Customers crave personalized experiences, whether in the form of abandoned cart emails based on past purchases or personalized automation rules tailored for their specific workflows. The more personalized the experience, the more value customers receive.
The days of broadly targeted old-school marketing tactics are done and dusted—marketing is no longer a numbers game. You don’t need to cast wide nets of billboards, telemarketing calls, or mass mailers to grab the attention of the masses. Personalized marketing is all about cultivating brand messages that speak directly to specific customers’ interests and demographics and induce buying behavior.
Now, marketers skillfully use data to craft highly relevant and timely messages for each prospect, aiming to catch their interest exactly when they’re most likely to engage.
It’s all about personalized marketing now.
This is exactly what we’ll discuss today. We’ll cover what personalized marketing is, examples of personalized marketing, and how you can leverage it to increase your conversions and ROAS.
What is personalized marketing?
Personalized marketing, also known as marketing personalization or one-to-one marketing, is a strategy that utilizes segmentation data points to target and retarget leads with ads and landing pages. The goal is to create a more focused and relevant experience for each customer, increasing the chances of them getting involved and making a purchase.
Research from McKinsey reveals that companies that excel at personalization bring in 40% more revenue from these efforts than those with average performance. Additionally, 76% of consumers expect personalized experiences and feel disappointed when they don’t receive them.
On the flip side:
- 41% of consumers stop supporting brands that fail to provide personalized experiences
- U.S. businesses risk losing as much as $756 billion in revenue yearly due to a lack of trust and poor personalization
A crucial part of personalized marketing involves collecting and analyzing customer data, including demographics, past purchases, online habits, and real-time actions. This data helps businesses understand each customer’s specific needs and likes, allowing them to create personalized messages, suggest products, and offer promotions that resonate with individual customers.
Personalized marketing happens through various channels, like email, social media, websites, and mobile apps. Imagine an online store using a customer’s browsing and purchase history to recommend products they might like. Email campaigns can also be tailored to include content and promotions that match a particular person’s tastes.
But here’s the thing – even though personalized marketing can turn customers into enthusiastic supporters, it also raises privacy concerns. Striking the right balance between enhancing content and respecting customer privacy is crucial for engagement and conversions. This means adhering to data protection rules and being transparent about using consumer data is essential for successful personalized marketing, especially now when consumers value privacy and customized experiences.
Marketing personalization strategies
Identifying what your customers want at any given moment is challenging. While data informs what shape your marketing personalization strategy should eventually take, there are three common strategies that every brand can build off of to ensure they always create a strong personalized marketing plan:
1. Identify and understand customer needs
Every customer expects you to know their needs. When they punch a long-tail query into your search bar, they expect content that answers it. If they’re shopping in a brick-and-mortar location of yours, they probably want details on a product. At every touchpoint throughout the funnel, ask yourself, “What does the customer want here? What are they looking for?” Or, even better, ask them. Surveys and user testing are an easy way to discover these answers.
2. Remember who they are and their actions on any channel or device
Brand communication that exists in disconnected siloes is what frustrates customers.
For instance, if they’ve coordinated a date and time for a demo of your product via phone, and they get an email aiming for a demo sign-up the next day, that constitutes a bad user experience.Not only is it annoying, but it can potentially confuse prospects. They may think: “Did something go wrong? Was my demo canceled? Are they trying to reschedule?”
Your advertising personalization strategy should span every device and channel, and your CRM should reflect anything you’ve learned about your prospect along the way. Avoid scenarios like those above, and instead, aim to know exactly what your prospects have done, the kind of messaging they’ve responded to, the type of content they like, their communication preferences, and more.
3. Anticipate their future needs
Access to customer data and browsing behavior allows you to predict what’s coming next. Think of when you book a flight somewhere. Airlines don’t stop after selling you a ticket. They ask if you want travel insurance, if you want to book a hotel room, if you’ll need to rent a car, etc. They know you’re traveling, and they also know the experience is more than just flying. The same goes for your product or service. What add-ons might they need? What upgraded versions might they consider? This extends before and after the buying stage, too.
If you know your target audience reads a lot of your content on social media marketing, send them more content about social media marketing. Send them blog posts, podcasts, ebooks, and tip sheets. If they’ve already bought your product, make them aware of newer versions, bug fixes, and use cases that help them maximize your product’s full potential.
Think of a successful personalization in the funnel similar to playing chess; you have to think several moves ahead and predict behavior.
How to create a successful personalized marketing strategy
To create a successful personalized marketing strategy, you must carefully combine data analysis, technology use, and customer-focused methods into a cohesive plan. Here’s everything you need to develop a successful personalized marketing strategy:
Collect relevant customer data
Tap into various sources, including demographics, purchase history, and online behavior, to learn more about your customers. Use data analytics tools to extract meaningful insights from the collected information.
Do psychographic segmentation of your customer base
Group your customers based on their personality, lifestyle, hobbies and interests, social class, and values. Identify distinct customer personas to tailor personalized content and offers for each segment.
Use marketing automation tools to streamline and scale personalized interactions
Automate personalized emails, recommendations, and content delivery based on customer actions.
Utilize AI and machine learning
Use smart algorithms that predict what your customers might like. Continuously refine personalized recommendations and content based on real-time data.
Create personalized content
Develop content that resonates with each customer segment. Tailor product recommendations, promotional offers, and messaging to match individual preferences.
Optimize multi-channel experiences
Ensure consistency in personalized experiences across various channels, including email, social media, websites, and mobile apps. Optimize the user journey for a seamless transition between channels.
Respect your customers’ privacy and build trust
Communicate how you use customer data and prioritize privacy concerns. Obtain explicit data collection and use consent, adhering to relevant privacy regulations.
Implement A/B testing to assess the effectiveness of different personalized approaches
Continuously iterate and refine the personalized marketing strategy based on performance metrics and customer feedback.
Monitor and measure the performance of your campaigns
Use analytics tools to track and measure key performance indicators (KPIs) such as engagement, conversion rates, and customer satisfaction.
Stay agile and adaptive
Keep abreast of evolving customer preferences and market trends. Stay agile and adjust your personalized marketing strategy accordingly to remain relevant and effective.
With these steps, you’re not just marketing – you’re having a personalized conversation with your customers.
The benefits of personalized marketing
Personalization is a valuable asset for marketers, fostering stronger connections with customers, optimizing marketing efforts, and ultimately driving business growth.
It allows marketers to enjoy a handful of benefits.
1. Enhanced customer engagement
Personalization enables marketers to create content, offers, and messages that resonate with individual customers. This tailored approach enhances customer engagement by providing relevant and meaningful interactions, capturing their attention, and encouraging active participation.
2. Increased conversion rates
Marketers can significantly boost conversion rates by delivering personalized content and offers aligned with a customer’s preferences and behaviors. Customers are more likely to purchase when they feel connected to the products or services presented.
3. Improved customer satisfaction and retention
Personalization demonstrates that a brand understands and values its customers. Positive perception of the brand increases when customers receive personalized recommendations and experiences. Satisfied customers are more likely to become loyal advocates. Also, by consistently providing personalized experiences, marketers can build long-term relationships, making customers more likely to return for future purchases rather than exploring alternatives.
4. Optimized marketing spend
Personalization allows marketers to target specific audience segments more effectively. This targeted approach ensures the efficient allocation of marketing resources, reaching the most receptive audience and minimizing wasteful spending on broad, non-specific campaigns.
5. Data-driven insights
Collecting and analyzing customer data for personalization purposes provides valuable insights into customer behavior, preferences, and trends. Marketers can use this data to refine their strategies, make informed decisions, and stay ahead of market changes.
6. Cross-selling and up-selling opportunities
Personalization enables marketers to recommend complementary products or upgrades based on a customer’s purchase history and preferences. This opens up opportunities for cross-selling and up-selling, increasing the average transaction value.
7. Effective email marketing
Personalized emails addressing a recipient by name or suggesting products based on past purchases can significantly improve open and click-through rates. Tailored content makes emails more relevant, increasing the likelihood of conversion.
8. Adaptation to customer lifecycle
Personalization allows marketers to tailor their strategies to different customer lifecycle stages. From attracting new customers to nurturing existing ones, personalized approaches can be adapted to meet customers’ specific needs and expectations at each stage.
9. Competitive advantage
Brands that effectively implement personalization gain a competitive edge. In a crowded market, offering personalized experiences sets a brand apart, attracting and retaining customers who appreciate the extra effort to meet their needs.
Personalized marketing examples
“Personalization” is a term we hear all the time – in blog posts, in reports – perhaps even to the point of overuse. It’s turned into a buzzword that’s lost some of its clarity. To some, it’s as simple as adding a name to the subject line of an email. To others, it evokes the image of sophisticated algorithms that can predict life events like pregnancy based on shopping patterns. Effective personalization falls somewhere in the middle. Here are some standout examples to spark your creativity:
Video
At first glance, you might think video isn’t the kind of format you can easily personalize, but with a bit of ingenuity, it’s entirely achievable. Consider, for instance, the customized onboarding video created for a new customer as he’s introduced to a new Ahlsell store:
The video uses a conversational approach to engage the viewer, directly addressing a customer by name and giving him a virtual tour of the Ahlsell store’s layout. It provides a sneak peek at the products and the careful setups for a top-notch shopping experience.
This personalized onboarding video achieved a click-through rate (CTR) of 53%. On top of that, of those who followed the link, 78% stayed to watch the entire video.
Digital advertising
Personalization is critical in crafting relevant and value-focused digital ads.
To align each campaign’s ads with their corresponding landing pages, ensure consistency in headlines, visuals, logos, and brand colors. When these elements are unified, they strengthen your brand’s identity and confirm to visitors that they’ve landed where they were meant to, all the while delivering on the ad’s initial promise.
Here’s a great example of a message match from Monday.com:
Businesses can harness the power of email to perform marketing wonders. This medium offers non-intrusive, easily digestible, and highly customizable messages. Email subscribers can get promotions uniquely tailored to their demographics, interests, behaviors, and company attributes through dynamic content. Take a look at the personalized recommendations email Brooklinen sends subscribers based on their browsing habits:
Social media
While it was once a one-way photo and text-blasting to followers, social media has become highly personalized. You’re likely familiar with the emoji slider feature in Instagram stories, which allows account holders to poll their followers.
Most recently, Instagram added polls in the comments section under posts to increase engagement.
The addition of polls in the comment section could dramatically alter how creators and followers engage. Now, creators can directly gauge the consensus through real-time results from questions they ask.
Before this polling option was available, sifting through a high volume of comments to discern the most favored response was quite a challenge, as creators had to count each reply manually.
Facebook’s targeted ads are another great example of personalized marketing. Social media caters to users by showing them ads corresponding to their preferences and interests. For instance, a frequent reader of The Wall Street Journal will surely find this New Year Special Offer useful:
Personalized marketing challenges and the tools to overcome them
The biggest challenge of personalization is scaling it effectively. You can’t manually create an email for every customer. You can’t manually create an ad for every prospect. But you must maintain that appearance, which requires the right tools.
For starters, here’s what you’ll need:
1. Analytics platform: Analytics platforms aid in collecting data, which every marketer relies on to create personalized campaigns. As opposed to the self-reported data like name and email address — the “who you are” data — the data collected by most analytics platforms is behavioral. The “what you do” data can be even more valuable than the former. Platforms like Google Analytics, Heap Analytics, and Crazy Egg are popular in this category.
2. Data management platform: Data management platforms (DMP) hold audience and campaign data from sources involved in programmatic ad buying. For marketers, it’s a one-stop location where they can manage user data to create targeted user segments for digital advertising campaigns. The data you collect That user data could be, for example, age, household income, browsing habits, purchasing behavior, demographics, location, device, and more. Then, the DMP can analyze those segments’ performance and assist in optimizing future campaigns.
3. Customer relationship management software (CRM): Your CRM is the hub of customer information. Anything you learn about a prospect—from lead capture forms, sales calls, or third-party data providers—should be logged here. When connected with the rest of your marketing stack, it will allow your other tools (like a landing page platform) to feed it with prospect information, and, in turn, it can provide that information to an email marketing platform, which will help personalize your emails even further.
4. Landing page platform: Everything else falls apart without the correctly optimized final destination. This is your best way to capture prospect data today, so without it, you can kiss personalization goodbye. It’s also the best tool you have to move customers to the next stage of the funnel. Unlike regular web pages, landing pages are designed to drive prospect action — to get them to sign up, download, buy, etc. They accomplish this with a 1:1 conversion ratio, message match, a lead capture form, and several other use cases for personalization. And because every landing page needs to match the ad it comes from to maximize personalization, scaling landing page creation with manual coding dries up far too many resources. Landing page platforms like Instapage help you create and manage these pages in a fraction of the time and cost it would otherwise take.
5. Email marketing platform: Today, email marketing platforms are a staple of every marketing technology stack, as the channel is the number one most profitable for businesses. That’s not surprising, considering email addresses are a piece of information easily offered up by prospects. Through this channel is how most people prefer to be contacted. And according to research, getting emails opened comes down to personalizing it.
Consumers say they’re more likely to respond well to an email if it looks like it’s made for them. Dynamic content can accomplish this, as can segmenting or sending emails based on behavioral triggers, say, after an ebook is downloaded or your pricing page is viewed. And it doesn’t even have to be that complicated. You can send a gimmick-free birthday email to prospects on your mailing list using simple data like name and birthday. It sounds simple and maybe even useless without a CTA, but more and more customers appreciate brands who treat them like the people they are over the money they have.
6. Tag management platform: Marketing tags help you collect information from your prospects when they land on your website (among many other things). These little pieces of JavaScript, like the Meta Pixel, are added to the code of your web pages. When a visitor completes a specified action, that tag fires. The problem with these tags is that they’re tedious to manage, easily forgotten about when they’re no longer needed, and they can also greatly slow down a web page (which significantly impacts bounce rate and conversion rate). Using tag management software like Google Tag Manager allows you to add, delete, and update all your tags from one place. It also means your page load times won’t get bogged down by tag after tag, as the code for GTM only needs to be added to the back-end of web pages once.
7. Demand-side platform: Demand-side platforms work with supply-side platforms and exchanges to deliver your ads to prospects who are most likely to click them. The process is called programmatic advertising and is done primarily in real-time. You specify who you want to reach with your ads and how much you’re willing to spend. Then, a bidding war occurs between you and all the other advertisers trying to reach the same audience. A prospect lands on a page, and before that page loads fully, algorithms determine which ad to display to them. These algorithms take things like browsing history, time of day, and IP address into account. Whoever has bid the highest for the impression when all’s collected wins the placement. Their ad is published when the visitor’s page loads fully.
Start implementing your personalized marketing strategy
Personalized marketing is a game-changer, forging deeper connections between brands and their audience. Marketers can craft campaigns that speak directly to individual preferences by employing savvy strategies and tools like data analytics, customer segmentation, and dynamic content.
But let’s zoom in on a vital piece of the puzzle—landing page personalization. This marketing strategy ensures that each visitor gets a tailored journey based on their behavior, demographics, or preferences, skyrocketing the chances of turning clicks into conversions.
Want to start personalizing your landing pages? You can start with Instapage.
Instapage empowers marketers to reduce costs, grow conversions, and deliver highly personalized landing page experiences that increase brand trust, customer loyalty, and conversion rates. With Instapage, marketers can build, deploy, and optimize landing pages that convert—no developer needed.
Sign up for an Instapage 14-day free trial and start building highly personalized landing pages today.
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