What Is Personalized Marketing?
Personalized marketing uses information about your customers to create individualized, relevant messages and offers. The goal is to engage customers and leads by communicating with each as an individual. Personalization must start with data.
By analyzing the data captured, you can assess what products, services, features, and messaging attract the most customers and leads. This may include purchases, time of purchase, promotions or offers applied, completed form responses, downloaded content, social media engagement, and survey feedback.
Each piece of information collected can help you create or trigger custom-made experiences for every individual who interacts with your business.
Why Is Personalized Marketing Important?
According to McKinsey, companies “getting personalization right” generate 40% more revenue from personalized marketing activities than their peers. Personalization done “right” can support favorable outcomes by adapting offerings and outreach to individuals at specific times with compelling touchpoints.
McKinsey’s research highlights that shoppers have a strong point of view on personalization. Seventy-two percent of respondents said they expect the businesses they buy from to recognize them as individuals and know their interests.
Furthermore, based on McKinsey’s study, here are the top five actions shoppers expect:
To help your organization achieve more favorable outcomes, below are questions to review before engineering tailor-made customer experiences.
Three Questions to Ask When Implementing Personalized Marketing
1. How are you capturing customer data?
The primary ways for gathering data include:
Web analytics to track people’s behavior. Web analytics process and report the behavior of visitors to a website or app. This information can help you identify high-value content.
Forms and surveys to capture user-provided information. Landing pages, forms, and surveys offer a more transparent data collection method. Some customers feel more comfortable with this data collection method.
Both methods can provide detailed information about your customers and leads.
2. Who are your ideal customers?
After you’ve gathered detailed information about your customers and leads, you can begin to segment your audience into groups based on shared characteristics. This may include demographic information, income level, location, similar interests, browsing behavior, and past purchases.
Consider how you’ll use your customer data to segment your audience into distinctive groups. Then, tailor offers and messaging to each group respectively.
3. Where will you use customer data?
After you have defined your ideal customer segments and aligned content to fit their needs, where will you place the content? Where on your website or app or through what channels can you also learn more about each customer and lead?
You could consider:
- Placing an advertisement in a social feed that one of your customer segments uses regularly
- Presenting a lead capture form on a popular landing page on your website
- Sending a survey in a follow-up email to a customer who makes a purchase
These actions and others can help you scale your personalization efforts.
This business trend will continue to evolve as advancements in technology and analytics make personalization more accessible.
When you follow personalized marketing best practices, you may be able to deliver more satisfying customer experiences and increase customer loyalty.
Discover the many ways customer relationship management (CRM) tools can help. With certified experience in Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Salesforce platforms, the Business Technology Solutions Team at FORVIS is here to help. Use the Contact Us form below to send a message.
Related reading: Are You Ready to Use CRM and Marketing Automation Together?