Digital Marketing: 4 Ways to Personalize Your Marketing
Create a message your customers can relate to for increased revenue and customer retention
Personalization. This term has become one of the biggest buzz terms in marketing in recent years. As marketers continue to have more data available at our fingertips, the opportunities to personalize our messages continue to increase.
With all the latest advancements in message delivery, segmentation and targeting, delivering a personalized message to consumers continues to improve and become increasingly automated.
Given that there are so many options available, knowing where to start can get overwhelming quickly. From my personal experience, I have highlighted four of my favorite ideas for personalizing messaging and increasing conversion rates.
Recommendations
Using a customer’s browsing or purchase history can become a powerful way to target customers and increase buying behavior. Customers have a higher propensity to buy products suggested to them if those products are relevant.
When a customer is browsing your site looking for items to purchase, there are a few great ways to help them find products that may apply to them. Showing the customer a list of what others “ultimately purchased”, “bought with this item” or “similar” products can also provide a significant boost to revenue.
Customers who are shopping, especially in an e-commerce situation, want to make sure they are buying products that other people are buying and interested in. These simple ideas can go a long way to capturing additional sales and incremental revenue.
Demographic Information
Using demographic information to target your messaging can also have very strong impacts on your marketing campaign. One of the best ways to accomplish demographic profiling and targeting is to create customer personas. There are many ways to create personas, one of the most common being a combination of age and gender.
Using this will allow you to create messaging and images for different age groups. Speaking to a younger couple with kids versus grandparents would allow you to create specific messaging for these two unique groups.
Speaking to younger adults in more aspirational, dream big terms as they are just starting on their life journey. Speaking to people nearing retirement in terms of security and relaxation can also be very effective.
Experiment with different customer personas. Do your research and homework around them. One of the most effective ways to develop personas is by asking your customers directly, whether it be through surveys or customer interviews.
Profession
Speaking directly to your customer’s pain points from a professional perspective can lead to significantly higher engagement and conversion rates. If there are specific ways your product or service can improve their business, increase revenues or lower costs, make sure this stands out in your messaging.
When looking at your customer’s profession, don’t just think about it from a B2B perspective. Another great way to think about using a profession for personalization is to think about how they prefer to receive communications. People who are an accountant or attorney typically prefer their communication to be more professional and direct. People in more of a marketing or public relations role typically expect and respond to more creativity in their messaging.
Location
There are so many possibilities for personalizing based on location. One of the first things I like to think of is tying my message in with where my message is being delivered to. If I am sending a message to a warmer market, such as Florida, Arizona or Southern California, using a picture of a snowy climate really wouldn’t make much sense (unless I operate a ski resort!).
If the campaign is specific to certain physical locations, make it hyper local to your target market. If you are holding a location specific event, don’t overlook the power of maps. Putting a simple map showing the location closest to your target audience can be very effective.
Final Thoughts
These are just a few examples of many, many ways you can use personalization in your messaging. However, there are a couple things to keep in mind when personalizing your messaging, regardless of the medium.
First, don’t be creepy. People enjoy being shown relevant content and have messages they can relate to. However, be careful that your personalization messages aren’t blurring the line between catering to your customer and being creepy. Every customer is unique to what they find personalized versus what feels over the top, so definitely keep this in mind when designing your personalization efforts.
Second, like any marketing efforts that you do, TEST, TEST, TEST. There are many ways to test out personalization in your messaging; don’t be afraid to experiment. Sometimes, the most complex ideas don’t work and that simple item that you thought nobody would notice leads to a 20% increase in conversion rates. I have been on both sides of these efforts and one thing I have learned is without testing, I would have made some massive changes to my personalization efforts that would have had disastrous results and missed out on some big wins.
I am Dave Schafer, an always learning entrepreneur, CPA, experienced marketer, writer, father and husband. One of my large passions is all things digital marketing, an ever-changing field that offers so much upside done right. If you get stuck on a question or have questions with digital marketing, email me directly at Dave2742@gmail.com. Thank you for reading my article and ABT (Always Be Testing)!
