The best way to market to your customers and clients is changing every day – and more rapidly than ever. How do you establish rapport and boost loyalty in this kind of environment?
Marketing personalization is the key, but to truly unlock the power of one-to-one marketing, it’s important you dig beneath the buzzword to discover the strategies that will unleash its best potential.
In this post, we’ll give you an overview of what you need to know about personalized marketing and how you can implement it to achieve better business outcomes in your company.
What Does Personalization Do for Marketing?
In an age of connectedness and technology, making your marketing work to its fullest potential has never been more important. There are many pieces of content that flood the feeds of your target customers every single day.
Meanwhile, customers are experiencing a disconnect. They find that the majority of the marketing and advertising they consume is irrelevant. This, in turn, leads to them actively resisting or ignoring it – making it clear that casting a wide net isn’t going to bring your business the most leads.
Marketing personalization focuses on fostering a relationship with your customer base, rather than interacting with them in a way that’s purely transactional. By fostering a positive relationship with your audience, you can encourage repeat business, lock in that loyalty, and even have your most avid customers become brand advocates.
3 Benefits of Marketing Personalization
Targeted marketing isn’t just a trend. It has real impacts on your business and bottom line. Here is a look at 3 of the top benefits for companies that implement this strategy:
Improving Lead Nurturing
Lead nurturing is all about providing relevant and timely content to prospects, based on their interests and stage in the buying process. But how can you know what content to provide? That’s where marketing personalization comes in. With accurate prospect profile data, you can segment your leads into lists according to their demographics, interests, behaviors, and product preferences. This allows you to target them with relevant content that will help move them further down the sales funnel.
Increasing Conversions
Personalized marketing has a positive impact on the rate of customer conversions. When customers feel that a company is paying attention to their specific interests and needs, they are more likely to do business with that company.
Boosting Retention
Personalization builds trust and loyalty among customers, leading to repeat purchases. It also creates a stronger connection between business and customer, which ultimately leads to increased customer satisfaction and retention.
Using Personalization Throughout the Customer Journey
When you implement it well, tailored marketing can encourage positive contact with your customers leading into, during, and long after they make a purchase. This is where data on demographics, purchase history, and motivators really come into play for marketing personalization. The idea is that you are removing the barriers and friction in the user experience and showing your appreciation.
Simply put, a personalized customer experience strategy addresses customer needs and enhances their overall satisfaction throughout the entire journey.
The Tools You Need for Effective Marketing Personalization
A key advantage in implementing good marketing personalization is that the technology and systems it uses don’t vary drastically from the toolkit already in use by most savvy marketing teams.
Analytics
As always, the bedrock of any marketing campaign is data. Analytics can harvest and provide valuable insights into the habits, demographics, and motivators in your user base.
Website Monitoring
Analytics is a good starting point for understanding your audience. However, if you want to excel at personalized marketing, you have to understand user behavior. With Velaro, you automatically and instantly get a full picture of every website visitor – what they’ve viewed, how they got to your site, and what they’ve chatted about before.
Survey Generator
Whether it's an email survey or a pop-up on your website this is one of the most transparent ways to collect customer information. You need a survey generator and processes in place for how to use it. This way, you’ll be able to take in customer feedback and act on it to make smarter marketing decisions.
Customer Relationship Management System (CRM)
All businesses need a CRM to stay connected with contacts, but there are even more powerful personalization capabilities. CRM software can help you track interactions throughout the entire journey with your company and keep that information in one place. This allows you to get that information at a glance and use it to create better experiences.
Personalized Marketing Examples
By its very nature, personalized marketing strategies prove incredibly varied – there are perhaps as many examples of this tactic in action as there are customers on the receiving end of the approach.
The key here is remaining demonstrating to your customers that you are and willing to meet their needs. Here’s a closer look at different ways businesses can implement personalized marketing.
Targeted Emails
Sending communications directly to your customers’ inboxes is a terrific way to stay top of mind, and there are a lot of different ways to personalize. You may choose to do this based on customer interests, demographics, or even time zones to reach the right people at the right time.
Custom Videos
81% of marketers say video has helped them directly increase sales. While these assets may take a little more work, they have a clear impact on the bottom line. If your team can support this, you can create videos for specific individuals or you can create custom video tracks depending on what different segments of your audience needs to know.
Relevant Recommendations
We all make purchase decisions based on how a product or service meets our needs and how it aligns with us. You can use this concept to your advantage by making relevant recommendations based on past browsing or purchase history.
Making an Impact with Personalized Marketing
Personalized marketing isn’t just a trend. To stand out from other brands and businesses competing for your audience’s attention, you need to provide an exceptional experience. You can achieve that through personalized marketing strategies.
