These days, businesses are embracing personalization in marketing to increase sales, get more customers, and create a stronger brand image.
In a recent survey, it was revealed that 14% of companies practice personalization sometimes, 50% do so often, and 34% always personalize experiences.
If you are also a business and want to implement personalization in your marketing efforts, this blog is for you.
The experts of Marketozz have explained personalization in marketing, its benefits, how to start personalized marketing, challenges that you may face, and much more. So, let’s start.
What is Personalization in Marketing?
But diving deeper into the topic, let’s first understand what personalization is, in marketing.
In marketing, personalization means creating or re-creating tailored marketing materials, such as advertisements, notifications, video ads, and more, according to customers’ interests, demographics, preferences, etc.
Marketers collect customer data from different sources and analyze it to get deep into the needs and interests of the customers. Accordingly, they create personalized marketing campaigns and run them in front of the target audience.
As these marketing materials are highly tailored, the chances of customers resonating and engaging with them are usually high, and also many customers take action, such as buying the product or signing up for the services, at the end.
The following are the common data that is used by businesses to create personalized marketing content:
Source: Sources (direct search, email, social media, third-party website, etc.) from where the customers come to the website.
Geolocation: Location of customers who visited the business website.
Buyer Persona: Does the buyer make purchases, or usually explores products and leave?
Buyer Status: The buyer is a first-time or existing customer.
Time of Day: At what time of the day the potential customer visits the website?
Device Type: Which device he or she uses to visit; mobile, desktop, tablet, or any other.
Customer Behaviour: This information helps marketers understand customer behavior. How often does he/she visit the website, for how long does he/she stay, with which products or services does he/she spend the most time while exploring, the mouse movements, and more?
Email Opens and Clicks: Number of marketing emails opened by the customers.
Push Notification Click-Through Rates: Number of times customers open the push notifications.
By analyzing these data, businesses can understand what their customers are actually looking for, hence, it becomes easy to create tailored marketing content for them.
But, one question that might be popping up in your mind right now would be why it is necessary to invest in personalization for marketing. A business can also run marketing campaigns without personalization and make sales. Well, the answer to this is in the next section.
Benefits of Personalization in Marketing
If you look around, you will notice that almost every business has started using personalization in their marketing efforts. But why? Because of the following benefits:
1. More Conversions
Personalization in marketing is done by keeping the needs and preferences of customers in mind. Hence, there are more sales conversions when a business chooses personalized marketing.
According to the McKinsey report, businesses drive 40 percent more revenue by leveraging personalization, compared to competitors who didn’t.
Personalized content resonates with customers better, and influences them to buy the products or services from the business.
2. High-Engagement
You are likely to spend more time on Instagram when you see relevant reels and posts, isn’t it right? Similarly, businesses that use personalized marketing content based on customer preferences, get higher engagement rates.
According to the best digital marketing company in India, businesses get more views, likes, shares, and retweets, of posts and videos from brands that have created tailored content for their customers.
3. Better Returns on Investments (ROIs)
Personalization in marketing drives better returns on investments (ROIs) compared to traditional marketing. Let’s understand this by an example. When you send a generic email containing information about the iPhone 16 to hundreds of customers, the chances of opening and reading those emails are very less, as not all the customers are interested in the product.
On the other hand, if you send a tailored email, let’s say, an email with details of an iPhone16 to a customer who is looking to buy an iPhone16, what do you think the chances of him/her opening and reading the email, and even purchase the phone? Yes, it is very high. This is how personalized marketing brings better ROIs to the table.
4. Enhanced Customer Retention
Another benefit of using marketing personalization is that it helps businesses for more customer retention.
Customers are likely to stay loyal to brands that recommend them the products and services that they (customers) are interested in, and not with the brands that show what they (brands) want to sell, irrespective of customers’ interests.
5. Better Customer Experiences
By doing personalization in marketing, businesses can provide better experiences to their customers.
From knowing what they are actually looking for, and their preferences, budget, and value, to delivering the exact product and services, a business can win the heart of its customers.
This is the reason 36% of customers say that they will return to a brand if they have a positive experience and 60% will become repeat buyers if they get a personalized shopping experience.
6. More Social Sharing
When your customers get better shopping experiences, they will share it with their friends and family.
As discussed earlier, you, as a brand, can enhance your customers’ shopping experiences by using personalization in your marketing efforts.
In the end, happy customers will share their experiences with others, and it will market your product and services and enhance your brand image in the market.
7. Stronger Brand Reputation
With high engagement rates, more satisfied customers, and social shares, you can build a stronger brand reputation in the market and gain a competitive advantage. But remember, you need to opt for personalization in your marketing efforts to gain the formerly mentioned goals.
So, these are the major reasons why every business has already started or thinking of doing personalization when marketing their products and services to their customers.
How a Business Can Start Personalized Marketing
By now, you must have been convinced to put a personalization element into your marketing efforts. So, we have provided you with a roadmap to help you get started with personalized marketing.
Step#1. Collect Customer Data
Your journey of personalized marketing starts with collecting customer data from various sources. We have mentioned the common data you need above in the same blog.
However, it is crucial to respect customers’ privacy and obtain consent prior to collecting data. Add consent forms on your website, social media handles, and other sources, from where you will collect the data.
Step#2. Categorize your Customers
After collecting the data, you need to categorize your customers based on different factors, such as age groups, demographics, language they speak, their purchase power, and more.
This categorization will help you further while creating tailored content for a particular segment.
Step#3. Create Personalized Marketing Content
Now, it’s time to create tailored marketing content for your targeted audiences. Remember to keep the factors, needs, and preferences, while creating the content.
For personalization marketing, you can do video marketing, email marketing, push notifications, WhatsApp marketing, social media posts, blogs, and much more. However, remember to keep the factors, needs, and preferences of your customers, while creating the marketing content.
Step#4. Monitor your Campaigns
You must monitor your marketing campaigns in order to see what is working and what is not. For this, you can do the A/B testing to know which content is resonating with your targeted customers and which aren’t.
Also, you can track engagement metrics, such as email open rates, likes and shares of videos, conversion rates, and more, and use them when you optimize marketing campaigns in the future.
Step#5. Continuously Optimize Campaigns
Marketing requires continuous efforts to make campaigns better and convert potential customers into actual ones. Therefore, you need to continuously optmize your marketing campaigns to keep them relevant for the customers.
Also, the needs and preferences of customers also change in a blink of an eye. A customer who wanted an iPhone till yesterday, is now interested in buying a Samsung smartphone.
So, you need to use fresh customer data to know the latest preferences of customers and optimize your campaigns accordingly.
Tools Required for Personalized Marketing
The following is the list of tools you will be required for personalized marketing:
1. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Systems
For managing and analyzing data and interactions with customers.
2. Email Marketing Platforms
For sending personalized emails to different customer groups.
3. Marketing Automation Platforms
To streamline and automate marketing tasks.
4. Customer Data Platforms (CDP)
To collect customer data from various sources.
5. Web Analytics Tools
To monitor customer behavior on your website, app, and other platforms.
6. Ad Targeting Platforms
To deliver tailored advertisements to a targeted customer base.
7. A/B Testing and Optimization Tools
For testing marketing campaigns and optimizing them for better results.
8. Survey and Feedback Tools
To get feedback from customers to refine personalization efforts
So, these are the major marketing tools that you need to create tailored marketing campaigns for your brand.
Challenges of Personalization in Marketing
Personalization in marketing is not as easy as it looks from far away. When you step into it, you will face various hurdles on the way. The top challenges of personalization in marketing are as follows:
1. Reliable Data
Data is the essence of personalized marketing. Therefore, it is necessary for marketers to collect reliable data from multiple sources. However, many businesses fail to collect reliable data, that affect their marketing campaigns’ performance.
2. Limited Capabilities
Many businesses are not enough capable to create personalized marketing campaigns and compete with giants in their market segment. Their limited capabilities are another challenge that obstructs their personalized marketing.
3. Aggressive Retargeting
Many brands retarget their customers so aggressively that they (customers) get irritated by them. This negatively impacts the customer experience with the brand and affects their conversions.
4. No Proper Planning
Personalized marketing requires proper planning and execution. However, many businesses find it challenging and ruin their marketing efforts.
5. Failure in Campaign Optimization
Last but not least, businesses find it challenging to understand what went wrong in their marketing campaigns in the first place, and thus, do not optimize their campaigns properly.
These are some of the top challenges that brands face while doing personalization in marketing. However, these challenges can be overcome by hiring the top marketing company in India, which is an expert in personalized marketing and has the proper team and experience to tackle these types of challenges.
Conclusion
Personalization in marketing is adding tailored content, such as product recommendations, offers, deals, and more, by keeping the needs and preferences of customers in mind.
By doing so, brands can get more sales conversions, get higher customer engagement and satisfaction rates, better ROIs, and build a stronger brand reputation in the market.
However, to achieve the results, you need a proper roadmap. The journey of personalized marketing is challenging too. So, why don’t you get an expert? Get Marketozz!
Marketozz is the best online marketing agency in India that has helped many big brands with personalized marketing, social media marketing, email marketing, and other types of modern marketing, and achieved the desired results like increasing sales, growing brand reach, building online reputation, and much more.
