As the digital age advances, so too do the number of tools available to the modern marketer. One of the increasingly popular approaches to marketing is known as personalized marketing. This approach to marketing is growing in popularity because it has the power to enhance the customer experience during interactions with a brand. What is personalized marketing and why is it becoming so popular?
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Personalized Marketing Explained
As the name suggests, the idea of personalized marketing is to deliver content to customers that is tailored toward their online behaviors and previous shopping/searching patterns. Personalized marketing has been described in a number of different ways, but the most basic explanation goes like this:
“personalized marketing is the implementation of a strategy by which companies deliver individualized content to recipients through data collection, analysis, and the use of automation technology.”
To put it more succinctly, personalized marketing involves capturing data on consumer behavior and generating content specifically for individuals based upon that collected data.
Benefits of Personalized Marketing
Personalized marketing has quickly become popular because of the many benefits it delivers to companies. First and foremost, personalized marketing improves the customer experience. This involves a bit of give and take as consumers voluntarily share some data such as their cookies and you track their online activity to collect other bits of information. You can solicit that information by first offering a reward to the consumer for sharing voluntarily with you, such as a 20% discount on an oil change at your auto repair shop if they sign up for email newsletters.
You can then use data to personalize the experience for individuals the next time they interact with the brand. Sticking with an auto repair shop, you could use information on the age of an individual’s car to personalize email newsletters they view with tips on how to extend the life of tires or batteries in their automobile. Other benefits of personalized marketing include:
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Generate revenue: personalized marketing enables brands to identify the preferred channels for each customer. By identifying those channels and responding to individual customers through those channels you generate more revenue with an increased ROI because you waste less marketing spend trying to connect via channels those customers aren’t engaging on.
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Build brand loyalty: one of the major goals of personalized marketing is to build brand loyalty. Using the information provided by consumers and gathered through analytics allows to you treat each individual as a unique person and craft content to meet their specific preferences.
How to Improve Your Personalized Marketing Strategy
With the rising popularity of personalized marketing content and the list of benefits it provides your business, it’s important to ensure your company optimizes its personalized marketing. What steps can you take to improve your personalized marketing strategy?
Personalized marketing starts with great data, so make sure you’re collecting data, data, and more data. Now, you can’t exactly send every customer a 25-question form seeking input, they’ll skip right by it. Instead, ask your customers questions over the course of time and build a profile of their interests, hobbies, and online patterns. From there, follow these steps to improve personalization:
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Segment your audiences: this is personalized marketing, so you’re going to have different customers with different preferences. With data in hand, segment your audience based on factors such as age, gender, income, location, interests, and pain points.
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Map out your content: specific content and targeted ads should be built to speak successfully to each audience segment. Blogs might attract one audience while conshorter, concise infographics generate engagement among others. Make sure your content is mapped out to the interests and needs of each audience segment.
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Personalized marketing requires attention to detail on the data and the ability to make tweaks over time to ensure that the content and ads shown to audience segments remain valuable to the individual.