The year is 2022, and most businesses have realized that generic advertising messages no longer provide the desired impact. Instead, consumers, today want marketing messages that appeal to them personally and relate to their aspirations. This is the reason why advertising is becoming more and more personalized in nature.
If you, too, want to personalize your marketing strategy, read on. We will discuss personalized marketing, its advantages, personalized marketing strategies, and trends.
So let the learning begin!
What is Personalized Marketing?
Personalized marketing can be defined as the implementation of promotional strategies by companies to deliver personalized content to prospective customers through data collection and analysis and the use of automation technologies.
Source: BBF Digital
Personalized promotions aim to entice and engage current or potential customers by communicating with each of them through one to one marketing. A personalized marketing strategy allows businesses to improve the efficacy of their promotional efforts and connect to audiences on a personal level. It also enhances customers’ experiences and improves brand loyalty.
Why Should You Personalize Your Marketing?
Having the same ‘vanilla’ branding message delivered personalized experience too all your existing customers and prospects seldom leaves a good impression. Growing competition and shortened attention spans of customers make it imperative for brands to stand out and create a personal rapport with their prospects, which makes personalized marketing important for growing businesses.
Source: FSSI
Personalized messaging ensures that brands connect to their customers through mediums suitable to them and address their needs individually. Personalized marketing improves revenues and helps brands learn more about consumer preferences using automation and other technologies, which allows them to stay afloat in the long term and improve their product or services.
The Benefits of Personalized Marketing
Personalized promotions have helped countless companies leave a lasting impression on customers and come out with their own branding voice. Some brands have even converted personalized branding into their USP, and as a result, they enjoy a personal rapport with all their users. But what exactly are the quantifiable advantages of customized branding?
Here are a few benefits that businesses can derive from personalized marketing:
1- Enriched customer experience
The primary goal of personalized branding is to deliver a personalized customer experience, right from the product inquiry stage to its delivery stage. Prospects should feel valued and know that their concerns are appropriately addressed. Thus when a brand reaches out to them personally and offers a solution to their problem through their product or service, it leaves a lasting impression on them, turning them into loyalists. This is the biggest advantages of personalized marketing.
2- Increased customer loyalty
Brands acquire tons of information from their clients and prospects these days. As a result, they expect brands to pay heed to their suggestions and address their preferences. And making use of such insights to improve customer satisfaction makes users connect more to such brands, boosting consumer loyalty and gaining a competitive advantage.
3- Increased return on your marketing investment
By using the right automation tools and technologies, advertisers can easily recognize the channels their prospects would engage in. As a result, such technologies can help produce better returns on the investments that businesses make, ensuring that their personalization efforts yield optimal results through more efficient targeting. This helps maximize revenues with the minimal marketing effort.
Challenges of Personalized Marketing
Personalized marketing might sound easy, but businesses face several challenges while developing a personalized marketing strategy. Here are a few notable ones:
1- Finding the Right Technology
Discovering the ideal tool or software that helps you connect with and understand your audience is crucial for any firm looking to personalize its branding. Unfortunately, using outdated technology to note down customers’ demands and aspirations can slow down the pace of personalization.
Many modern businesses are therefore using automated CRM (customer relationship management) software that can intelligently gather market insights. In addition, intelligent marketing technology coupled with a smart personalization engine can significantly benefit businesses.
2- Time and Resources
Finding the right team to orchestrate the personalization needed and the time to make such personalized modifications can take time and effort for most competitive businesses. Creating effective marketing strategies requires brainstorming and analysis, which requires much time and resources. However, if invested wisely, such resources can yield great results for such companies.
3- Creating a Single Customer View
While looking for common customer trends and threads across marketing channels, advertisers are able to create a better picture of who their prospective customer is. This can be done by piecing information together to create a unified customer profile. However, marketers often find it difficult to link data related to purchase history with individual customer profiles, preventing them from creating a personalized marketing strategy.
4- Implementing Smart Segmentation
Intelligent segmentation of prospects across channels can drastically boost the performance of a promotional strategy. But, sadly, many marketers need help to move past basic segmentation strategies, broader segments, and simple clustering, which impact their bottom line severely.
The table below shows some of the biggest challenges in personalized marketing, and the percentage of firms who face them.
Source: Bynder
How To Create a Successful Personalized Marketing Strategy?
Let us now learn how to create a successful personalized marketing strategy. Below are a few basic steps to get started:
1- Create a team to spearhead the effort
As discussed previously, creating a capable team to strategize your branding is the first step toward personalized branding. You must decide each team member’s capabilities, responsibilities, and role, how the customer data will be collected, and from where. The team chosen must be able to segment your audiences and create separate plans targeting each group.
2- Collect information, but respect people’s privacy
The effectiveness of personalized marketing improves significantly when reliable data is collected from the right sources. However, you must ensure that information is collected in the data management platform while keeping people’s privacy in mind. Hence data collection must be accurate and compliant to ensure its usefulness.
3- Use data to segment your audience
Once customer data is collected, it must be analyzed thoroughly to understand different prospect types and segment them. The data garnered from your sources must then be linked to consumer profiles, and plans must be made individually to target different segments of your audience.
4- Choose where you’ll personalize
Personalization can happen in many forms, be it in the medium of communication, the message delivered or the recommendations provided to prospects. The area of personalization you select is what would differentiate you from your competition. Hence, it would be best if you chose where the personalization has to happen to create the maximum impact and yield the desired results.
Examples of Personalized Marketing Campaigns
Let’s take a look at a few examples of personalized marketing campaigns that most successful organizations run. Most of these customizations have brought massive success to brands and have helped them stand out.
1- Targeted Emails
Email marketing is a tried and tested way of targeting different user groups. Sending individualized emails to customer segments for data collection, signups, renewals, and promotions is standard practice for many organizations. Once you create personalized campaigns, they can help you learn about the preferences of audiences and their feedback regarding your offerings, which allows you further customize your products or services.
2- Custom Video Messages
With the lowering attention spans of audiences, businesses are using custom video messages to grab the attention of their prospects. However, creating custom video messages can be time-consuming without the use of the right automation technology. Thus, you must consider the scalability of a SaaS tool that you plan to use.
3- Product Recommendations
Good product recommendations are a surefire way to gain traction among audiences. However, this requires you to analyze their taste and buying behavior. From Netflix to Amazon, all major companies today use product recommendations to improve sales and keep audiences engaged. Good recommendations also smoothen customers’ buying journey and give an impression that you understand them, which turns them into loyalists.
Source: KiboCommerce
Social media has become a great tool to connect to audiences on a one-to-one basis. Social media makes collecting responses easier from prospects and allows brands to reach out to prospects much faster. As a result, communication is easier, and conversions are much quicker via social channels.
5- Fear of Missing Out (FOMO)
This seemingly millennial term stems from the human psychology of unease when we sense that we are missing out on something significant. This fear of missing out works on most of us as we buy products or services out of a fear of missing out.
It could be a special offer, a hot favorite, or the last piece of an item that they like. By introducing a feeling that they might miss out on a special deal or making them feel that their favorite items might soon be ‘sold out (especially with online shopping), you can make customers make that purchasing decision.
Five Personalized Marketing Statistics & Trends To Watch Out For
Personalized marketing has changed over the years and since the advent of social media, brands too have invested wholeheartedly to make their customers feel special. People who have studied personalization in advertisements have also come up with various statistics on how viewers react to personalization.
Source: Hubspot
Let us now discuss some of the reigning personalized marketing trends that most businesses are experiencing today:
1- Growing Customer Expectations
Customers have high expectations from brands they do business with these days. They want personalization and an individualistic approach that makes them feel heard and noticed. Thus, customer retention only increase when brands offer buyers a high degree of personalization and already know what they would like.
2- Purchasing Behaviors
Creating more engaging and personalized content has helped several Small businesses improve their numbers in recent years. When audiences realize that a brand is working towards providing them with personalized experiences, they acknowledge and reward the effort of the brand through more purchases.
3- Email Transaction Rates
Personalized email campaigns deliver 6X the tractional rate. This means that adding a personal touch to your regular emails can positively impact your sales. However, you must learn how to turn a reply/response into a conversion and use the responses received to create better emails in the future.
4- Evolving Customers’ Preferences
According to the latest personalized marketing statistics, Customers today like to buy from, recommend, and even pay more for brands that offer personalized marketing. This shows that going the extra mile for your consumers can pay off and lead to business growth.
5- Email Open Rates
Emails with personalized subject lines are much more likely to be opened and read. Thus, leveraging customer data can enhance the effectiveness of personalized marketing campaigns and reduce your overall efforts.
Personalized Marketing FAQ's
Personalized marketing is highly effective in creating lasting relationships with customers. Customers who feel connected to a brand are more likely to become repeat buyers and brand loyalists.
Marketing personalization deals with using customers’ data to improve their experience. For example, consumer data can help companies segment customer groups, identify buying patterns, and better target potential buyers.
There are several ways in which marketing can be personalized. Customers can be segmented based on their tastes and buying behavior. There can also be one to one marketing personalization, where brands ask about customers’ individual preferences. Customizations can also be done via personalized content, recommendations, personalized web pages, products, etc.
Personalized marketing efforts can be measured by factors such as tracking conversion rate uplift, which determines how personalization strategies contribute to total revenue. In addition, factors like average order value uplift can also help determine how the order value of the test group has increased.
To acquire data about your target audiences, you have to conduct market research and learn what they prefer. This should be followed by data segmentation and self-personalization, which would help optimize your campaigns.
Updated : December 1, 2022
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