Personalized Marketing: The Ultimate Guide to WOW Your Prospects and Customers

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Personalized Marketing: The Ultimate Guide to WOW Your Prospects and Customers

Published By Moo

August 26, 2024

Moo

26/08/24

Personalized marketing can make or break your next marketing campaign.

So let’s get rolling!

First of all.

What is personalized marketing?

Personalized marketing is a form of data-driven marketing strategy used by marketers and companies. With the assistance of digital marketing tools, marketers can communicate hyper-personalized marketing messages and product incentives to on-going or ready to be customers.

Personalized vs Non-personalized Example

Imagine you have received two marketing emails with different subject lines from two different companies.

The first subject line reads: ” Hey there…”

The second one goes: “Hey, Tim…”

If your name is Tim, then which of these two subject lines easily connect with you?

The answer is obvious!

Hey, Tim… feels warmer and easily connects with you.

That is the power of personalization!

Personalized marketing LOVE at first sight

Customers decide within a matter of seconds, whether they love your marketing message.

If you provide a relevant message, then your customer will be satisfied.

However, if you miss the mark, they will be gone forever!

Retail has moved beyond just buying products, shoppers now want better experiences.

Especially online, recreating some of the lost personal touch of more traditional offline sales, personalization can delight the customer.

As well as make them feel special, primed to come back for more.

Text personalization in emails is an obvious and easy to implement use of personalized marketing content.

Although every marketer uses some sort of merge tags in their email campaigns, so this has lost much of its WOW effect.

However forward-thinking retailers and digital marketers and now upping the stakes, and driving WOW moment engagement again, using the power of image personalization.

Image personalization can be incredibly powerful.

It consists of:

customizing specific details of a marketing image,
adding in the customer’s logo,
website screenshots,
or business name.

These small subtle changes will increase email click-through 2-4x.

If an image paints a thousand words, a personalized image creates a thousand impressions.

Of course, personalized images don’t have to stop with an email, you can further boost your conversions by personalizing your whole sales funnel from email to landing page and beyond.

According to a study conducted by HubSpot, in a six-month study of 330,000 websites, Hubspot discovered that website personalization delivered a 202 percent uplift in website conversions.

If you’re sending your customers to a landing page from an email, start adding URL parameters to the email links to enable web page personalization.

This could be the customers first name, company name, or something more advanced such as their logo, or website screenshot.

Obviously, the key here is to align the personalization with your product or service, so it doesn’t feel facked or forced.

For example, if you’re an agency that provides digital services for your clients’ websites, using a personalized image, that included your team reviewing their website would make sense and therefore be really impactive.

How did Intercom do it?

Intercom increased it’s landing page conversion rate 300% by using this exact strategy, personalizing links with the company name.

They grab the “company” parameter’s value and insert it into the page dynamically.

They also personalize the solution and selected product features based on their second URL parameter – “solution”.

Once we have an identifiable user web session, we can take marketing personalization further and start to tackle a big issue for all online destinations…

Cart abandonment rate averaged 69%, according to a deep-dive analysis by the Baymard Institute based on compiling 41 different studies in cart abandonment.

A recent study suggested that even the best-in-class of SaaS platforms were losing a staggering 75% of those who signed up for a free trial and never came back.

Re-engagement has never been more important, retargeting lost prospects with personalized image ads, giving a 1-2-1 experience, will certainly drive increase engagement and better Ad ROI.

Cablato research shows that personalized advertising sees, on average, between 2.5x – 4x uplift in consumer engagement compared to standard version-based advertising.

Completing the loop for the user from a personalized Ad, back to a personalized landing page, possible with a personalized bot experience to guide them back from abandonment, and you now have a highly effective conversion funnel additionally you can use a dedicated analytics and funnel tool like Finteza, to make optimization and decisions efficiently.

AND THAT’S THE POWER OF HYPER PERSONALISATION!

Implementing Personalization Marketing within your Organisation

Even though many companies have managed to personalize some outreach and segments.

Most firms still struggle to improve on the ways they engage with their customers.

The challenge is to transform a marketing organization’s processes and norms to match and accomplish the full potential that personalization offers.

When done right, personalization improves customers’ lives.

It also increases their engagement and loyalty with the company because the messages will be designed towards what the customers wants.

Customer benefits translate into those of the company, according to the Harvard Business Review, here is how:

Personalization can reduce acquisition costs by up to 50 percent, increase revenues by as much as 15 percent, and improve the efficiency of marketing spend to between 10 to 30 percent.

Why are you still not personalizing your messages? You are missing a lot!

Data-driven personalization at scale is not a new concept. Instead, it is a fundamental part of programmatic advertising that has been there for many years.

The challenge is that consumers are still frequently bombarded by irrelevant and inept ads that do not resonate with their desires at all.

Even though data-driven thinking is increasingly being applied to the audience and media components of the programmatic advertising, more is yet to be done on the creative side.

A recent study reveals that 97 percent of programmatic campaigns do not have a targeted creative for every audience segment.

Apart from using data to identify the best placement and user, chief marketing officers (CMOs) have to look beyond the medium and scrutinize the message being sent to the customers.

This is because the ad will remain ineffective despite reaching the right customer if the creative is irrelevant and not engaging to the consumer.

The adoption of data-driven personalization is increasing across major vertical markets.

Despite the presence of many early adopters, the majority of the advertisers are still getting used to this form of personalization.

The outcome/lesson

The critical lesson learned so far is that data-driven personalization is not a technology problem.

Instead, there are more technical capabilities that an organization can use to increase its customer engagement.

Data-driven personalization is about creating a new organizational muscle by incorporating new collaboration models, processes, tools, and skillset.

Building a data-driven personalization capability will take time just like it took years for marketers to learn programmatic advertising.

Marketers can hasten their learning curve by choosing the right partner.

That is a person who augments technology with the leadership and expertise that marketers can use to deliver results.

What is personalization at scale?

In today’s marketplace, it is not enough to send each customer an email that addresses them by name and provides a discount based on a past sale.

You have to design and deliver tailored messages to thousands of your customers in multiple interactions. This is the point when you need technology. Technology enables a company to interact with its clients regularly. This is why you should not just think of personalization alone, but instead, think of personalization at scale.

Why should personalization marketing at a scale matter?

Personalization at a scale should be considered by marketers.

This is because when done well, it can deliver impact and growth faster while creating better experiences for your customers.

Personalization plays a vital role throughout a client’s lifecycle: customer engagement, basket size, frequency of purchase, churn prevention, cross-sell, and acquisition, among other things.

Because the future of marketing is in data analytics, whether agile or digital, personalization still comes out as the common denominator.

Majority of classical marketing disciplines such as pricing, advertising, messages, and services will become more personalized in the future.

Marketing research and experience reveal that when personalization is fully implemented, it can unlock significant near-term value for companies.

For example, it can cause a 10 to 20 percent more efficient marketing, increased cost savings, and up to 30 percent uplift in revenue and retention.

Moreover, even though the earliest results can be achieved in a couple of months, adopting personalization has a lasting positive impact on your consumer relationship.

The fact is that the majority of consumers want better personalization. Eighty percent of customers assert that personalization is essential to them.

Furthermore, out of the 95 percent of marketing professionals that were questioned at the 2017 World Retail Congress, only 20 percent said retailers are doing a great job at personalizing their messages.

These marketing professionals also recognized the need and potential that personalization presented.

Another revelation that came out the 2017 World Retail Congress is that many companies still do not understand personalization at scale.

They consider it a mystery.

What is Pattern Interrupt?

Humans have an average of 50,000 thoughts every single day.

Interestingly, 95 percent of those thoughts are repeated every day, according to the National Science Foundation.

This is lots of repetition and allows for very little new thinking.

Pattern interrupt is a technique used to change a particular thought, behavior, or situation.

We all have behavior patterns that are habit sequences or mental pathways.

Moreover, a pattern interrupt is a great way to induce trance.

Milton Erikson is famous for using the handshake induction as a formal pattern interrupt.

Routines help us get out of bed every morning and keep life’s momentum alive.

We know what to do and when to do it. But how do you create productivity in this busy and predictable time?

How do you make room for growth and new beginnings?

It has to be through pattern interrupt!

As earlier indicated, pattern interrupt is a technique used to change a particular behavior, thought, or pattern.

Behavioral psychology and neuro-linguistic programming use this technique to alter thought patterns and behaviors.

It can be used in marketing to capture the attention of your customers and turn them into loyal fans.

But before diving in, stop correlate and listen….

It’s been said before, ‘with great power, comes great responsibility’ and personalization is no exception to this, so before jumping into some actionable content, let’s take a second to understand the theory behind personalization.

Let us review the personalization equation formulated by McKinsey:

• Relevance

Relevance is the critical feature of personalization.

For example, personalizing a coffee mug to a tea drinker impacts on their preferences to buy coffee and convinces them to abandon tea.

• Timelessness

Timelessness plays a big role in terms of where the prospect is in the buying cycle.

Use re-marketing and drip campaigns aligned with your customer buying patterns to increase the personalization of ads.

Open rate results from a mixed selection of industry sectors, from 1 million email sample.

• Privacy/Trust

This is one of the hottest topics when it comes to personalization.

You have to approach privacy carefully to avoid annoying your prospects and customers at the same time.

The privacy paradox reveals that you can know a lot about a prospect before they directly reveal it to you.

When it comes to personalization, focus on caution and avoid the creepy zone in the first meeting.

For example, with a B2B cold prospecting, you can start with a subtle business personalization that is enough to initiate a pattern interrupt without being irrelevant.

Once you have a users trust, or they become a customer, using further personalization is usually far more effective.

For example, many SaaS solutions will auto-detect the user’s profile from their email account and automatically update the account avatar.

WordPress famously does this, and even went one step further with its Gravatar service, enabling other software developers to easily implement personalized profiles.

Now some use-cases you can start to implement today…

We’ve covered the theory of personalization, and you know the reasons why hyper-personalization is critical to your business sales and marketing funnels and why it works.

Let us go through some of the hyper-personalization tips and examples that you can implement today in your business to get a higher ROI.

We’ve grouped the examples by Pirate Metrics…

Awareness
Acquisition
Activation
Revenue
Retention
Re-engagement
Referral

1. Product discovery/ Feedback calls

Using humor and personalization together can be a powerful combination.

In our first example, we’re sending an email to users who haven’t subscribed after their trial has been completed.

We’re of course using the standard personalization you would expect, but as part of the offer for some serious feedback, we’re offering to buy them lunch, in an eye-catching way.

Offering a ‘bribe’ in return for feedback is a tried and tested method, for example, Capterra offers a $20 Amazon gift card if you fill in a review form.

Another tip to increase the chances of getting a reply is to include a humanizing and personalized image when presenting the offer.

Your chances to get a positive reply will be increased to 2X higher.

The learnings you get by jumping on a call sharing a burrito and chewing the fat about your product will allow your customer to reveal a lot about your products.

2. New customer welcome

The best companies make it a duty to create life-long customers and communities.

When somebody becomes a customer, you should take the time to welcome them into the company family by introducing them to your team.

You will be increasing their satisfaction with your business and make them feel safe and welcome in your community.

3. Product shipments

The worst stage of purchasing a product online is waiting for it to arrive.

This is true, especially for the international shipments that can take up to 30 days to be delivered at your doorstep.

You can help customers stay engaged by sending them an email with a picture of their package with their name and address on the shipping label.

Doing this helps keep their excitement about the product very high.

Moreover, these customers will also confirm the shipping address as soon as possible to avoid last-minute mistakes.

Such as the delivery of the product to the wrong destination.

4. Customer support

The only time a customer may engage with your support team is when they have a negative experience.

Engaging these customers in a personal way can turn their negative experience into a positive encounter

Consequently, transforming them into brand evangelists of your company.

Ensure that your support team goes through regular personalization training seminars in a year.

Doing this will ensure that they approach your customers in a personal way that contributes to building a positive reputation for your business.

5. Sales appointments

If you have a sales team or a sale rep, then you know that getting people to show up for a sales appointment is one of the most crucial things to do.

By sending a personalized reminder email that shows their appointment time, you will increase their attendance rate.

As well as draw their attention throughout the sales process.

Remember to be clear in your message to avoid turning off the prospective client when sending the email reminder for the sales appointment.

Bonus: 30 Cold Emails Tips to Increase Response Rates!

6. Webinar reminder

It is so frustrating to spend hours working on creating a perfect webinar only to have low attendance.

Help people see that you care about them attending your webinar session by sending an email shortly before the webinar begins to drive them to attend.

By increasing attendance in the webinar, the chances of increased sales automatically become high.

The next time you are preparing a webinar, ensure that you send personalized emails to your email list members to remind them to attend.

7. Cart abandonment

Every business that sells online products suffers from cart abandonment.

Following up with a personalized email at the perfect time can recapture the lost client and add a large increase to sales.

You can increase your chances of conversion by personalizing the email to a specific product that was in the cart.

By referencing these products, the client will find it irresistible to consider purchasing the item that they abandoned due to their reasons.

They might have lacked enough cash or were not yet ready.

Personalised email sent at the right time could trigger a client to make a decision and click on the check-out button.

8. Text message follow-up

Marketing and follow-up through text-messages have become increasingly popular.

Nowadays, you can add a personalized image to a text message to make it have an enriching experience.

Images in texts is a powerful tool to lead capture at events and from ads. Moreover, your prospect will be engaged from the very beginning.

This increases the possibility of closing a sale.

9. Customer anniversary

Celebrating customers that have stayed with you for the longest time makes them feel appreciated and part of your company’s family.

They will feel engaged and noticed by your company.

An anniversary or birthday campaign is one of the ways to drive and reward the sense of community among your customers.

You can transform your customers into loyal and permanent clients by preparing personalized sweet birthday messages on their birthdays.

10. Referral follow-up

Referrals are a great way to get new customers.

You can increase your chances of converting referrals to a customer by including some personalization when following up with a new referral.

This helps to build trust and confidence in you as a company.

Especially when you reach out to them for the first time.

11. Product-up sell

Increasing your customer value using upsells is an excellent way to increase your overall revenue.

Upselling is a sales technique where the seller induces the client to buy more expensive items in line with their pattern of purchase.

The concept enables the seller to make more profit.

Help your customers know what they should be adding to their shopping basket.

This can be done by including a personalized reminder for those customers who did’nt take an upsell on your first attempt.

These upsell offer reminders provide a perfect area to add personalization in a way that increases revenue.

12. Customer certification

If you offer any online training or certification.

Generating personalized certificates is an excellent way for your clients to feel rewarded for their time and effort.

Personalization of the certificates even gives them bragging rights in your community.

Certifications can be used in a variety of ways, including courses, training, and onboarding, to reach a particular milestone within the company.

13. Online order confirmation

Begin your relationship off on the right foot by personalizing the first page your clients ever see.

That’s the order confirmation page.

Their first impression screen should be the perfect place to show attention to detail by welcoming the clients in a personalized way.

You can make the order confirmation page familiar to them by using their name within the page.

Furthermore, you can include a personalized image based on the product that they intend to purchase.

It is about creativity and personalization.

14. Membership

Creating a personalized member emblem or card is a great way for a customer to develop a deep connection to your company and your community.

If you offer any membership, including membership cards, member-only web portal, etc, personalization of these memberships will be a key factor in creating a loyal customer base.

15. Live events

Who does not like attending a live event that has a great atmosphere, energy, and training?

By engaging your clients in a personalized way before the event, you can create some of that energy and atmosphere before they leave their homes or hotels.

You can do this by sending personalized reminder emails about the impending live event.

This will boost their confidence and increase their chances of turning up at the event.

They will also be more engaged at the event and actively participate.

16. Onboarding

Customer onboarding refers to all the activities involved in introducing a new customer to your company, product, or service.

Other than randomly throwing information at your new customers, customer onboarding involves the process of gradually and effectively showing the customer everything that you have to offer.

By using personalization in onboarding, drip sequences timed to user trial and product usage; you can increase the chances of newly acquired customers turning into permanent clients.

17. Re-engagement

Re-engaging with clients who are no longer active in your list is one of the most effective ways to implement personalization.

These could be people who have not read your newsletter for the last 30 days, or they have recently canceled their subscription haven’t re-ordered in a while.