This 2020 Start Personalizing Everything
A person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language.
It’s been long acknowledged that personalization will be the future of marketing.
This belief stays, if not grows stronger, this 2020. Yet, there are plenty of companies still struggling to find the right balance between being creepy and showing enough care beyond addressing the customers’ first names.
Personalization works best when it’s relevant and useful. Serving the right message to the right customer, at the correct time, on the best platform, helps your message to resonate more meaningfully in your customers’ mind. Thus, modern marketing personalization should be defined by dynamic, hyper-specific targeted experiences that go beyond dynamically inserting basic data, i.e. your customer’s name or address.
There are many ways to define personalization, but for marketing departments, personalization ultimately is a strategy that is implemented to increase your relevance and engagement, which will eventually drive customer loyalty and sales.
So, what do you need to personalize?
Personalization is all about focused marketing initiatives based on data, and as such, throughout the marketing funnel and buyer’s journey, there are plenty of opportunities for brands to insert their personalization strategy.
1. Website
Your website is most often the first impression your visitors will have of your brand and continues to be a driving factor for conversions and retaining their attention.
Brands can utilize historical data, such as location in their website, for example, to personalize the browsing experiences and nurture and engage customers directly.
Telecommunication company, the O2 uses data based on customer’s device and location to offer personalized and niche marketing ads, that showed what the best offer they have for the customers, what similar items the users might prefer, and where their nearest store was located.
2. Communication channel
Today as technology rapidly advancing, there are a lot of channels that you can use to engage with your audience. But with customer expectations growing by the day, one-to-one communication becomes the benchmark that customers have come to expect. As such, brands have no choice but to personalize their communication channels as well in order to stand out.
Personalized email aside, you can come up with other creative methods to interact with your audience. Starbucks, for example, successfully keeps customers engaged with its gamified mobile app. By integrating the brand’s rewards system with the ability to customize and order drinks via the app, it makes use of information such as purchase history and location to get as personal as possible.
READ ALSO: M-Commerce: The Rise is Here.
3. Content
There’s no doubt, hyper-personalization has become a part of the modern lifestyle. Today, brands can easily create highly personalized experiences for their customers simply with a creative content marketing strategy.
When talking about personalized content, we cannot forget Netflix’s personalized viewing recommendations. Using an algorithm that’s constantly being developed and improved, Netflix not only shows their audience movie recommendations based on the content they have watched, it also personalizes the covers, giving prominence to actors or actresses their audience are more familiar with.
4. Product or service
As far as personalization goes, product personalization seems to a pretty common tactic among marketers. After all, personalized product or service helps a brand to stand out from their competitors by offering their audience the opportunity to create a unique product that leaves a special memory for them.
READ ALSO: Three Unusual Marketing Strategies.
Coca-Cola, for example, incorporated personalization in its Share A Coke campaign, which involved printing common names on Coke bottles to attract more millennials. Beyond that, they also plan to launch products printed with surnames and famous cities around the globe. Talk about how a simple marketing strategy can bring so many sales for a business.
5. Customer service
When it comes to customer service experience, many customers prefer face-to-face interactions for service and support from their favorite brands. Fortunately, today’s fast growing technology makes it possible for brands to support hundreds to thousands of personal conversations with their customers at the same time.
Domino’s pizza took customer service one step further by introducing Dom, a pizza ordering chatbots, which allows customers to order directly through Facebook Messenger. Here’s the catch. The chatbots allows both one-off and repeat customers to order without having to create an account or profile and without even leaving the comfort of their favorite apps.
Are You Ready to Personalize Your Marketing?
With technological improvements, customer expectations are evolving. As marketers, we need to provide the information that customers want, in the right place and at the right time; and personalization is a way to help us achieve that. In fact, research shows that personalization increases the efficiency of marketing by 10–30%.
At the end of the day, personalization should be present as part of the whole experience for your customers.
Personalization is about delivering a timely and relevant messaging, segmented by visitor traffic or customer personas and that resonates across all your marketing channels. The spoils of personalization, therefore, will go to those who are willing to put customers first and seriously prioritize individual needs over profit.
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