Personalization is not a fad. More and more companies are making the switch to personalized marketing as opposed to the generic, spray and pray type marketing that is all too common. Results coming from companies that have taken it on are very positive. The UKs largest high street toy retailer The Entertainer have reported 3x email revenue YOY increases after implementing personalization.
Personalization versus hyper-personalization
Personalization amends communication based on a customer’s name, location or even purchase history. Hyper-personalization on the other hand also considers browsing behavior and real-time data to be able to change messages in the moment.
So, if you wanted to implement personalized marketing campaigns, how would you go about it?
Data collection
The first step to personalizing your marketing messages and campaigns is to collect the right type of data. Your attempt at personalization is only as good as the quality of data coming in. Name and title are good but what if you wanted to send out an email promoting the newest designer shoes in stock that cost $350. You need to know who in your database of customers typically buys $300-$400 shoes from that particular designer to send a truly personalized message.
This added segmentation will ensure that only those people interested in that particular designer who spend that amount of money will see the email and as a result will be more likely to buy the new shoes. But to widen the sphere of customers, you can also send the message to people who have searched for that designer but not necessarily bought. Also you can send this particular email to those people who have bought a complementary product in the past and who may be interested in this product.
Collect as much data as you will need, but not so much that might annoy your customers. The key is to collect information in a non-invasive way. Use a simple signup process initially and at a later stage collect relevant data using a preference centre or an update email. Use social media to run competitions and push surveys to gather more information about your customers. The more data gathered, the more personalized the message.
Keep it simple
Start off with some simple personalization; try segmenting your messages with something easy like gender or age range. Try changing the imagery in your message to reflect the gender or age of a customer. Test to see what happens when you put some pictures of only men’s products in a segment of only men or sending age relevant products to the right age group instead of sending the same message to everyone.
Once that’s done, you can start doing a bit more personalization; try creating segments of people who consistently buy a certain product or always buy around the same time of the year or month. Find out the frequency of purchase of certain groups of customers and target them with a message just before they are due to buy again. So if you know that a group of your loyal customers always buy in July and again in December, start sending them personalized messages with the types of products they buy in June and November to start them thinking of buying again.
Time for a deeper delve
Measure the results of your initial personalized campaigns and based on the results, start to analyse the data gathered. Send even more personalized messages based on this additional data gathered. Also start looking into social media data gathered and include this into your newly personalized messages. See what customers are saying in surveys and what results you can include from competitions. Measure the engagement rates of the initial campaigns sent out, monitor which message resonated the most and see how you can further segment these groups to use in future campaigns. The next stage of personalization is to begin to segment based on purchase data. See who is buying what products and when, and push those messages out to your customers.
Choose an automated marketing team
Personalization done manually is an extremely hard thing for marketers to take on. There is mountains of data to comb through and hundreds of messages to be designed and built catering to the hundreds of newly created segments based on individual tastes and behavior. Using an automated marketing platform makes this task much, much easier. Also most good marketing platforms these days come with advanced reporting capabilities, making the job of analysing the data gathered and measuring the engagement levels of customers much simpler.
The icing on the cake that any good marketing software platform should provide is real time marketing. This turns personalization into hyper-personalization and makes your marketing truly relevant and contextual. For a marketing message to really resonate it should be able to change in real-time depending on where a customer opens it, or change content depending on the weather for instance.
Don’t forget context
Personalization, true personalization, isn’t complete without context. Start to look at segmentation based around location, the weather, what people are searching for or time sensitive offers and make marketing messages even more relevant. Or use an advanced marketing tool to send contextualized emails that change content depending on when or where they are opened, dynamically changing SKUs when they become out-of-stock, giving real-time pricing, showing products that reflect what a person was browsing for on a website - the list goes on and on.
Hyper-personalization is the next phase of digital marketing; emails that change content based on where a customer is and when the email is opened. Context-based messages and segments of one all tie into building more relevant communications with your customer and pushes only those messages they want to receive, resulting in increased revenue. Batch and blast is dead, the era of true personalization is here.