By now, smart B2C marketers have already (hopefully!) come to terms with the fact that personalized marketing is, in fact, the future of the industry. Consumers are too aware, and too in tune, to tolerate anything less than highly targeted, personalized content from brands. For marketers, this can sometimes pose a problem: how can you personalize content for thousands of customers without running your marketing team ragged?
How to Implement a Successful Personalized Marketing Strategy
Luckily, we’ve taken the situation into our own hands and outlined 5 ways marketers can successfully implement a personalized marketing strategy in their organization. Let’s take a look:
1. Make Sure You Have the Right Technology in Place
Before anyone starts any project in life, it’s important to have the right tools for the job, and personalized marketing is no different. Marketers should make sure their current marketing technology platform is able to handle the data, segmentation, and automation that effective personalized campaigns require. The right technology can help free up time and resources by automating tedious processes or analyzing huge data sets. Some examples of valuable personalization technology include:
- Content personalization.
- Recommendations.
- Marketing automation.
- Data collection.
2. Gather as Much Customer Data as Possible
With the right technology in place, marketers can begin collecting customer data at every single touchpoint across the buying journey. When marketers know exactly what a specific customer is searching for, or is continuously clicking on, it becomes easy to target this customer with relevant content, incentives, and even recommendations. In order to gather this data, marketers must track metrics such as email opens, link clicks, shopping cart data, and even purchase history. The more data collected, the more refined and effective personalized content can be.
Marketers can also use this individual customer data to segment large consumer audiences. These segments can make it easier to manage large groups of consumers, as well as determine overarching trends and themes. This consumer data can be very helpful in determining future marketing strategy and focus.
3. Spread the ‘Personalization Love’ Across Channels
Once this data has been collected and segmented into dynamic consumer profiles, marketers can begin executing across channels, platforms, and sites. This means taking all of the data that was collected by your technology solution and putting it to good use. Common channels today include email, social media, web, and third-party ads.
For traditional platforms, this means adding dynamic content or personalization tokens. Sophisticated technology such as incentive or recommendation tools can actually deliver targeted messages that are specifically designed for certain outcomes. Personalized incentive recommendations take into account how a single customer has responded to previous incentives to deliver the ultimate deal for maximum returns.
4. Impact Every Stage of the Digital Customer Journey
While spreading personalized messages across various platforms is important, it’s crucial to ensure this personalized messaging hits every stage of the digital customer journey. Just as offline consumers engage and learn about goods, products, or services, so too do online consumers. It’s up to marketers to ensure that consumers are adequately engaged and provided for between browsing, cart, and purchase, the three stages of the basic digital customer journey.
In the beginning, marketers can offer incentives or recommendations to pique consumer interest. This could also include a call-out along the lines of “Similar Customers Also Bought…”, which shows customers related items most likely to interest them, based on historical product affinities.
Once a customer moves something into their cart, it doesn’t mean the journey is over. In fact, 70% of website visitors progress to the cart stage but end up leaving the item behind. Marketers can send reminder emails and keep the shopper’s cart top-of-mind to encourage a purchase; determining how to turn these one-time shoppers into loyal, repeat customers is imperative.
5. Continuously Update and Refine Personalization Processes
Just like any other process, personalized marketing practices require continuous review and optimization to ensure 100% effectiveness. A best practice is to let campaigns run for a couple weeks, and then analyze the results. This way, your team will have an accurate impression of actual progress over time, rather than a quick snapshot into how your personalization strategy is progressing. It’s also important to remember to double-check all of your technological integrations, to make sure you have access to a holistic picture of data.
During the refinement stage, marketers can take a step back and evaluate certain strategies or elements of their personalized marketing campaign. Does anything seem off or strange? Has there been any new consumer feedback to integrate into the strategy? How is the technology holding up? Do any of the automation tools or recommendation engines need further tuning? These are all questions to ask periodically to ensure maximum effectiveness and customer satisfaction.
Final Thoughts
Personalized marketing boils down to creating a seamless, easy buying experience for your consumers. Making a customer feel like one in a million can be the secret ingredient to forging a strong, lasting bond between consumer and brand. Has your organization implemented a personalized marketing strategy? What are some of the highs and lows you’ve encountered along the way?
Still have questions? Emarsys can help provide answers and suggestions on any personalized marketing strategy.
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