Personalized Marketing is Crucial for 2021
Personalized marketing is more than a nice-to-have – it’s a must-have. We’re not talking glorified AI from the far future either. The basis for any successful marketing is establishing a personal connection. Empathy. A relationship. Today, personalization means more than just addressing customers by name in an email.
Personalization delivers individual content that corresponds to a customer's product preferences and behaviors. It connects all channels - from email to shop to a mobile app.
What Does Personalization Achieve?
Personalization provides customers with information based on their individual interests and needs. You can determine the preferences of each individual customer based on their preferences. The result is personalized content and product recommendations. We’re not only talking shopping here – personalization is important to your nonprofit donors, too!
Why is Personalization Important?
Personalization is just good business. It increases sales and binds customers to your company. Studies show that people who feel understood through personalization use a company's offers more often, and prefer to do so. This in turn leads to a better customer experience.
“Marketers were asked about the share of their digital marketing budget devoted to personalization efforts. 33 percent of respondents were devoting more than half of their budgets to personalization. 67 percent spending less than 50 percent on these tactics.” Statista
Personalized Marketing for eCommerce
Personalized marketing is essential for delivering the right message at the right time. Online stores can analyze the actions and buying behavior of a shopper to offer tailored products and services.
The likelihood that the customer will be interested in customized offers is far greater than offers without context. This ultimately leads to a higher conversion rate.
What are some things you can do to make your online shop pop?
Calls-to-action based on the user's actions as they move through your sales funnel.
Hide sign-up forms from people who are already on your email list.
Use a semantic product search tool that understands what people want.
Personalized Email Marketing
The foundation of successful email personalization is collecting and analyzing customer data. Step one: identifying your customers' demographic, geographic, and behavioral data. Step two: applying that data to your email campaigns to create customized content.
Wait! This sounds a lot like the benefits I have in social media. Well, you might say that, but there is a difference:
The emails are yours
Email marketing is subject to only one algorithm: yours
More customer loyalty, trust, and value of contact than social media
Personalized Marketing With Website Visitors
We all want to provide our website visitors with a great visit. Their experience should be highly relevant, targeted, and personalized. Your website should dynamically offer content and features that are helpful and actionable.
Website personalization happens in real-time behind the scenes (automating your landing page). Data, attributes, and user characteristics blend to deliver a user-centric experience.
What are some things you can do to achieve this?
Offer surveys with personalized questions and topics.
Provide contact and location information on nearby shop locations.
Curate event and rebate information happening near the user.
“Research shows that 57% of online buyers are happy to exchange personal data in return for personalized offers or discounts. 58% say personalized experiences are important when buying from a company.” Ariela Gorshtein
Personalization and Data Protection
We’ve given you the heads up on the EU data protection laws in a previous post. Why is this important to your personalized marketing? Well, we are faced with a slight dilemma.On the one hand, customers want to enjoy individual service. We have complex data protection regulations such as the GDPR and the CCPA. They look to ensure that this personalization only happens within a very limited scope.Data protection and personalization are often seen as opposed. The two actually complement each other. How so?A customer actively shares their data with us. They opt-in willingly and in context. In return, they receive certain services. Here, personalization benefits both seller and buyer immediately, precisely, and legally.
Personalized Marketing is Today Not Tomorrow
There’s no time like now to get personal. Tomorrow comes pretty quickly, so get started today. Ask yourself three questions:
Where should your personalization occur in your marketing funnel?
What information do you need to collect?
What will you do with this information that benefits your customers?
Why we react favorably to personalized messages seems obvious at first. Who doesn't like to feel valued and directly sympathized with? Messages that are relevant to us are automatically more interesting than generic ones.Not only the company but also the customer benefits from personalization. We benefit from increased interactions, more sales, and improved customer loyalty. The customer benefits from more relevant offers which mean less time spent in product search.
“Marketers often view personalization as a daunting undertaking. But successful players often start small. Only by acting today can companies hope to be in a position to deliver value to both their customers and their brands.” McKinsey & Company
Is Data Driving Your Personalized Marketing Strategy?
Data is the lifeblood of your personalized marketing strategy. You can invest countless hours and dollars into developing the best possible approach to engaging your network, but if your data is lacking, so will your results. At AWI, we understand the importance of high-quality data. We literally built a company on it.
So, if your company needs better outcomes from its marketing strategies, AWI is ready to help immediately with our list services and data cards.Let’s schedule a call and take your marketing to the next step.
