Yes its Working: 7 Practical Ways to Personalize Your Marketing and Boost Conversions

The future of marketing is personalized customer service. Customers are better informed and are demanding the best service possible. Brands that key into this concept enjoy the rewards.

Personalization delivers an improved experience to your customers. It leads to an increased conversion rate and income for your business.

Michael Brenner, a top CMO and founder of the Marketing Insider Group says “the future of marketing is personal.”

Ever wondered what it would be like to have every email you receive, mobile offer you view, the advertisement you see, the website you browse, as well as retail store you visit personalized just for you?

This is made possible with technological advancements. The gathering of customer data and behavioral targeting enables brands to offer a personalized customer experience.

What is personalized marketing?

Personalized marketing gives customers a sense of identity. They cease to be one of the masses and instead become an individual with unique wants and needs. It makes customers feel seen and heard.

How Personalization is Changing the Face of Marketing

80% of consumers are more likely to make a purchase when brands offer personalized experiences.
91% of consumers are more likely to shop with brands who provide relevant offers and recommendations.
Consumers are 40% more likely to view items that are recommended based on information they’ve shared with the brand.

Example of Personalized Marketing

Coca-Cola’s “Share a Coke” campaign, in which the brand printed popular names on Coke bottles. This helped to increase sales for the first time in 10 years.

So, what are the 7 ways to personalize your marketing?

1. Personalized Product Recommendations

This occurs when products are recommended to you based on your browsing or purchase history. For instance, if you buy or browse for a shoe on Amazon, the eCommerce giant would send you product recommendations based on your behavior. These recommendations are extremely effective and can double your sales.

Invesp, a giant in the world of conversion optimization, ran a survey on product recommendations. It found the following:

Personalized product recommendations are estimated to account for more than 35% of purchases on Amazon.
49% of consumers said they have purchased a product that they did not initially intend to buy after receiving a personalized recommendation.
54% of retailers reported product recommendation as the key driver of average order value in customer purchase
75% of customers are more likely to buy based on personalized recommendations.

2. Personalized Email Campaigns

Campaign Monitor describes email personalization as “the act of targeting an email campaign to a specific subscriber by leveraging the data and information you have about them. It could be information like their first name, the last product they bought, where they live, how many times they log into your app, or a number of other data points.”

It goes further to describe a personalized email as:

Relevant: Relevant content is content that speaks directly to the needs of your customers.
Timely: It’s not enough to have relevant content. Your content must also be timely. Gathering enough data about your subscriber enables you to send emails that they need at every stage of their buyer journey.
Comes from a person: People are bound to trust an email from a fellow person. Like this email below:

3. Personalized Content Marketing

Such could include white papers, blog posts, podcasts, videos, webinars, etc. Content marketing works. These statistics are proof.

Jessica Sprinkel is Director of Marketing Programs at Logi Analytics, an analytics software startup in Washington, DC. She provides an insight into how companies are personalizing their marketing with current technological advancements.

“More recently”, she says, “marketers have been able to use dynamic content, which means instead of setting up individual campaigns, and trying to route prospects into the optimal one, you can create ONE campaign, ONE email, and ONE landing page – all of which display differently depending on who is on the receiving end.”

Product demos can be personalized, landing pages can be personalized, and interactive content, such as online calculators, etc, can also be personalized.

Take a look at Co-Schedule’s Headline Analyzer. It provides personalized content marketing. It analyzes the headlines that you provide.

4. Personalized Advertising and Promotions

Retargeting ads fall into this category. They’re based on the interests of your customers. They also take the location of customers into consideration.

Retargeting ads allow your business to show targeted ads to the users who visited your website and didn’t complete a conversion – purchase an item, fill in a contact form, download a file, etc.

With retargeting ads, your brand and products stay in the minds of your customers.

Formerly known as interest-based advertising, personalized advertising is a powerful tool that improves advertising relevance for users and increases ROI for advertisers.

5. Personalized In-store Experiences

Sharon Shapiro, head of content marketing for Bluecore, says “personalization in retail, involves tailoring your offerings and marketing materials to suit the need of a specific individual or small segment of like-minded customers.”

According to her, “customers have unique paths to purchase, and personalization helps retailers guide customers on the right path based on their needs and behaviors. Personalization requires analyzing a wide range of data, including location, browsing, and demographic data, to determine individual consumer preferences. With customers shopping on more channels than ever before, this is no simple task.”

6. Personalized Mobile Marketing

Instapage defines mobile personalization as “the process of employing user-specific data (demographics, interests, behaviors, life stage, location, time, etc.) as deep insight for enhancing and customizing marketing messages across mobile devices. It enables advertisers to build deeper relationships with users and treat them as actual people instead of just paying customers.”

In this example, Pinterest takes what it already knows about its individual users, and provides them with personalized Pin suggestions via push notification:

7. Personalized Social Media Campaigns

This involves personalizing your social media campaigns. SocialPilot says this can be done in 5 ways:

Personalization in retargeting ads: This involves showing ads related o a purchase, browsing history, webinars attended, etc.
Personalization in videos: Facebook does this very well by making videos showing the memories of a relationship. These videos only hold value to you and your friends. This makes it as personal and relevant as possible.
Personalization in quizzes: Eneco, an energy producer and supplier, used a single quiz to collect more than 1000 conversions in just 6 weeks – 5X more than what they had expected.

Personalization in chatbots: Chatbots have been popular lately. They’ll ask you questions and offer recommendations tailored to the information you give them.
Personalization based on social media data: KLM surprised its customers through what they called KLM Surprise. They studied the social profiles of these customers and had a gift waiting for them at the airport. It was a highly successful campaign. They also garnered more than 1 million impressions on Twitter alone.

Conclusion

Personalization is really the future of marketing. It helps to improve campaigns, increase conversion rates, and grow engagement from customers.

Now that you know about personalizing your content, what are you going to do?

Guest author: Iyabo Oyawale is a freelance SEO Blogger. She tells engaging brand stories that help B2B SaaS companies turn casual users into die-hard fans. She shares data-driven B2B tech marketing strategies at Copy Vista. When not working, she can be found leisurely walking the streets of Lagos, Nigeria.

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