Marketing personalization is a powerful tool for elevating your business. Increased sales conversions, attracting and retaining consumers, and enhanced brand loyalty are just a few benefits of web personalization. Customized user experiences not only translate to increased sales and revenue for your business, but they also help your brand stand out in a sea of online options and distractors. One survey found that nearly 80% of customers choose brands that provide a personalized experience. In contrast, almost 70% of consumers will avoid companies after poor user experiences.
What is Marketing Personalization?
Marketing personalization is a strategy that involves tailoring marketing efforts to individual customers or specific segments of your audience. It goes beyond mass marketing to create more meaningful, relevant, and engaging experiences for customers. Some examples include:
- Personalized Email Campaigns
- Dynamic Website Content
- Personalized Product Recommendations
- Behavioral Triggers
- Social Media Personalization
Applying marketing personalization strategies, and applying them effectively, is a necessity in today's online marketplace. Poorly executed personalization can not only cause your company to miss out on bottom-line benefits, but it can also have other unintended adverse effects on your brand. The key to successful personalization is finding a balance between being tailored to your customers without being redundant, predictable, or overkill.
6 Marketing Personalization Pitfalls to Avoid While Optimizing Your Web Strategies.
1. Superficial understanding of your customers
The best forms of personalization take the time to truly understand their target audience and motivations. Falling back on surface-level demographic data (e.g., age, gender, geographic location, etc.) risks generalizations, misunderstanding, or simply ineffective tailoring of marketing approaches. Without forming a deeper understanding of consumer preferences and tendencies, marketing personalization efforts could fall short or be altogether ineffective. Dedicating time and resources to understanding and remaining in touch with your consumer perspectives will result in real, bottom-line returns on your personalization approaches.
2. Overdoing the amount of customization
As mentioned above, balance is key regarding personalization. Too much customization can cause customers to feel overwhelmed with too many choices, creating a level of cognitive overload, excess learning demands, or decision fatigue. Implementing personalization strategies should allow for individualized user experiences while still providing a straightforward, streamlined experience. Balancing when to offer options versus an automatic pathway is an important component of successful web personalization.
3. Not updating your personalization strategies
As with everything in the marketplace, consumer preferences and attitudes are dynamic and changing, especially in our increasingly fast-paced online world. It is important to periodically review and update your marketing personalization strategies to reflect the evolving consumer preferences. This does not require major overhauling changes. Instead, regular minor course corrections as needed will help your brand stay relevant to your consumers. Thinking of personalization as an iterative process will keep your strategies fresh, help your brand stay connected to your audience, and allow your company to continually reap the benefits of web personalization.
4. Not securing or misapplying consumer data
One of the fastest ways to lose customer trust is by mishandling their sensitive information. Beyond security breaches, this can also include faulty platforms or algorithms that result in email marketing errors or overly specific product recommendations. These errors can cause strong emotional responses from consumers. They may feel disconnected and nonunique to the company or somewhat violated by overly invasive recommendations. While gathering customer data is an informative personalization tool, you want to ensure you are using it appropriately and securely when tailoring brand messaging or strategies.
5. Having outdated or fragmented UX technologies
Using up-to-date digital technologies can have a tremendously positive impact on user experience. Conversely, having outdated or disjointed platforms can create a fragmented web experience for your consumers and diminish the continuity of personalized branding. It can inadvertently create information silos across the company’s teams. Consider using digital platforms that help to create a cohesive UX and streamline data sharing across stakeholders as needed. Enhancing your digital technologies can go a long way in improving personalization experiences and outcomes.
6. Using redundant creative messaging
It might sound counterintuitive, but being overly personalized runs the risk of becoming boring to your audience base rather than keeping their attention. When tailored messaging becomes too niche, the consumer experience can become redundant. Homogenous experiences and content risk your company blending into the noise of the multitude of internet attention-grabbers instead of striking a unique cord with your users. One source even found that nearly half of consumers reported losing interest in a brand after repeatedly seeing the same ads or creative marketing. Diversifying your personalized marketing approaches helps your brand attract and maintain the attention of current and potential clients.
Avoid Marketing Personalization Pitfalls with Engine Room’s Transformation Guide
Now that you know what to avoid with personalization, learning more about how to optimize marketing personalization is key. Through our personalization services, Engine Room partners with clients to create a plan, develop strategies, and implement best practices to tailor your digital marketing to speak to your audience and enhance your brand. Our team also offers a free digital transformation guide to walk you through the essential steps for tailoring your brand messaging and UX design to your unique customer preferences and needs.
Download Engine Room’s free guide to enhance your company’s performance, customer experiences, and bottom-line outcomes through personalization.
