Are you using personalized marketing to drive customer loyalty and profitability?
Capture your audience's attention more effectively with personalized marketing
As markets evolve and your customers’ expectations and desires change, making your business stand out becomes even more critical, whether you are a B2C or B2B company. In today’s customer-first environment, offering a personalized online experience to customers and prospects can be a deciding factor for your brand’s success.
When done well, personalization in digital marketing captures your audience’s attention more effectively than nearly any other tactic. It is a highly appealing feature, with an Epsilon research report finding that 80% of consumers are more likely to do business with a company if it offers personalized experiences. And if your company doesn’t offer personalization, your customers may go to a competitor who does. The Amazon Report notes that 47% of consumers will check Amazon if the brand they are shopping with doesn’t provide relevant product suggestions.
By creating value for your customers, personalization helps drives customer loyalty and long-term profitability. Monetate’s 2017 Personalization Development Study reported that 79% of organizations that exceeded revenue goals have a documented personalization strategy. And McKinsey and Company have found that personalization can deliver 5X-8X ROI on marketing spend.
Executing personalized marketing effectively
Understanding why personalization is important is just the first — and the easiest — step to implementing it. The truly daunting prospect for many marketers is figuring out how to get started with it in their organizations. Based on our experience in developing and implementing personalization for many of our clients, we have some suggestions for when the time comes for you to develop your own personalization program.
Build your strategy and plan.
Before you do anything else, you need to be able to answer some key questions:
- What goals are you trying to accomplish and measure?
- Who are your target audiences?
- What customer-facing platforms and/or technologies do you currently use?
- What content within those platforms would be good candidates for personalization?
- How do you plan to collect and track your customer data?
- How will you address any applicable data protection requirements for the data you collect?
- How will you phase your approach and stay effective?
Start simple and then move to more complex solutions.
Personalizing your digital marketing does not have to be an all-or-nothing endeavor. You can start small with a single project, product line, business unit, or other test case that makes sense for your business. Then, scale up based on your experience and lessons learned to make future personalization efforts less of a heavy lift.
Gather and use data to make informed decisions.
Collecting data is important but a wasted effort if you don’t use it to drive decisions. Depending on what data you track, it can be used to segment your users, understand their interactions, and cater both content and the experience to them.
Call upon teams across your company to assist.
You will need input from many teams not only in the design and planning phases, but also as you start implementing personalization, in order to make sure everything is working to plan. Qualitative as well as quantitative data will be critical to determining the success of your efforts and identifying opportunities for improvement.
Be prepared to shift direction as needed.
Users change their habits often, based on their needs and expectations as well as market conditions. Keep this in mind, and make sure to always be on the lookout for when trends in your data indicate that change may be needed.
Continue to understand your customers and anticipate their needs.
Keep things fresh to keep your customers' attention. Providing new offers, promotions, products, and other personalized content for your customers builds strong relationships.
Who’s doing personalization well?
Need some inspiration for your own personalization efforts? These organizations, of various industries and sizes, are all using personalization to help them achieve their larger business goals:
Amazon
- Promotes products customers may like based on their previous browsing and purchasing
- Provides relevant products based on what a site visitor is currently looking at
Spotify
- Provides a suggested playlist (Discover Weekly) based on songs a user has listened to
- Lists albums a user may like based on search and song history
Nike
- App promotes offers and rewards specific for a customer
Netflix
- Recommends movies and shows based on previous viewing activity
- Shows different movie/show visuals based on audience and what a user has reacted to before
- Offers a personalized homepage with updates, links, and business contacts
City of Boston
- Rebuilt its website on the Drupal Content Management System (CMS) to utilize a large ecosystem of developers to adapt the website to users’ changing needs
Wendy’s
- Uses geo-targeting to advertise new products to potential customers in specific locations, helping them spread the word about the products beyond the store walls
- Combines behavioral and session information with unified customer profiles (UCPs) to develop a clearer understanding of users’ motivations and preferences for further personalization
The ability to understand your customers’ needs and provide them with relevant content is at your fingertips. Build a loyal community of customers and increase brand recognition by activating personalization. If you aren’t sure how to get started, we’re here to help. Get in touch and discover how your company can benefit from personalized marketing.
