Everything You Need To Know About Personalised Marketing | PWD
Everything You Need To Know About Personalised Marketing
Personalised marketing is an essential tool in a digital marketer’s toolbox. It is especially effective in this new era where customers are online more than ever before.
This new style of marketing is becoming a powerful strategy as more consumers become overwhelmed by an influx of information. You merely have to search anything online for a few minutes and you will be overloaded with adverts. As consumers become annoyed with mass advertising, they begin to block out the adverts on the side of their screen.
However, advertising still matters and consumers want to be told what they need to buy. The key to reaching consumers now is to use a more specialised approach that targets them personally.
We’re talking about personalised marketing, of course! So, let’s explore what it is, why it’s important and how it works.
Personalised marketing is also known as one-to-one marketing. It’s the practice of focusing on individual customer’s interests rather than sending out mass impersonal advertising. This idea of a more personal approach to customers has been an area of interest for some time now. However, simply adding customer’s names to mass emails using a database and an automated email service is not enough anymore. Customers are looking for advertising that is in line with their interests on a deeper level.
As such, marketers need to implement more in-depth strategies to segment their audiences to specific niche interests. This ensures that they only send relevant content to prospects.
Many users are tired of consuming unnecessary information in the ever-growing digital world. This means their time reading marketing text and emails may shorten drastically - especially if they are not interested in the information.
Simply put, customers are becoming more selective in what they read and spend their time on. To respond to this changing dynamic, you need to improve your marketing game with new tools and strategies and many of these include automation software.
To become successful at personalised marketing, you need to embrace these modern technologies. This includes using analytics and data management platforms as well as customer relationship management software (CRM).
Using these tools, you can easily collect and analyse user data and track everything you learn about your leads and customers. As a result, you can implement better, more accurate marketing campaigns that entice more clicks and conversions.
Here are 3 strategies for getting started with personalised marketing.
Data is key here. You want to be collecting as much data on your website visitors and target audience as possible. To start, you can use analytics tools, user behaviour data, customer forms and surveys, purchase history, location history, etc.
By gathering data, you can create buyer personas for your target market. What do they need and like? How can you solve a specific pain point they’re experiencing?
Through segmentation, you can target specific types of customers and appeal to their needs better. This can help you to personalise the entire buyer journey and boost conversions.
Analyse Behaviour Across Channels & Devices
Balancing multiple channels of communication can be difficult, especially when using social media in your strategies. Yet, it is so important to keep track of your communications with consumers. If you send an offer that a consumer accepts, take them off the list of offers going out through other channels.
Prospects will get annoyed if they start receiving communication asking them to take action on things they already have. For example, continuing to show them advertisements for a product after they’ve already clicked on it before and bought the product.
Remember to collect their data and behaviour from all these sites and channels. This will ensure that your CRM has a balanced view of what actions they have or have not taken - allowing you to target them with marketing that they haven’t seen yet.
Some marketers believe that once a piece of marketing is seen by the prospect and the prospect acts on it and becomes a customer, their job is done. However, this is not the case. Personalised marketing should follow the customer along their entire journey, providing them with extras and add-ons to their original purchase.
When a customer makes a purchase, it is easy to predict what they will need next. For instance, you can provide your customer with guides or more information on how to get the most out of the product or service they bought.
For example, say you run a booking service for accommodation. When a person makes a booking, ask whether they are travelling for business or pleasure. You can then recommend restaurants, sightseeing spots, conferences, and other relevant experiences. You could also offer goods that they may need on their trip.
4 Examples of Personalised Campaigns
Product recommendation is a simple yet effective method of personalised marketing. By tracking your consumers’ interests, you can easily recommend similar products they are interested in or show them products they’ve been looking at. This may nudge them to make a purchase. Since successful companies like Netflix and Amazon gain success from this tactic, why can’t you?
When you search for a product on Amazon, you will see recommended products at the bottom of the page. Thus, if you didn’t find what you were looking for or the product was out of stock, you may find a similar product that will work just as well.
Netflix has a built-in AI software that gathers data on what type of movies and series you like. Then automatically recommends suggestions based on these. This provides a great user experience and tackles the problem of viewers not knowing what to watch next.
Gone are the days when one email is good enough to send to all your clients in your database. You should now segment your clients into specific groups based on their interests. You can then send specific emails to each group of consumers.
To better understand your consumers, gather demographic data or even create a mini-survey for them to fill out upon subscription. Within this, ask for feedback on their interests or what news they would like to receive.
The average reader online only has a 15-second attention span when reading content. Once they lose interest in reading, despite how engaging the article may be, their behaviour will change.
However, people love video content. It’s more engaging as people can listen to it to find out what they need to know instead of scrolling through chunks of text.
Go a step further and create a personal video. With the right software integrated with your CRM, you can create video templates that include a prospect’s name in them. This is an excellent way to grab their attention and boost your Click-Through-Rate (CTR).
With a personalised video campaign, Cadbury achieved a CTR of 65%! This just goes to show how effective it can be.
Social media is already a personal space whether it is Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Reaching out to your consumers on these and other platforms allows you to create a personal relationship with them. So, consider sending out personalised messages using automation technology.
This method also invokes better brand loyalty and increases customer satisfaction as your audience feels valued. It opens up an avenue to let your consumers provide relevant and honest feedback - giving your more data to work with.
Common Challenges Of Personalised Marketing
While personalised marketing is an increasingly popular and successful tool it is not devoid of problems and challenges. Dealing with the personal information of customers is always a tricky area - meaning that you should be mindful of potential mistakes when investing in these strategies.
This style of marketing based on personalisation can be quite expensive for smaller businesses. Investing in a highly customised website may be out of your budget range and spending resources and staff to collect data may not be viable for you.
However, this does not mean that it is impossible, you just need to get creative with email marketing and other methods.
Data Collection Without Spooking Clients
While many customers are open to sharing more data, many of them are sceptical about how ethical certain data collection methods are.
Customers are becoming more aware of websites that track their movements. They are uncomfortable when adverts pop up based on what they were searching for recently. Thus, transparency is key to allow your customers full control over how much of their data is collected and how you will use it.
Start Turning More Customer Engagements Into Conversions
Taking care when implementing new marketing strategies that involve personal data from customers is essential. Not only will clients appreciate the tailored content, but they will also trust the company more. This will likely lead to a higher customer retention rate and more conversions from those ad clicks, website visits, and email marketing campaigns.