Whether you’re a start-up looking to grow, or an established business looking to keep on top of your game, you know personalized marketing is essential. Every day customers are bombarded with information. Personalized content is a surefire way to cut through all the noise and make sure your business is seen—and that your efforts get results.
The question is, how can you personalize content to reach hundreds or thousands of people? Penrod has you covered. We’ve done a deep dive on all the trends out there and outlined five ways you can implement a personalized marketing strategy in your organization, be it start-up or well-established.
1. Before You Start: Get the Right Tech in Place
Chances are you have data—lots of it. It’s what drives your business and the decisions you make. That’s why it’s so important you have this data stored and managed properly. An older platform may not catch duplicate or incomplete customer records. This means unreliable opportunities in your sales funnel, which leads to missed opportunities to engage with customers.
A dated CRM platform may not be able to perform the tasks you need, like building reports, preparing metrics, or providing a 360-degree view of the customer. That’s why getting the right tech in place is essential for launching an effective personalized marketing strategy. We like Salesforce, because it:
– Collects and stores data in a single, user friendly platform
– Can integrate seamlessly with other data sources, including legacy platforms
– Allows you to build and track personalized campaigns throughout the customer journey
With the right platform, you can really see your marketing efforts take off!
2. First Things First: Make it Personal
Now that you’ve got the right tech, you can start crafting your personalized marketing strategy. The first step is often overlooked: Use a person’s name.
Simple, right? Yet that’s the key to personalized marketing: Reaching customers and making them feel like they aren’t just a number or an email. It’s important to ensure your communications are relatable, meet people where they are, and show the value.
Building on that, it’s important to send communications as a person, not as a business. Yes, building a brand and using that brand cache is vital to growing your business. When you engage with customers, however, engage with them as a person representing the brand.
We know what you’re thinking: “How can I tailor emails to reach thousands of unique customers at once?” Personas can help you as you start your personalized marketing journey. No matter what business you’re in, no two customers are alike—but this can group or segment customers, so you can create personalized, targeted messages that resonate. You can build personas based on data you already have: location, age, or purchase history.
3. Capture Leads (aka Give and Receive)
Personalized marketing is all about using data to best connect with your customers. With the right technology, you can collect valuable data at key touch points along the customer’s digital journey. This will help you better identify and meet their needs.
Of course, there is a catch: Today’s customers are often tech savvy and aren’t willing to provide data without getting something in return. You need to incentivize them. Customers are often willing to provide a few bits of key information—name, employer, or email—in exchange for an item of value. One way to capture leads is to offer an incentive, such as:
– Whitepapers
– Case studies
– Ebooks
Not only will this help you capture leads, you can also gain valuable information to further refine your marketing. The more data you gather, the more effective your personalized content can be. Tracking metrics like downloads, link clicks, and open rates can offer deeper insights into your customer groups and their unique needs. This can help you further tailor messaging to provide them information about specific services or products you offer that may be of interest to them.
4. Engage at Every Point of the Digital Journey
The customer journey is not always linear. In fact, it may be more of a cha-cha: one step forward, one step back, then a final step forward to complete a purchase or gain a customer’s full trust. Customers may abandon transactions for a variety of reasons. You want to make sure your customers are engaged throughout the three stages of the basic digital customer journey—browsing, cart, and purchase—as well as the in-between, “undecided” stages.
Remember, sometimes it’s not a simple 1-2-3 step process! Consumers may browse, add something to the cart, close their browser, wash, rinse, repeat before they make a conversion. That’s why engagement at every point of their digital journey is key. With the right marketing automation platform, you can send reminder emails (“Forgetting something?”) to encourage a purchase.
Offering recommendations, such as “Similar Customers Also Bought” messaging, is another way to further engage customers, personalize promotion, and encourage more purchases. Remember: a one-time purchase is wonderful, but repeat customers are the ultimate goal.
5. Wash, Rinse, Improve, Repeat
Like any other process, practice makes perfect—or at least, much more effective. Customers are fickle and their needs and wants constantly change. That’s why it’s important to continually review, refine, and optimize your personalized marketing efforts.
For example, set a target time for an email campaign. (Two weeks is a general rule of thumb.) Then, analyze the results. Go beyond open rates and instead look at click-to-open rate (CTOR), which measures the effectiveness of the content of your email, as well as download metrics.
To get a truly holistic view of a campaign, look at your website and landing pages, as well. This will help you get a more accurate impression of a campaign’s success. Be sure to ask:
– Can we trust this data? Does this data seem realistic?
– What kind of qualitative consumer feedback did we get?
– What elements worked well and can be used again?
– What elements fell flat and need fine-tuning?
Asking questions like these can help your team stay sharp and continually improve the effectiveness of your marketing, as well as customer satisfaction.
The Ultimate Takeaway
Customers are the foundation of any business, no matter how big, small, young, or old. Personalized marketing is a way to build lasting relationships by creating a tailored, enjoyable experience for your customers. With the right tools—and team—it’s easy to get winning results.
Has your organization implemented a personalized marketing strategy? Does your current strategy need a kick-start or a complete overhaul? We’ve got you covered!
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