Personalized marketing makes consumers feel unique and vital. For a business, this could establish a strong bond that will encourage the consumer to buy from their brand again. However, for too many companies, customization efforts typically stop at merely including the name of the customer in an email to them.
Businesses that truly want to stand out in this competitive landscape can’t be this lazy in their personalized marketing. To help those companies interested in going above and beyond in their marketing efforts, 13 members of Forbes Communications Council offer insight into what methods a business can incorporate into their personalized marketing to make an unforgettable impression on the customer and gain a loyal following.
1. Leverage Customer Data
Many universities do a great job of building loyalty through personalized videos and sending them to accepted students. Using proprietary technology, colleges can instantly create and send thousands of videos, all customized to each student’s major and interests, to drive enrollment. It’s a great example of how deep customization via technology can drive customer loyalty. – Nysha King, MRINetwork
2. Focus On What Is Valuable To Your Recipients
Personalized email marketing is a great tool for marketers, but many consumers don’t see what’s in it for them. Just adding their name to an email won’t get the job done. Focus on making the email content personally relevant. Use their history of purchases and interactions with you to deliver truly personalized content, based on what interests them. Those are messages that consumers find valuable. – Tom Wozniak, OPTIZMO Technologies, LLC
3. View Consumers As Individuals
Creating relevant content by identifying target personas among your target audience or customer base is crucial. ABM (account-based marketing) works well because it commands the view of consumers as individuals, rather than a group. This approach takes more time and research than a “spray-and-pray” mass email campaign for example, but the reward is better engagement rates and ultimately, loyalty. – Cristina Garcia, impact.com
4. Make It Human-To-Human
Personalize your email so it reads like a real human wrote it, not a robot. Talk about your personal experience instead of talking down about what “more and more companies are doing.” If you have the resources, personalize further to suit your recipient’s profile — quote a recent social media post or comment they made, to show that this couldn’t have been written by a robot. – Udi Ledergor, Gong
5. Embrace Dynamic Content
A customer opens your summer sale email after the offer has expired — that’s annoying. Use dynamic content to change your call-to-action depending on when the recipient opens it. Remember, you’re playing on their turf, and you have to be relevant to individuals at scale. – Jay Miller, Maropost
6. Address Customers’ Pain Points
Oftentimes, companies will venture down the path of personalized campaigns. It’s crucial to understand the customer needs and where they are in the buyer or customer journey. Showing that you care as an individual helps build loyalty as every business transaction has a personal value driver. Being human in the email goes leaps and bounds to show that there is a person ready to help you to succeed. – Div Manickam, Dell Boomi
7. Put A Face To The Name
When sending out personalized emails, it’s good practice to add your customer’s name at the very beginning, but it’s even better when you end the email with a profile, picture or name at the bottom, lending that human touch to the business and personalizing your brand. This is sure to generate more of a positive reaction, with the hopes of sparking a conversation! – Antoine Bonicalzi, Cyberimpact
8. Get Back To Ink
In the age of all digital, email-centric marketing, what can really stand out is a personal, hand-written note. Several times a year, we’ll host letter-writing “parties” for our employees to send notes of appreciation to our customers, partners and top prospects. The most important part of these is to truly personalize the message — make it genuine, and it will have an impact. – Jon Perera, Highspot
9. Segment Your Audience
Personalize by grouping customers into segments. It’s one of the easiest ways to ensure that your content and offers are relevant. Start small by spitting customers into two or three groups, such as their average bill (frugal, average, big spenders). Then tweak your templates to make a version that appeals to each segment. The beauty of segmentation is that even small steps like these make a big impact. – Jacqueline Phillips, amoCRM
10. Personalize To The Person
The current issue with “personalization” is that companies still put consumers into “buckets.” While messaging may be personalized to a group, it still comes across as partially irrelevant to a customer. Creating individualized content sequences that speak directly to a consumer on an individual level is key to driving customer loyalty because they feel their needs are the company’s main priority. – Patrick Ward, High Speed Experts
11. Focus On The Buying Cycle
Segmentation based on where a customer is in the buying cycle can determine whether an email is marked as spam or motivates an action. Customers who have never made a purchase shouldn’t receive the same emails as a brand’s most loyal customers, who you may want to upsell a higher quality product or reward them for their loyalty. This requires marketers to deeply understand their market’s behavior. – Amanda Hinski, Frost Valley YMCA
12. Use Push Notifications
Marketers must find channels with less noise. Push notifications can bring your message to the customer’s screen directly from your brand, rather than an email notification. Leverage customer data — did they leave items in their shopping cart, which types of items do they frequently browse? — to create relevant notifications. By delivering relevant content, you can build customer loyalty. – Prashant Bhatia, Stibo Systems
13. Align Messaging With Behaviors
We follow the traffic behaviors of our clients and prospects to discern their interests and then segment messaging and content delivery based on the data we collect. So if a prospect is viewing a lot of information about profitability or cash flow, for example, we streamline our content delivery to ensure they receive communications personalized to their exhibited interests. – Andrea Boccard, AccountingDepartment.com
Source: Forbes
Featured image: Members share their best personalized marketing tips to boost customer loyalty. PHOTOS COURTESY OF THE INDIVIDUAL MEMBERS
