How Personalization Is Changing Digital Marketing

Personalized marketing, or one-to-one marketing, individual marketing is a marketing strategy by which companies leverage data analysis and digital technology to deliver individualized messages and product offerings to current or prospective customers. Advancements in data collection methods, analytics, digital electronics, and digital economics, have enabled marketers to deploy more effective real-time and prolonged customer experience personalization tactics.

At one point, all marketing was personal. The door-to-door salesman, bank teller, and haberdasher all knew their customers by name. Direct mail pieces were printed in different versions to appeal to a customer’s geography or preferences. Then, with the dawn of email and websites, marketers began relying on mass-marketing techniques to deliver a singular message across the new digital channels.

Is now the time to finally get personal again and shed your one-size-fits-all marketing strategy? Your customers think so!

What Consumers Want

85% know that websites track their online shopping behavior, but understand that tracking enables companies to present offers and content that match their interests. 75% prefer that retailers use personal information to improve the shopping experience. 64% believe it’s more important that companies present them with relevant offers. 36% don’t want their website activity tracked.

Companies Are Making Online Personalization a Top Priority

94% companies that agree online personalization is critical to business performance. 66% two out of every three companies believe that personalizing their websites will improve the customer experience and the success of their overall business.

Roadmap to Personalization

The Building Blocks of Personalization

Luckily, your products don’t have to stay in abandoned shopping carts for long. Better personalization is the leading way for retailers to improve conversions – through a combination of guided selling, recommendation, and targeted email campaigns.

1. Identify All Data Sources

Data drives personalization. Whether in a laptop shopping session or a quick Google search via smartphone, your brand should constantly be collecting both explicit data (by asking questions) and implicit data (by observing behavior).

2.  Aggregate Data

What good is all that data without a good way to use it? Create a cross-channel consumer profile of each person’s interactions so you can analyze them and process them in a way that drives action. This profile should drive product-specific recommendations and personalized communication strategies.

3. Plan

A ‘’one size fits all’’ strategy won’t work with every customer, and neither will the same plan to reach them. As your system leverages more data about each person, plan for the delivery of communications to become more tailored, using both the information that customers knowingly provide, and the data gathered via observation.

4. Personalize

As your customers experience the personal targeted messages and promotions derived from your efforts to cater to them, they’ll develop a greater brand affinity over time. The more you demonstrate your understanding of their personalized preferences, the more they’ll give back in the form of brand patronage.

Effective Personalization Strategy

The Power of Personalization

Personalization in marketing engenders consumer goodwill: 61% feel more positive about a brand when marketing messages are personalized. In the relationship of marketing, brands must address their customers as individuals in order to meet increased expectations for personalization and relevance throughout the customer lifecycle.

53% are more likely to purchase when a brand personalizes digital communications. Personalized digital communications have an even more positive impact on those between the ages of 18-34, with 65% more likely to purchase. Consumers value personalization across channels. 67% say it’s important for email to be personalized, followed by social media (44%), SMS (40%) and web display ads (36%). Younger consumers (18-34) are more likely to place importance on personalization across channels. Nearly half of consumers are less responsive to mass marketing messages. Brands that allow consumers to share their preferences around when and how to be contacted are more trusted than those that do not.

Of this group, 66% are more inclined to purchase from brands that enable them to share these preferences.

Real Time Website Personalization

Real-time website personalization customizes the user experience by offering content that is specific to the user based on behaviors, preferences, interests and other data. By targeting content to users in real-time, websites can deliver more relevant and engaging experiences.

How to Do It

Step 1

Define personals and create a segmentation.

Step 2

Determine rules for targeting your visitors.

Step 3

Implement small touches to get started:

Geotargeting: Tailor messaging based on a user’s physical location.

Internationalization: Change language, currency, and other details based on region of visitor.

Keywords: Use search terms or phrases to customize content.

Page views/Clickpath: Predict pages/content a user will be interested in based on their previous pages visited.

Step 4

Conduct A/B or multivariate testing to make sure you’re maximizing your results.

Step 5

Analyze your data to determine what’s working and what needs improvement.

Real-Time Metrics Deliver Real Marketing Changes

With smartphone technology’s ever-growing popularity, a whole new world of personalization opportunities is at hand. 70% of the world’s population will be using smartphones by 2020. 59% of surveyed North American retailers said mobile and marketing are their top two digital priorities for 2017.

Poised For Mobile Marketing Potential

Consumers Worldwide Demands Personalization From Brands: U.S. vs. U.K.

U.S. Study Shows E-commerce Giant – Amazon Undisputed King of Product Searches and Personalization

The Millennial Perspective on Personalized Marketing

Millennials are a lot like everyone else. Email, direct mail, and in-store are their preferred channels for receiving offers and communications. However: Millennials prefer mobile 2x as much as the general population, and are nearly 3x more likely to prefer social. Their purchasing habits constantly change – 61% say their purchasing habits change based on where they are and they are doing (versus 50% of ages 45+). More than 50% said they would find location based push offers valuable or extremely valuable, as long as they were timely, targeted, and within reason (versus 32% of 45+).

Personalization is essential for successful marketing, and personalization is impossible without data. The more you know about your customers, the better you can tailor your messages and strategies. A personalized customer experience can help your brand stay ahead of the competition and keep consumers loyal. 

Sources: Forbes, eMarketer, Wikipedia, Business Insider, IBM.