August 25, 2019

Creating a Personalization Program for Success

As the digital marketing space continues to get more competitive, marketers and agencies have gotten more creative on the best ways to engage and reach their target audience. Advancement in technology has made marketing more data-driven. According to a survey by Salesforce, 61% of people acknowledge that technology has influenced their shopping behaviour and expectations, 66% agree that they would likely switch brands if the brand treated them more like a person than just another number. Technology has increased consumers and customer expectations from their brands, today’s consumers prefer a personalized experience based on their preferences or taste. Personalized marketing allows you to reach customers on an individual level instead of a one-size-fits-all kind of marketing, but you may be thinking, how is that possible? How do I tailor my marketing to suit individual customer? Isn’t this a whole lot of work? How much resources and time will I have to invest to achieve this?

Relax! There are ways to achieve this. How is your martech tool? How much of your customers’ data do you have at your disposal? Some of the steps to take to achieve success with this are simple basic steps which have been outlined below:

Put a Strategy in place

Before kicking of your personalized marketing strategy, ask yourself these questions and answer them honestly:

• What brand message am I passing across?
• What type of customer behaviour am I hoping to achieve – increase customer purchases, increase customer trust or repeat visits?
• What marketing resources are at our disposal (or can we create) to enable our strategy?
• Is this strategy or marketing plan short-term or long-term?
• What resources do I have to make this successful?

Create or Setup your marketing program

Once you have answered the above questions, it is time to act. Identify the techniques you will need to gather the required information and how you will use them for your personalized marketing program. Some of the ways to research your audience include:

• Questionnaires
• Surveys
• Forum groups
• Social media
• Informal discussions
• Anonymous feedback via your website or mail.

Keep in mind that you need as much information as possible from customers and prospects alike. Try to make questionnaires or surveys short, relevant, engaging and straight to the point.

Time to implement your marketing strategy

So you have collected data, analyzed them, set up your marketing tool and you are ready to implement your marketing strategy. Here are some of the ways to achieve success:

1. Send emails from a human instead of a brand: one of the easiest ways to kick off your personalization strategy is by sending personalized email using the name of an actual person – could be someone in the marking team, CEO, Head of Sales – anyone but not your brand. If you decide to use an email template, make them look authentic and not like something from a marketing machine.
2. Use Marketing Automated tools: if your run campaigns, these tools have the power to trigger leads based on content interest, monitor your campaigns and look out for engagement.
3. Use the name of the receiver: instead of writing “dear client”, use their first name. You can get their names from the forms they filled. Use it.
4. Your database of emails should be segmented by customers’ persona: it is more effective to segment your email database by marketing personnel; this helps you to be able to personalize messages to each of them, thereby, hitting on their specific pain points.
5. Create and send persona-driven content: please avoid a one-size-fits-all type of content and create persona-driven content to your prospects.
6. Personally respond to customers on social media: a lot of companies make the mistake of automating this process. A human responding to customers or prospects on social media is a no-brainer. Have a real person behind your account and answer questions or requests according to their various demands.
7. Targeted Landing pages: if you can create a landing page for your different personas, do it. Let the landing pages have targeted personalized offers for your audience.

Customers prefer to patronize those who personalize their shopping experience as it gives them a sense of belonging. So what are you waiting for, create your personalized program and start now!