There are about 2.14 billion online users globally, and they now expect personalization throughout their buying journey.
Of course we all have an understanding of ‘personalized marketing’, whether that involves having Dear <First Name> in the marketing emails you send or offering a personalized experience to website users through cookies and log ins.
But there’s more to personalized marketing than that, so let’s explore the concept now before we discuss how your business can adopt a more personalized marketing approach.
What is personalization?
The process of personalization entails sending a marketing message to an individual based on data such as purchasing history, interests, demographic data, behavior, most-used channels, age, gender, or anything else that will help with the segmentation of your audience.
Personalized marketing is essentially one-to-one marketing, where your content speaks to one individual at a time, with a personalized approach.
It’s very different from conventional marketing methods in which generic messages were created for the masses through emails or advertisements.
In contrast, personalized digital marketing provides a custom message to each person, making customers feel valued by this experience. The core purpose of this entire strategy is customer satisfaction, user retention, and especially user experience.
Several studies have shown that personalized marketing delivers results: After all, more than 91% of consumers prefer to shop from brands that provide relevant advertisements and reach out to them according to their preferences. Personalized marketing provides an amazing customer experience, which is another reason for Google’s June Algorithm update, which will help business owners, SEO Experts, and Web Developers measure various user experience metrics. In short, it works and it’s essential to create a personalized approach for marketing as early as possible in the marketing funnel to enhance digital marketing outcomes.
What personalized marketing is not
Gone are the days when you only needed to mention an individual’s name to customize an email for a potential client. Today, the concept of personalization has advanced just like all digital marketing has.
Modern customers want businesses to serve the digital equivalent of a “turndown service”. Remember that service from pre-COVID business travel? If you were lucky enough to stay in a 5-star hotel on your business travels, a staff member would discreetly enter your room while you were out to provide a fresh bottle of mineral water, position plush slippers beside the bed and place your favourite chocolate truffle on your pillow. In a digital world, this simply means that customers want to be served or ‘spoon-fed’ the options available so that they don’t have to toggle through websites and platforms to find what they are looking for.
Read on to discover more about it…
What makes personalization important?
The world is evolving rapidly, and consumers are growing ever more reliant on technology and getting used to the ease and convenience of living their lives online. With everything just a tap or click away, customers give their money to brands that recognize them and have the least lengthy procedures. Here are a few facts and figures to testify the move to personalised marketing:
- 71% of buyers feel frustrated due to impersonal engagement with the brand.
- 70% of millennials feel frustrated because of irrelevant emails from brands.
- 74% of customers feel fed up when they don’t find Personalization over websites.
- 36% of people want businesses to be proactive about providing personalized experiences.
- 90% of U.S. consumers find Personalization pretty appealing.
- 56% of online shoppers prefer to buy from websites that recommend products.
- 63% of consumers are very likely to avoid brands with poor personalization tactics.
- 66% of buyers say impersonalized content stops them from closing the purchases.
- 42% of consumers feel agitated by content that isn’t personalized.
Wondering how to start personalizing your marketing strategy?
- More than 50% of the consumers will share their information to get personalized discounts from their favorite brands and businesses.
- More than 83% of consumers will share their data in return for getting a personalized experience with any brand while shopping.
- Over 90% of consumers are eager to share personal behavioral data for a cheaper and easier customer experience.
Here is how it will be an easy process:
Given the statistics, creating a personalized experience for the customers will not take much effort. After all, customers themselves are willing to share their data, information, and behavior details with brands and businesses in return for getting a better customer experience. Isn’t that amazing?
You have already discovered that customers are willing to go the extra mile to simplify their buying experience. But how are businesses treating this opportunity? Read through to know more.
- 98% of marketers have made advances in customer relationships through personalization.
- 89% of businesses are already spending time, money, and effort on Personalization due to its benefits.
- 79% of retailers make up the majority of many industries that are actively investing in personalized digital marketing.
- 51% of marketers prioritize personalization for their marketing strategies.
- 88% of marketers claim that they need personalization to foster a better customer experience.
Learning from the leading organizations in the industry is always worth the investment. Given the numbers, personalization is a must-have for businesses today.
What drives success for personalized marketing approaches?
The art of delivering the right message at the right time and through the right channel is the ultimate factor that drives the entire process of personalized marketing campaigns. But how to know the right stuff? Well, it’s all about the data!
Data is the key factor that drives a seamlessly personalized marketing strategy. Not utilizing this data adequately might prove to be very destructive for the business. Most businesses and marketers are learning as they go along, but the key to success is retrieving all the data responsibly and using it correctly, and refining it through quality control processes to steer clear of data privacy disasters.
Important elements for personalized digital marketing
Now that we established the need for personalization and its importance for digital marketing, here are some more important elements to consider. Personalization is a process; you need several things to formulate a personalized marketing strategy, including:
- Data
- Technology
- Content
- People
- Strategy
The process revolves around these five things, and when put them together the right way, they reap excellent benefits for any business – big or small!
You can gather data from visitors, social media users, and walk-in prospects and analyze their behavior and habits to create a buyer persona. Using this buyer persona will help you target the right audience, at the right, time and through the right platform without any troubles
The final take away
Personalization in marketing is like a basic need of this generation and the coming ones. Therefore, if businesses want to succeed and gain a competitive edge in the market, they need to adopt it right away. Implementing the technology sooner will help them learn about the tactic and polish their skills to achieve the best results.
In a nutshell, personalization requires delivering the right content at the right time and through the right channels – and not a generic message sent to the masses across all platforms.
By doing so, you can easily achieve a basic level of personalization for your customers. Creating your content in a way that serves your product or service to the customer on a plate and is ready to be bought and consumed will deliver ten benefits:
- Higher conversions
- A better understanding of customers
- Customer engagement
- Social sharing over the platform
- Higher engagement across all platforms
- Brand affinity
- Instant feedback
- Qualified lead nurturing
- Customer retention
- Higher revenue
About the author:
Aimen Kahn is a skilled writer with a vast experience in content marketing. Having served several different industries she’s now exploring the digital marketing side and helping businesses, startups, and entrepreneurs establish their online presence with compelling content. having worked with numerous big names, she aims to help the struggling ones on priority for a change.