Personalise Your Marketing for Success?
In the ‘early’ internet days consumer interest could be easily gained by simply using original or interesting content. Today's demands have changed. Customers have become smarter to targeted marketing techniques. Real effort is now needed to gain new customers attention. Personalised marketing has become an inevitable part of any online store marketing strategy today. Personalised marketing stands for the strategy that organizations use to send individualized content to different recipients via data collection, analysis merged with automation technology. The aim of personalised marketing is to actually engage consumers or potential consumers by communicating with each of them as individuals.
Benefits of personalised Marketing
Personalised marketing provides several advantages for both customers and businesses:
- Drive revenue: You can increase your ROI by identifying as well as responding to each customer’s preferred channel.
- Enhanced customer experience: Consumers always feel comfortable when it comes to providing personal information to their preferred brands when they receive some benefits in return. By providing all these information, a consumer expects to have more personalised offers upon his/her return.
- Maintain consistency across channels: Today, customers interact with brands through various channels like email, mobile, social platforms etc. It’s crucial for brands to maintain consistency across channels. For instance, the app experience should match the in-store experience.
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Increase brand loyalty: By providing personal data and information, consumers expect to be considered as special individuals with certain preferences. If you can fulfill the preferences, you can be rest assured of both customer satisfaction and brand loyalty.
Tips for personalised Marketing
Custom Marketing Campaigns
Though it may sound like an uphill task, knowing your audience plays an extremely important role in a successful marketing strategy. First, you need to segment your audience specifically. It’s important to keep in mind that you’re not targeting the entire public. Instead, you’re targeting a selected group, say coffee drinkers who like organic products or tech-savvy ones who need top-notch gadgets etc. Based on these specifically segmented terms, offer them content which you can customize further. Then you can tailor the campaigns based on different parameters such as frequency, gender, demographics etc. Remember that you can only reap the benefits of customized marketing campaigns when you implement them in a smarter way.
Personalised Email Campaign
This is perhaps the most convenient way to develop a personal rapport with your email recipients. Greeting somebody by his/her first name is always more engaging compared to mentioning ‘Dear customer’. You can integrate lead data into the mailings to highlight specific offers or products. It’s also advisable to mention the name of an active member of your marketing team instead of having your company name as the sender. Moreover, if you can add the member’s photo along with his/her email signature, it would look like an actual human invested his/her time and effort to create the message. By personalizing your emails, you can attract more sales and boost customer loyalty.
Consider the Context
If your content isn’t designed for specific interests and requirements of each persona, it won’t be shared or viewed and it’ll definitely not promote your brand. As a marketer, you’ve to identify the type of content which would be of certain interest to each persona. By identifying this, you would be able to deliver your key objective – personalised content. Ideally, you should begin with your business requirements and develop a benefit that can be offered to the customers. You need to define metrics and KPIs that substantiate your ROI, which means you need to identify insights and data required for creating personalization rules. Apart from that, you should have proper tools as well as resources to implement these changes.
Engage on Site
Getting users to visit your site and make a purchase needs a lot of effort and planning. By improving user engagement, you can personalize your marketing and make the most of user visits. From adding a value proposition to your product or service (any special feature on offer or how your offerings are better than that of your competitors etc), offering easy site wide search for visitors with relevant product recommendations, making your brand and site connected to social media platforms to make content creation and sharing easy, using onsite messaging to actively engage visitors when they are on your site and cascading emails with product feeds are some effective ways to boost engagement. You can even use customer surveys and usability testing to offer your site visitors a better experience along with investing in a customer engagement platform that will let you track the data in real time to bring success your way.
Social Media Marketing
Leverage the real-time platform of social media to engage your customers effectively. From talking about your brand and getting your brand message across to your customers directly to chatting with them, listening to their concerns and collecting their feedback about your products/services, you can do a lot to build trust, get loyal customers and even new customers by word of mouth publicity. After all, it’s this personalised attention that will set you apart from your competitors who use automated responses or don’t make an effort to reach their target clientele directly and at a fast speed.
Responsive Design
With a responsive web design, you can ensure your website offers optimal viewing and browsing experience to all users, irrespective of their device or screen size and resolutions. Since personalization is all about convenience, using a responsive template with mobile-friendly features like swipe or click-to-call will help users with mobile devices while catering to desktop users as well – without you needing to create or maintain two websites. This, in turn, will create a positive image of your business in the minds of your site visitors and they will be more likely to return or recommend it to friends and family.
Branding
Try to brand your content to support your business vision or message. So, instead of generic content, focus on your USP. Emphasize on why customers should choose your e-store. Whether you offer high quality products at the best rates, give regular discount to customers, or are quick to add new products/categories to meet market demands, focus on what sets you apart from your competitors to entice your consumers as well as product vendors who would be willing to partner with you.
Data Collection
Personalization works only when it’s useful and relevant. So, any personalization effort has to be backed by data and insights that are as precise as possible. From using a feedback loop from customers that gives you useful insight into their demographics, location and motivation for buying from you, to using a central data management system, making single customer views and traditional customer databases to merge with digital data management systems, you need to take the necessary steps to ensure successful personalization of your business and brand.
Conclusion
Search engines are increasingly showing personalised content as users find them more useful. So, you should use historical data, past consumer behavior records as well as real time reports and analytics to ensure your personalization plans are on track and help you attract more customers by showing them exactly what they want or are searching for.
