You can enhance the impact of your targeted messaging by forging actual relationships with your customers.
While you don’t have to be on a first-name basis with your customers, simple gestures here and there can make all the difference.
We’ve compiled a list of ways to create “one-to-one” interactions with your customers to help you develop your personalized marketing plan.
Always Focus on Improving the Customer Experience
Customers are comfortable providing personal information when they know they will get something in return.
They’ll download products, fill out forms, subscribe to newsletters and provide valuable feedback that helps you improve your entire marketing system.
By focusing on ways that you can continue to improve and enhance the customer experience, you’ll drive more repeat traffic to your offers.
Increase Brand Loyalty
It’s important that your personalized marketing strategy treats your customers as unique individuals with specific preferences. You can do this by using smart segmentation.
Not only will this give you the competitive edge in both overall customer satisfaction but it will build brand loyalty.
Be Consistent Across All Channels
Your customers are likely going to interact with you across many different platforms, such as email, social media and mobile. And chances are, they’ll engage multiple times throughout the day.
This means it’s important to be consistent across all channels. You want your online-shop experience to match your app experience, which should also match email messaging and so on.
Adjust Your Strategy Based on Location and Time
You’ve probably heard about optimizing your email strategy by sending out messages a time that’s ideal for your target audience, but personalized marketing strategies take this a step further.
Rather than a send out a campaign to everyone at the same time, automate your strategy to send messages based on the individual’s history of when they are actively online.
You can do this easily by setting your campaigns to go out based on a user’s local time. Or, you could use push notifications to remind them about sales and limited-time offers.
Create a Personal Brand Voice for your Business
Hubspot found that emails that were sent by a real person from their marketing team had a higher click-through rate than emails that were simply from the company itself.
Both emails were technically from Hubspot, but the email from Hubspot’s human marketer felt like a one-on-one interaction. This in turn increased the perceived value of the email, as customers felt like the email was written specifically for them.
You can apply this strategy to your marketing emails by using “I” and “we” pronouns in the body of your email, talking conversationally, and signing off with your real name.
Create Automated Behavior-Triggered Email Sequences
Behavior-triggered emails, or simply triggered emails, are emails that are sent out automatically when a customer uses your digital products in a certain way.
These triggers, or user events, are usually key moments in the customer journey where it would make sense for your business to step in.
Although the automation may take some work to set up, triggered emails have a 152% higher open rate than traditional emails.
This is because they’re one of the most accurate ways to send targeted messaging.
If you’re going to set up triggered emails for the first time, bear in mind that most people already have specific expectations of when and how businesses should contact them.
Here’s a list of the common types of triggered emails:
- Welcome, introduction, or onboarding
- Cross-sell and/or up-sell
- Lead nurturing
- Cart abandonment
- Customer satisfaction and feedback
- Re-engagement
- Upcoming recurring purchase
The most important thing is to make sure that the content of each email is personalized for the individual.
Also, it’s worth noting that most people expect at least a welcome email when they join a newsletter, offer or mailing list.
Create Interactive Emails
One study found that over 50% of email recipients want to better interact with email-based-content.
Unfortunately, the technology for fully integrated interactive emails isn’t quite there yet and crafting interactive emails does require coding knowledge.
Despite this, interactive emails are becoming increasingly popular as marketers use them to create frictionless experiences across multiple channels.
These emails let recipients engage directly within the content rather than having to visit an external website or resource. For this reason, they’re more convenient and foster higher levels of engagement.
Common elements of interactive emails are things like: image carousels, embedded videos and GIFS, motion graphics and animations, live polls, review or feedback forms, and adding a product to your cart.
Emails that collect feedback like polls and feedback forms can also be a good way to gather data for personalizing further communications.
For example, a customer casts their vote on a live poll but doesn’t make a purchase.
In the re-engagement email, you can highlight the product they voted for in the poll, since they had shown interest in it before.
Create Personalized Web Experiences
Website personalization is a bit like a combination of everything we mentioned above!
It’s a strategy that configures websites based on a visitor’s data. This includes behavior, demographics/firmographics, and specified interests.
In doing so, your website can provide each visitor a unique user experience by serving information that’s relevant and timely.
If you’re just getting started with website personalization, we recommend starting with geolocation and device type.
However, keep in mind that personalization based on geolocation does not mean tracking your lead down to their exact location!
Rather, geolocation tracks a visitor’s approximate location.
An example of personalization using geolocation would be adjusting the copy of your website to feature your nearby physical store.
You could also use geolocation to automatically localize the content of your website to different areas or countries (this includes language, copy, images, cultural references, etc.).
For device type personalization, marketers know that people don’t behave the same way across their devices.
Your customers may use their mobile phones for online shopping, and will only open their laptops when they need to do something more cognitively involved like choosing between two similar products.
Therefore, you can personalize your website to match each visitor’s device.
For example, the mobile site would show more widgets containing relevant product offers.
While the desktop version has a widget that helps leads compare product specifications.
