The Definitive Guide To Personalized Marketing

Marketing is an important part of any business’s sales strategy. With marketers working on content and advertisements, you’re able to perform outreach and help customers get the information, products, and services they want.

Marketing creates brand awareness, which connects you with your audience. It can also drive profits and growth by creating relationships with your customers through personalization.

And personalization is what your customers want. According to a study from McKinsey, 71% of customers agree that they expect companies to create personalized experiences for them. Even more importantly, of those surveyed, 76% said they’d be frustrated if a business didn’t deliver them the personalized experience they were expecting.

These results just make sense. If you think about your own shopping habits online, you may feel the same way. You want to know that the brand is listening to you. You don’t want to dig through the sludge of 100 unnecessary pieces of marketing for the one email or ad containing the products or services you need. You simply want to find what you’re looking for, get suggestions for other items or services that might help you, and receive high-quality customer service from start to finish.

As a business owner, you should know that personalizing your marketing efforts can help you strengthen relationships with your customers by showing them that you are listening to their specific needs. You’ll build trust with your brand by showing that you see your customers as individuals with personal preferences and specific use cases for your products or services. That trust comes with benefits; you’ll see stronger engagement numbers and be able to increase conversion rates.

As you get started on your next marketing campaign, keep in mind the power of personalization and how you can reach out to your customers with the kind of content that resonates. Here’s what you need to consider if you’re ready to develop deeper connections with consumers.

What is personalized marketing?

Personalized marketing is a way of tailoring your marketing content to specific target audiences. When you tailor content in this way, it meets the needs and wants of individual customers, making them feel as if every piece of content or product was specifically sent to them with their needs in mind.

While emails and advertisements can be personalized, that’s not the only thing personalized marketing does. Personalized marketing is also designed to create strong, genuine relationships with customers by ensuring they have a positive, personalized interaction with your brand from day one.

Why is personalized marketing important?

Personalized marketing is important for many reasons. It can improve conversion rates when you run marketing campaigns. It helps you save money on your marketing efforts, ensuring more prospects turn into leads and, eventually, conversions.

It also ensures your customers feel highly valued by your brand. Rather than feeling like just another individual in the crowd, your customers will get distinctly relevant marketing content that helps them understand why they should have a relationship with your brand.

With personalized marketing, you get to connect with your customers on a deeper level, build brand recognition, build social proof, and earn loyalty and repeat business.

5 Benefits of Personalized Marketing

Personalized marketing lets you connect with your audience and build strong relationships to keep them loyal in the long term. This kind of marketing has several important benefits, and you can take advantage of them to grow your brand over time. Some of them include:

1. Increasing Conversion Rates

The primary reason companies use personalized marketing is because it helps improve conversion rates. Customers are happy because they get offers that are tailored to what they want or need. In fact, personalizing an email will improve click-through rates by 14% and conversions by 10%.

2. Generating More Revenue

When you use personalized messaging, you improve the opportunity to make more revenue. Personalized messaging leads to higher conversion rates because customers feel that you’re solving a problem specifically for them. Receiving super-relevant marketing copy means the customer will be enticed and likely to convert, generating the revenue you need to grow your company.

3. Building Stronger Relationships

When you use personalized marketing, you position yourself to build stronger relationships. Your marketing team will better understand your customer base, ensuring your customers get more of what they want in the future.

4. Boosting Customer Engagement

Customers will engage with your brand if they see a reason to do so. Using personalized marketing, you show them why your products or services solve a problem for them. When your marketing is personalized to the buyer, they will feel a deeper connection and be more likely to engage.

5. Improving Return On Investment (ROI)

You can increase your ROI with personalized marketing efforts. Personalization makes your customers happier, and it’s, therefore, a better use of your marketing budget. As an example, AXA, a multinational insurance company, increased its conversion rates by 8 times when using video personalization.

3 Challenges of Personalized Marketing

Personalized marketing does have its challenges. Some of the challenges of personalization include:

1. Data Collection and Integration

Data challenges are among the most common issues with personalized marketing. To create a personalized experience for your customers, you need to have access to a large amount of data. As you build a marketing strategy, you then have to integrate that data into your plans and use it to create marketing materials that target the right groups of people. Having too much data can make this process difficult, just as having too little (or irrelevant) data can lead to problems.

2. Technological Limitations

Technological limitations are another challenge of personalized marketing. For example, for personalized marketing to work well, it has to address consumers’ concerns in real time. Unfortunately, it can be very difficult to deliver content to customers and create real-time experiences because your workflows have to be seamless. You’d need to synchronize all aspects of your marketing campaign, including data collection efforts, cross-channel profile management, and customer segmentation.

3. Resource Allocation

A third challenge of personalizing your content is resource allocation. This kind of strategy requires significant investments in technology (such as artificial intelligence), and will mean your marketing team, sales team, and others will need to be on the same page. If you’re on a tighter budget or you have a limited number of tools for teams to analyze data, you could find that it’s difficult to create a solid personalized marketing campaign for the different customer segments you want to reach.

Create a Personalized Marketing Strategy in 3 Steps

To increase your sales and get customers who are loyal to your brand, you need a personalized marketing strategy. Creating a personalized strategy can be straightforward, but it will take time and resources. To create yours, you should:

#1: Analyze Customer Data

To start with, you will want to analyze customer data to learn more about them. Find out where they’re located, what they’re interested in, current trends, and other details to better serve your audience. There are different ways to track your customers, such as through Google Analytics, surveys, and so on.

Common demographics to collect include:

• Age
• Location
• Gender
• Interests
• In-market segments
• Operating systems
• Behavior

#2: Create Customer Profiles

Another way you can create more personalized marketing campaigns is to develop customer profiles. These buyer profiles will segment your customers into groups, allowing you to send out marketing materials based on preferences.

For example, your group of 18-to-24-year-old buyers may prefer to receive marketing materials via text and have a particular product of yours that’s a favorite. On the other hand, groups of 50-to-60-year-olds might prefer to be sent to a FAQ page to learn more about your services and receive an easy-to-follow link to do so via email.

#3: Customize Advertisements

Finally, once you know about your customers and can segment them, you need to target them with the right content. When advertisements are personalized and actually reflect what someone’s looking for, they’re more likely to engage with your business and convert from a lead to a buyer.

5 Personalized Marketing Trends to Keep an Eye on

Personalized marketing trends come and go, but these are some that you’ll want to keep an eye on in the future:

1. Increasing Customer Expectations

Increasing customer expectations is a significant trend, with customers believing that they should receive marketing content that specifically targets their needs. When customers receive content that doesn’t reflect something they’re looking for or interested in, they’re much more likely to ignore it and move on to buying from other businesses.

2. Leveraging Technology and AI

Leveraging technology and artificial intelligence is another up-and-coming trend, and this one can help marketers thrive. With AI and technology, it’s easier than ever to gather large datasets and analyze them to understand your target audiences. Additionally, you can use technology and AI, like Podium, to communicate and personalize the customer experience.

3. Improving Customer Engagement and Loyalty

When brands focus on what customers want and need, they show that they’re listening to consumers and have their best interests at heart. That attention to detail can pay off with dividends, as consumers want to be treated as unique individuals with their own preferences. By taking the time to personalize the customer experience, you improve the chances of customer engagement and loyalty, effectively boosting retention rates.

4. Avoiding Generic Advertising

Generic advertising is history, and using it can make your brand look like a dinosaur as well. Pushing an ad out to everyone regardless of age or hoping that an email blast featuring one product and service will bring in leads that convert is not efficient. Today, using personalized content creates a stronger relationship with your customers, ensuring an improved customer experience.

5. Increasing Product Suggestions

After browsing or making a purchase, suggesting products, including related products or products to enhance items in a shopper’s cart, can help drive revenue. Customers will appreciate the suggestions that help them solve problems they deal with, and your recommendations can help boost your ROI by increasing the value of each sale.

3 Personalized Marketing Examples

To get a better understanding of personalized marketing, here are several examples. These are just three of many ways you could personalize your marketing efforts to make a strong impression on your customers:

1. Product Recommendations

Product recommendations are an excellent example of personalized marketing. When consumers go to a website, they’ll receive product suggestions based on their search or purchase history. Typically, these recommendations are suggested to certain demographics via artificial intelligence and machine learning.

2. Geotargeting

Geotargeting is another kind of personalized marketing option that could work for you. With geotargeting, you target people within a specific region, and you can personalize your marketing efforts by talking about events or topics that matter to those in that area.

3. Personalized Emails

Personalized emails are another example of how you can personalize your marketing materials and perform outreach that connects with your ideal audiences. Personalized emails can range from emails that get sent out on a consumer’s birthday with personalized product recommendations to emails sent out with top trending items based on a demographic’s preferences. Some technology will allow you to further personalize emails with the consumer’s name or past shopping history, which further shows that you’re paying attention to them as an individual.

The Power of Personalization in Marketing

During any part of the customer journey, you can make your customers feel more at home with personalization. By tailoring your marketing efforts to your customers, they’ll feel you’re speaking directly to them and be more likely to purchase from your brand.

By better understanding your customers’ needs and wants, you will be better able to respond to them, create an excellent customer experience, and convert more leads to sales.

Ready to streamline your efforts? With Podium’s suite of lead management and communication tools, you’ll be on the fast track to impressing your customers. Watch a demo to see how Podium can work for you.