Personalization has been one of the most underrated strategies that are responsible for changing how we imagine marketing. That said, many businesses struggle to implement it with perfection. Some think personalization just means using the first name in the email salutation; others lose their case by appearing too enthusiastic. But no matter what, customers are getting more and more cooperative. A 57% majority of consumers have no problem sharing their personal information on a website if they’re assured of its responsible use.
That said, let’s first understand what personalized marketing really means and how it empowers your business.
What Do You Mean ‘Personalized Marketing’?
Personalized marketing is a core business strategy for delivering tailored messages to your users or customers. The goal here is to make the venture feel more human and personal. The idea behind this is to give weightage to the customers’ likes and dislikes.
It is something that can be integrated on almost every marketing channel you’re active on and certainly goes beyond just using the customer’s first name in emails. According to data from Marketo, 79% of consumers say they are likely to associate with brand offers if they have been tweaked to reflect their previous interactions and preferences. That said, it differs (if not starkly) from traditional marketing, which relies on generalizing every customer through billboards, cold calls, and emails.
The personalized marketing approach reflects in your social media posts and messages and the blogs you post as well. It involves using the collected user data like demographics, purchase history, etc., and developing tailored experiences that target those specific individuals or groups of consumers.
How Personalized Marketing Benefits Your Business
It’s natural to wonder why you should go the extra mile or question what exactly you have to benefit from the personalized marketing venture, especially if you’ve been doing fine with the traditional methods. To answer that, McKinsey & Company has said personalization can improve marketing efficiency by 10-30% and even spike revenues by up to 15%. But more than that, when done right, it can help you reduce acquisition cost by as much as 50% in some cases.
Hence, it’s important to understand that customers have started to tune out, having received irrelevant mass telemarketing ads, calls, and messages. What everyone wants, instead, is personalization, and here’s what you’re going to get in return.
Increased Customer Retention
According to data from Harvard Business school, a 5% increase in retention has been shown to increase profits from 25% up to 95%. For you to hit those numbers, it is imperative to provide an incentivized and personalized experience to your customers. You can offer your frequent visitors certain rewards or discounts, inviting them for events, offering free deliveries, etc. — you get the gist. You can also be more subtle in your approach and, depending upon your business, escalate your live chat and video chat.
Live chat helps deliver real-time support to your customers, and the concept is easy enough that anyone can use it. It will help you build stronger connections, by offering assistance in their language and helping them given their chat history and previous purchases.
Similarly, video chat is one of the best solutions for providing after-sales service, and that’s personalized as it can get.
Ability To Offer Above Par Customer Experience
According to research conducted by Salesforce on thousands of customers, the age-long method of throwing information at the consumers has failed in modern times. Customers are now willingly sharing their personal information through forms and surveys because they understand it’s to improve their own experiences, and that’s where you come in.
Providing exceptional customer experience is no longer optional. So, it’s time to take it up a notch. If a customer buys a pair of blue jeans with you, instead of suggesting them more blue jeans, you can create a micro-segment and suggest t-shirts to go along with those jeans, or more jeans of similar design and fit.
It’s important to stay relevant without getting annoyingly specific, and, to achieve that, you’ll have to understand customer preferences and leverage tech advancements like AI on all platforms, including web, text, email, and in-store.
Increased Conversions, Sales, and Revenue
With every industry getting competitive by the day, your job as a marketer is all the more crucial. The need to focus on retaining customers is paramount and personalizing your approach helps you achieve just that. And if you assume it’s relevant only to the B2C markets, you’re mistaken.
Even in B2B, a staggering 98% of marketers agree personalization helps them do their job well, and a good 74% of them claim it has a “strong” impact. Businesses in this segment can successfully personalize customer experiences by segmenting their user base from the type of industry, or scale of business, geographics, among other factors.
You Make Insightful Recommendations
Personalizing your marketing approach also helps you make close recommendations based on your customers’ usage or purchase pattern. Netflix has the personalization game all tied up and running, and it was able to do that with the help of one of the most powerful recommendation engines. The OTT platform recognizes your likes and preferences based on the content you’ve already watched. And that includes genres, actors, language, and whatnot. Amazon is great at that as well, as it constantly shows you accessories that go along with products you’re purchasing, and also has an exemplary live chat support system.
You Build Stronger Relationships
This is one of the more intangible benefits of personalized marketing. An Accenture survey shows us that 50% of consumers will make purchases at a store that knows them by their name, and 67% of them will do the same if the retailer maintains their purchase history to improve personalization.
When customers understand and feel that your business cares about their interests and preferences, they are more likely to stick with you. The trick is in making conservative suggestions and not being too pushy with your recommendations. The latter might lead them to unfollow you.
Final Thoughts
Personalization is a complex domain, and carrying it out well demands a lot of technical know-how. Nevertheless, once you dive deeper, getting it right becomes more achievable. It will help in cutting short customer journeys and making the process overall convenient for both the involved parties.
Srushti Shah is an ambitious, passionate and out of the box thinking woman having vast exposure in Digital Marketing. She is working as a Digital Marketer and Content writer at Acquire. Her key focus is to serve her clients with the latest innovation in her field leading to fast and effective results. Working beyond expectations and delivering the best possible results is her professional motto. Other than work, she loves traveling, exploring new things and spending quality time with family. Reach out to Srushti Shah on Twitter or LinkedIn
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