7 Must-Known Data-Driven Strategies to Increase Conversions

Learn how the pros generate data about their prospects, and get their attention with personalized content.

If you’ve ever purchased something from Amazon, or if you’re an IKEA customer, you’ve probably noticed the great effects of a personalized experience. Amazon shows you that they know who you are and what you like. They never waste your time with their never-ending list of products, most of which don’t apply to your interests. They also send you customized emails based on your purchases.

So, why did you click on the links within Amazon’s email, and why do you continue to value IKEA’s kitchen product recommendations? Because they’re personalized based on your browsing/purchase history, and they are suited to your specific interests, needs, lifestyle or behavior.

Most marketers will tell you that a good open rate for an email campaign is 20 percent. Let’s think about that for a minute. A 20 percent open rate means that 80 percent of people are completely ignoring your communication. Isn’t this result affecting your ROI? As a strategist, I understand that this is a really difficult problem that many marketers face.

The Importance of Content Personalization

People have different needs, challenges, lifestyle, behavior, or expectations. So, the communication with each of them needs to be different. If you send an email campaign that targets everyone, chances are that people will ignore it. Email response is strongly determined by relevance. That’s why content personalization is crucial in your communication. It allows marketers to increase customer retention through more relevant and tailored experiences with the brand.

But how do we use personalization in our marketing campaigns to ensure we generate the results we need?

Well, before we can even use personalization in our email, landing pages, or in other marketing campaigns, we need to ensure we have the right data about our potential customers.

Here are a few data-driven strategies used by successful marketers to help them personalize the content to their customers.

1. Start Segmenation Early

From the first touch with their website, IKEA is segmenting. The image below is a screenshot of their homepage. It is an effort to get the right content in front of the right people, based on their location.

2. Allow Customers to Create a Profile

Once you select your location (and it’s not optional), you can create a profile. IKEA already knows where you are and what language you speak. So, having a profile ensures you that “you get more from our website”. Allowing customers to create a profile early on, when they first visit your website, will help you get specific data on their behavior as well as personalize your messages to them based on their browsing history.

3. Use lead intelligence

Lead intelligence, or collecting data about user behavior on your website, can be extremely important as you define segments of customers and personas.

One way to gather more data is to install a cookie on the reader’s computer.

For instance, when creating a profile on IKEA’s website, you have the option to check: “Remember me”. By checking this, IKEA ensures you that you’ll get personalized messages and your interaction with their website will be easier, and hassle-free.

An understanding of consumer behavior and their needs, frames your brand’s competitive advantage.

Other examples of companies that use lead intelligence to personalize the message to their users are: Bodybuilding.com, Amazon, or Netflix. They take all your previous purchase information and make product recommendations based on what you like and the product you are currently looking at.

4. Use the Right Tools

Another way to collect data from your potential customers is to use tools that help to gather more information on their specific behavior, and then enter them into targeted marketing automation campaigns.

While you may write about different industry topics within your content, that doesn’t mean that all customers are interested in all of them. If one person reads an article focused on a specific idea, using marketing automation tools (such as HubSpot) will allow you to learn about your customer’s behavior and automatically enter them into a lead nurturing campaign. This way, you personalize the emails sent to them based on their interests and the original content they’ve read.

5. Ask Questions

Once people created a profile on your website, ask them questions to learn more about them. Knowing their habits, favorite brands and sports, or their marriage status will help you tailor the emails you send to them based on their interests.

SportCheck does this really well. When subscribing to their newsletter, they send you to a new page where you personalize your communication preferences.

• What are your favorite sports and activities? — If they checked hiking, then send information on hiking and products that fit with this activity.

• What are your favorite brands? — Send information on the brands selected.

• Do you have children? — If yes, send information on children’s collections or activities.

It’s easy to see how much the emails could vary based on the data you get.

For example, if a new subscriber has children, it’s very important to tailor their emails around activities done together with their children. Kids will likely go skiing, cycling, or hiking together with adults, meaning SportCheck has several opportunities to sell products. And if they don’t have children, it would be an incredible waste of time to send emails with children’s products. One irrelevant email could ruin the relationship between SportCheck and the new subscriber.

6. Create Personas

Many companies adopt a convenient classification, being convinced that they have to build products that will solve problems for as many customers as possible, so that their products sell well to a larger target market and stay competitive. That’s one of the easiest route to failure.

By focusing on customers’ desired outcomes and on defining their personas, marketers can identify under-served segments, or segments of high potential growth, and ensure that their communications are tailored specifically to meet their customer’s needs.

Personas place the focus on specific user-groups rather than on “everyone”.

Understanding the difference between what “great” content and “meh” content means to your customers is key to winning their hearts. So, profiling the customers into different personas and analyzing the data will help to sketch what “great” means to your audience and establish personalized communication with them.

Creating personas is a very methodical process with a focus on understanding the particular use-cases and needs, all the goals and behavior of a hypothesized group of people. You describe personas, in a great amount of detail, and then design your system to engage with them. The data required to create a persona-based segments is important to understanding customers’ desired outcomes.

This includes gathering information about each persona such as:

• Interests and product use-case

• What “relevant information” means to them

• What they searched for online

• What are their pain points

• Obstacles that prevent them from moving forward

The HubSpot team put together a great little tool, MakeMyPersona.com, to make the process of defining a hypothesized persona a little more painless.

7. Test, Learn, Test Again

Since you can’t build everything for every persona (and you wouldn’t want to), setting up a primary persona is critical in focusing the team’s efforts effectively. In order to find which is the primary one, you’ll want to run some quick experiments between two or more personas to see which one performs the best.

The quickest way to do this is to create landing pages. A structured A/B testing process helps you to generate bigger wins with less effort. I personally love Unbounce as a quick landing page creator. They have tons of resources on their website on how to A/B test using landing pages, but this one particularly can help you get things started: How to Formulate A Smart A/B Test Hypothesis (and Why They’re Crucial)

Every experiment you run, typically ends up invalidating some ideas based on what you learned and will generate other ideas for testing. This comes from asking questions such as:

• “What experiment worked and why?”

• “What did we learn about our target segment?”

• “Where else can we apply the lessons learned from here?”

• “How might we make our next experiments even better?”