Marketing is evolving and changing, especially with the rise of digital advertisements. You have more opportunities than ever before to offer cross-channel marketing and personalized marketing.
Consumers mostly expect you to understand their needs, and personalization in marketing can help you do so.
What is personalized marketing?
It’s a form of marketing in which you personalize everything to the consumer by utilizing previous interactions and data points. If you gather zero-party data from the lead, you can use this crucial information to deliver relevant messages, make product recommendations that hit on pain points, and engage the potential customer in ways that aren’t possible with other forms of marketing.
If you haven’t started integrating personalization in digital marketing, you’re missing out on higher conversions and other benefits.
Personalized marketing is advantageous for both businesses and consumers. Every business is facing increasing competition, and if you’re not offering new, exciting solutions for your target demographics’ problems, your competitors will be.
Why is personalization important in marketing? It empowers brands to improve customer experience and hit on the pain points of consumers and recommend solutions that the lead didn’t even realize they needed. If you can do this, that’s when your business will experience:
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Personalization in marketing boosts both return on investment (ROI) and revenue. McKinsey conducted a report and found:
If you use this concept in your marketing, it offers you the power of lower acquisition costs while also increasing revenue and ROI. Personalization marketing trends continue to tick upward as more brands leverage this type of advertising with their ideal customers.
According to research, 73% of consumers expect you to know their needs and expectations, but this percentage still remains at 62% in B2B sales. Personalized marketing helps to improve the customer experience in a few ways, such as solving problems and anticipating the consumer’s needs.
You can also design better experiences based on the data collected, such as knowing where the lead is in the buyer’s journey.
If you know that the lead is in a certain stage of their journey, you can offer white papers, comparison guides, surveys, or other assets to satisfy the consumer’s questions and concerns.
Personalized marketing also organically leads to higher brand loyalty. The lead shares information with you in hopes that you will use it to solve their problems. The more that you begin satisfying the needs of your ideal customer, the more loyal they will be.
Loyalty is a goal of many brands because a loyal customer has higher retention rates and lifetime value (LTV). Loyalty also leads consumers to try new products or services that you offer.
Why?
They have come to trust your brand and are consumers who believe in your products or services. You might offer a unique selling point (USP) that your competitors do not.
How do you begin to offer personalized marketing?
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Creating a successful personalized marketing strategy requires many elements, including but not limited to the following:
First, you can’t personalize anything if you don’t have data to help you do so. One of the most direct ways to capture this data is through web forms, as they help to engage customers and understand their unique needs and preferences. By constantly monitoring your website forms, you can quickly detect and fix any form errors and figure out why users abandon your online forms. Web form tracking tool like FormStory is an effective method of collecting data for personalization that will help you:
By utilizing FormStory’s form monitoring capabilities, you gain access to detailed analytics and insights about how users interact with your forms. Capturing partial submissions and addressing the root causes of form abandonment enhances user experience, which leads to increased completion rates and a richer dataset for your personalized marketing efforts. This ensures that even incomplete user interactions can offer insights and opportunities for engagement, turning it into a powerful tool for personalized marketing.
Personalized marketing will also include data from other points, such as the user’s preferences, location data, time spent on certain pages of the site and more.
For example, you may find that a certain user spends time on a product page and keeps coming back to it. You might assume that the price point is too high, so you offer a coupon and push the sale.
Segment Customers for Focused Targeting
Your data will offer you options to segment customers. Using the web forms example, the data may be instrumental in helping with your personalized marketing because it empowers your sales team to segment users based on behaviors, interests, and any other data that was given to you.
A general rule of thumb in marketing is that if you can segment groups, you should.
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If you’re not using tools for your personalized marketing, you’re missing out on opportunities to improve the way you collect and utilize data. Multiple tool options are available, including FormStory, Proof, HubSpot, Dynamic Yield, Optimizely, and many others.
You can consider data analytics, CRM, data management platforms, and personalization engines, all of which will help you reach your marketing goals faster.
Marketing teams should spend time conducting internal research and scheduling product demos to find solutions that work best in your use case.
Personalized marketing is being leveraged by sales and marketing leaders to improve satisfaction and sales. If you employ the tactics below, you’ll have measurable results that you can use to improve ROI, LTV, and other sales metrics.
If you’re not using personalized marketing on your website first, you’re missing out on key growth opportunities. Your website is the doorway to your business, and it needs to offer current customers or users the highest level of personalization in marketing that is possible.
You may collect data from buyers or when users sign up for email or other offers.
When your target audience is on your website, you need to leverage this opportunity to drum up more sales and bolster conversions. You can pre-fill forms, create highly customized pop-ups and offers, and do so much more with a touch of personalization.
Live chat and chatbots are part of personalized marketing, too. Your audience wants to have real-time conversations, and if you cater the buying experience down to the consumer level, it will skyrocket your sales.
Conversations may lead to immediate sales, or you can use them to capture your leads by providing them with other resources, such as relevant eBooks or resources.
Your leads are always searching for ways to make informed decisions, and if you implement conversational marketing personalization, it’s a way to both educate and sell. But there’s also a hidden bonus that’s too easy to overlook: a faster buying experience.
Consumers want solutions to their problems with the least path of resistance. If you have a live chat with them, you can answer questions and concerns immediately, increasing the chance of a sale.
Add personalized marketing to your email subject lines, and guess what? You may see a 26% higher open rate. Revenue may also increase. Segment your emails and then add the consumer’s interests, challenges, and unique pain points into the copy. Hyper-relevant personalization in marketing will drive higher ROI and conversions.
Marketers are using automation to scale up personalization. If you have access to AI tools, let them do the heavy lifting to extract key data points and use them in your marketing campaigns.
Personalized marketing becomes powerful as a product recommendation machine. You can use this form of marketing to begin recommending products across your:
If you extract enough key user data, it will allow you to recommend products with such accuracy that conversions rise.
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Now that you know what personalization in marketing is, let’s discuss its different types. As you may have guessed, personalized marketing comes in many forms and styles, such as:
Push and pull are two forms of personalized marketing that you’ll need to explore:
Your company collects data and then pushes marketing out based on the information you collect. For example, you may push ads or content out to certain groups in hopes of offering a special marketing campaign to them.
Pull marketing requires the lead to come to you after they’ve been given comprehensive information from you. Perhaps you purchase PPC ads, which lead the consumer to your product. In this case, you’re making use of pull marketing.
Implicit and explicit personalized marketing also exists, and this can be done by analyzing how users interact with your forms, email, website and more. Any insights that you can collect about the user are a good thing.
Why?
It will allow you to use:
A short explanation of explicit personalization in digital marketing is when a user selects their preference for your email list, and you personalize it based on these answers. With this level of personalization, users are in control.
Implicit is the opposite of explicit because it’s based on the user’s behavior and history with your brand. For example, you may display ads based on the user spending time on a certain section of your website. You collect this information by tracking usage rather than the user sharing it with you.
Adaptive personalized marketing makes suggestions or recommendations based on the user’s behavior. It adapts and changes based on what the user is doing or, in some cases, consuming.
YouTube’s recommended videos feature is a great example of adaptive personalization. Suggested videos change based on what types of videos you’re watching.
One advantage of adaptive marketing personalization is that it allows you to understand your digital customer’s preferences over time. However, offering this level of personalization in digital marketing requires complex algorithms and investments in adaptive marketing campaigns.
Personalized marketing can be segmented or individualized.
Let’s say you want to send a promotional email to previous customers. To do so, you would need to segment your list into two categories: those who have made a purchase and those who have not. In this case, you would use segmentation.
Now, let’s say that you hosted an event and wanted to thank the guests who attended. If you sent individual, detailed thank-you notes, this would be considered individualized marketing.
Although there are obvious benefits to individualized personalization, smaller businesses often don’t have the bandwidth to go this route. Segmentation, however, can work well for businesses of all sizes.
To truly understand the advantages of personalization in digital marketing and to see what a successful strategy looks like, let’s look at some examples of personalized marketing used by recognizable brands.
Amazon has been delivering personalization marketing for customer experiences for at least a decade. In fact, their recommendation algorithm has made headlines.
This is one of the best examples of personalized marketing, as the ecommerce giant clearly knows its customers and will make recommendations based on past purchases, searches and other data it collects. Customers often find products they never knew they wanted or needed, and this leads to impulse purchasing decisions.
IPSY
IPSY tops the list of personalized marketing examples because personalization is the foundation of the brand.
Every month, IPSY sends five personalized sample products to subscribers. The products are selected based on the product categories subscribers are most interested in. Before subscribing, customers take a quiz to tell IPSY all about their interests and preferences.
Beauty is one category where personalization in marketing is essential. IPSY’s quiz and personalized monthly experiences are great examples of personalized marketing on how to do it the right way.
OpenTable is an online reservation platform, but it does an excellent job of creating personalized experiences for customers through its email marketing campaigns.
As a marketing personalization strategy, the brand uses customer reservation data to make recommendations on new dining spots to try.
OpenTable’s email campaign, is one of the greatest personalized marketing examples, as it makes it easy for customers to narrow down their vast selection of 52,000+ restaurants to places that fit their tastes and preferences.
Grammarly has found clever ways to implement marketing personalization into its email messages. Its welcome email provides useful information on how to make the most of its platform.
But they also offer personalized weekly emails with unique insights into your individual account. Your Weekly Writing Update will give you stats on your productivity (how much more productive you are than other users), how accurate your writing is compared to other users, and how unique your vocabulary is compared to other users.
Users are highly likely to open their weekly update just to see their stats and how they measure up against other users, and this includes Grammarly among best personalization marketing examples
Pinterest makes our list of top personalization marketing examples because of its push notifications strategy.
The social platform uses user data and interests to send them push notifications, encouraging them to check out new ideas. Displaying a preview of the ideas encourages users to open the app.
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Now that you understand the personalized marketing benefits and the best strategies to use, let’s take a look at some emerging trends to watch for.
Web form analytics can give some personalization marketing insight into shifting customer expectations by allowing you to track form engagement over time. With this data in hand, you can better predict shifts in customer preferences and behaviors and meet changing customer expectations through your personalized marketing strategies.
Personalized marketing influences purchasing behaviors. Customers who engage with personalized content are more likely to make a purchase. Not surprisingly, 90% of marketers say that personalization significantly contributes to business profitability.
Demand for personalized marketing is on the rise. More than half of consumers say that brands will lose their loyalty if they fail to deliver a personalized experience.
Personalized marketing extends to email marketing, which should also be tailored to customer preferences and behaviors.
This personalization marketing benefit can significantly improve open rates, and email transactions improve when messages are relevant to the customer.
One of the biggest trends in marketing personalization is the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning technologies. AI and machine learning technologies help businesses create more relevant, targeted, and personalized experiences at lightning speed.
There are many advantages to marketing personalization, but it’s not without its challenges. Some of the biggest obstacles faced with personalized marketing strategies include:
Technology, like web form tracking tools, makes gathering insights into customer behavior and preferences easier. But technology also presents a new set of challenges, like:
Finding the right tools – ones that will offer the functionality you need – is essential. When comparing your options, it’s important to consider:
Weigh your options carefully and choose a solution that will work for you today and in the future.
One unexpected challenge of personalized marketing is the sheer amount of time and resources it requires.
In many cases, personalization marketing requires a significant investment in infrastructure and technology. At the very least, you’ll need to invest in new tools and technology to collect and analyze customer data.
Finding the right technology and adopting new systems and processes will take time and resources.
Overcoming this challenge is no easy feat. Using tools that integrate into your current workflow may save time, but your team will still need training to realize the full potential of these tools.
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There are many advantages to having a single customer view. One obvious benefit is having a complete view of each customer, which allows for more effective:
But, creating a single customer view is not without challenges. The biggest challenge is poor data quality. If your data is outdated or incomplete, you won’t have a reliable single-customer view.
Data integration, privacy, and security also present challenges. When data comes from multiple sources, management can easily become chaotic.
Segmentation is the backbone of personalized marketing, but implementing smart segmentation is not as easy as it may seem.
Effective segmentation is complex and has nuances that are often overlooked.
Part of the problem is that marketers have so much data that it can be daunting to determine which points to use.
Segmentation tools can help with this challenging task, but they will also require time and resources to implement.
Today’s consumers expect to have personalized experiences when they interact with brands. If your business isn’t investing in personalized marketing, now is the time to start. If you know what personalized marketing is, you understand the power of shaping your marketing strategies to meet the individual needs and preferences of each customer. Along with meeting customer demands and expectations, you’ll improve your ROI because your campaigns and messaging will be more targeted and effective.
