Today's marketers are always on the lookout for new, innovative ways to personalize customer experiences. This emerging trend is driven by personalization's amazing benefits, such as increased conversion, lifetime customers and much better content.
When used properly, personalization is a powerful tool. For years, marketers have used customer experience management platforms like SiteCore to improve marketing and lead conversion efforts. Studies show that personalized emails have 29 percent higher open rates and 41 percent higher click-through rates than ordinary emails. There are various ways to leverage personalization in marketing strategies including
- Retargeting - using dynamic ads of products customers are interested in.
- Personalized social media quizzes
- Show personalized offers to returning visitors
- Use geo-location targeting
- Send personalized email based on user behavior
- Recommend product categories based on browsing behavior
- Personalized social media chatbots
- Custom video messages
Why brands and marketing executives should focus on personalization
Personalization has become a key part of today's data-driven marketing strategies, enabling marketers to intelligently use data to create unique and relevant experiences. However, Econsultancy's 2018 Digital Trends report indicates that not many organizations take personalization seriously. Only 7 percent of businesses made personalization their top priority in 2017. This is a sad reality, especially in the current age of consumerism.
As such, it's imperative for brands to "up" their personalization game to deliver more relevant and intuitive shopping experiences to today's consumers. To help you get started, let's look at some reasons why personalization should be at the heart of every marketing strategy.
Increased likelihood of conversion
Through personalization, prospects get the feeling that brands and marketers really understand them as unique individuals. This helps get brand-consumer relationships started on the right foot. Once the right degree of personalization is deployed at the right time and used throughout the relationship, consumers will develop a sense of trust and loyalty. Ultimately, such consumers are much more likely to convert and become lifelong customers.
More Engagement
No matter the awesomeness of your landing page/offer or the features deployed on your website, this content is only effective when prospects engage. Personalized content is more relevant and helps boost engagement levels. Although you may need to build several variations of your landing page as part of your personalization strategy, the control and precision from this process will let you micro-target your audience while substantially raising engagement levels.
More effective content marketing
Even if you create and post great content, it's useless if no one is watching, reading or sharing it. Great content requires time, effort and resources, which is why you must ensure that it's relevant to your target audience. Content should resonate with users and get them to further explore your sales funnel. Done right, personalizing your content will go a long way in compelling users to take the next step in their buying journey.
Best practices for incorporating personalization into marketing initiatives
Personalization has the potential to increase sales by 10% or more and deliver five to eight times ROI on marketing spend. Also, incorporating personalization into marketing messages can boost their effectiveness many times over. However, these results can only be achieved if personalization is done right. Here are some best practices for incorporating personalization into marketing initiatives.
Avoid going overboard
Effective personalization starts with data discovery. This involves gathering consumer data to provide meaningful insights about individual customers. Through customer data platforms, marketers can evaluate the probability of a customer's engagement when presented with certain content or website features.
With personalization software, you can track all sorts of data about your site visitors. However, such data should be used properly. Providing suggestions based on past behavior is usually a great idea, but can turn off customers when it's overdone. Marketers should use only the data needed to target audiences more efficiently.
A/B testing
Marketers should A/B test personalized content to see whether it's more effective than their regular content. Although personalized landing pages are generally more effective than regular ones, the improvements can be better measured through testing.
Review your personalization strategy
Just like other marketing strategies, personalization requires regular reviews and tweaking. Due to the constantly changing nature of consumer demands and preferences, personalization strategies must also evolve to keep pace. Marketers shouldn't be afraid to make changes to their personalization strategies. Experimenting with and testing out innovative ideas is the best way to find out what works and keep ahead of the competition.
Find the best tech solutions to compete for savvy consumers
Audiences are becoming immune to basic personalization hacks, such as sending birthday messages and including first names on emails. According to a Pure360 survey, only 7 percent of survey respondents said they would engage with a brand that sends them a birthday email while 8 percent said they would engage with brands that interacted with them using their first names.
An Infosys study shows that 31 percent of consumers crave better personalized experiences when shopping while Segment's 2017 State of Personalisation Report suggests that only 22 percent of shoppers are satisfied with their personalization experiences. To get the best results, brands must create and implement effective personalization strategies. The best way to do this is by leveraging best-in-class tech solutions.
This is where SiteCore comes in.
SiteCore is the world's leading CEM (customer experience management) platform with features and capabilities that facilitate rich analytics, personalization and marketing automation. You can use SiteCore to capture consumer data at every touchpoint while machine learning helps you create personalized experiences for individuals across all channels and customer interactions.
We're always happy to talk about the latest trends in tech and personalization. Contact us now for a free consultation and see how data and machine learning can better engage customers!
