How to Add Personalization to Your Marketing Campaigns

In the age of digital marketing, consumers are inundated with all kinds of media every day, so it’s only natural for them to tune out most of it, especially when it’s not something relevant.

Today’s technological advancements, however, have made it possible for marketers to take their marketing focus a notch higher through personalization.

Marketing personalization means engaging with your target audience in a way that feels human. It goes beyond calling them by their names in your marketing messages — it involves tailoring your marketing campaigns towards their interests and preferences.

Why Marketing Personalization Matters

One of the main benefits of personalizing your marketing approach is improved customer experience. When marketing offers and messages are relevant to the needs and wants of your customers, they feel more valued by and connected to your brand.

Personalization also provides the added benefit of boosting your brand reputation. When customers feel like they’re treated as individuals and not as mere transactions, they view your brand more positively, which ultimately leads to:

• Better customer engagement: With email marketing alone, emails with personalized subject lines can increase open rates by 26%. Another study also found that 72% of consumers actually prefer to engage with brands that personalize their messaging.
• Improved customer loyalty: 80% of shoppers said that they’re more likely to frequent a brand that offers personalized customer experience.
• Higher conversion rates and sales: 63% of marketers reported that they saw an increase in conversion rates through marketing personalization; 31% also reported that they saw an increase in e-commerce revenues.

4 Ways to Add Personalization to Your Marketing Campaigns

As we mentioned before, marketing personalization doesn’t only include addressing your customers by their names in your messages. Here are some creative ways to make your marketing campaigns more personalized:

1. Segment your audiences through buyer personas

The first and most important step is to segment your market and create buyer personas. A buyer persona is a detailed description of your target audience based on certain criteria such as:

• Demographics (e.g., age, gender, occupation)
• Geography (e.g., country, state, timezone)
• Behavior (e.g., potential customers, new customers, repeat customers)
• Psychographics (e.g., interests, individual personalities)
• Business size (for B2B brands)

Creating buyer personas involves conducting thorough audience research and segmenting your audience. Some of the tools you can use for this are Google Analytics, Kissmetrics, MailChimp, and Piwik Pro. Once you’ve gathered the data you need, you can start making a composite sketch of a fictional customer that embodies each of the buyer personas you identified.

2. Tailor your content

Buyer personas help map out your content based on where a customer is in the buyer lifecycle. For example:

• Potential customers: Providing free trials, demos, product samples, etc.
• New customers: Sending welcome gifts and/or messages, new customer discount vouchers, etc.
• Repeat/long-time customers: Offering product recommendations based on past purchases, referral bonuses, and loyalty discounts, etc.

You can also tailor your content depending on what segment your audience belongs to. For example:

• Location: Sending marketing messages based on their time zone, offering promos based on their location, celebrating certain holidays, etc.
• Purchasing/browsing history and interests: Providing product recommendations based on what they have purchased before or on what products they bookmarked or viewed.
• Age/gender or lifestyle: Offering buyer guides or product recommendations based on their demographics or psychographics (e.g., camping gear for outdoorsy customers, baby shower items, etc.)

3. Use behavior-triggered notifications

Another way to personalize your approach is to enable behavior-triggered notifications through marketing automation. Some tactics include:

• Abandoned cart notifications: This is pretty self-explanatory — customers who left items on their cart are given follow-up emails or push notifications. You can sweeten the deal by providing time-sensitive cart abandonment offers to further encourage customers to make a successful purchase.
• Re-engaging dormant customers: This tactic is especially helpful if you have a mobile app for your e-commerce business. Customers may stop engaging with your brand for many reasons. Re-engage them by sending special promos via push notifications or emails that will entice them to shop again from your brand.
• Product recommendations: Before a customer completes their purchase (usually at the stage before checking out), you can automate product recommendations based on the items on their cart — “customers who bought this also enjoyed.”

4. Personalize your aftercare engagement

Offering stellar aftercare services is a crucial factor in a customer’s shopping experience. In fact, 3 out of 5 customers report that excellent customer service is an important criterion for their loyalty to a brand. Make your aftercare services even better by personalizing your approach:

• Call them by their name and use yours too: This is important to emphasize in customer service because addressing customers by their name shows that your brand doesn’t just treat them as another numbered ticket. Additionally, using your name as the customer service rep adds a literal human touch and further cultivates trust.
• Know your customer’s history: Having the right tools in place will help you streamline your customer service even better by allowing you to look into your customer’s records, purchasing activity, and more. This also lessens a customer’s frustration of having to repeat their details and issues again and again.
• Use social listening: Customers often use social media to complain about a brand instead of reaching out to the brand’s customer service channels. Use this opportunity to offer customer service by reaching out to them and addressing their concerns where it’s appropriate. Social listening also makes customers feel seen and heard as individuals.

Amplify Your Marketing Campaigns

With the continuing development of AI today, it’s important for brands to remember that while these tools help in fine-tuning your marketing approach, nothing replaces genuine human connection. Strike a balance between using the right tools and making an effort to see and treat each customer as a person and not just another transaction.

However, we also understand that this can be quite overwhelming, especially for brands with limited resources and manpower. If you need help with any of your marketing needs, Ilfusion is here for you. We can help you craft marketing campaigns that are suited to your brand’s unique needs.

Give us a call at 888-420-5115, or send us an email at [email protected] to get started!

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