Personalize and one-to-one marketing means building a relationship with your target customers. It means that you have to understand your customers by learning about them so that you can change your strategy and behavior towards them.
It’s easier said than done because training salespeople to be careful and attentive is one thing. But when you ask them to treat individual customers based on their individuality, it means that you have to track their individual needs and talk to them personally that how you can meet their needs.
It requires a lot of research work. Now, the question is that the businesses would follow and implement real personalized marketing. The answer depends on its scope, but first of all, we have to learn more about it.
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What is Personalized Marketing?
Personalized marketing or individual marketing is when businesses craft individual messages for customers based on data collection, analysis and automation. The purpose of personalized marketing is to communicate with every customer at its level.
It may seem impossible, but if you divide and break it down, then you would see the benefit of it. Personalized marketing is the advanced form and higher level of target marketing, and you can’t target your audience better than personalization. It doesn’t mean that you have to do it manually; automated software and other latest tools are there to help you to find recommendations for customers.
Personalized Marketing Vs Permission Marketing
Personalized marketing usually starts with the seller and he’s the controlling person and asks customers to buy something by providing recommendations and choices.
On the other hand, permission marketing prefers to empower and hand over the control to the customer. Where the customer has the choice whether to receive information or not, when to start and when to stop, it’ll be his choice.
Benefits of Personalized Marketing
Some of the benefits of personalized marketing are as follows;
Better Customer Experience
When customers like some brand, then they’re willing to provide information and share their choices, likeness, and dis-likeness. The purpose is to have a better experience with their favorite brand.
Higher Conversion Rate
When customers have a better experience and they’re getting what they have always wanted. Then the company won’t find any difficulty converting, because they’re on the verge of buying your product/service. All you need is to be polite and accommodate them a little more.
More Understanding
When you’re the favourite brand of your customers, then they would be willing to provide you information. If you ask them to fill out the forms, contact information, or other personal detail, they’ll happily provide it to you. When you have all the information, then you’ll have a better understanding of your target audience and customers.
More Revenue
Better understanding means that the customer would have a better experience. It means the conversion rate would be higher, and higher CR means more sales and the company would earn more profit and revenue.
Customers’ Loyalty
When a company meets the needs and demands of customers, then it means that the customers would be satisfied with the company’s product/service. Higher satisfaction levels among customers would increase customers’ loyalty towards their favorite brand because they trust the brand.
Consistency
When customers are loyal to some brand, then they would be consistent on all social media platforms. The company would receive a variety of data from different channels.
Creating a Personalized Marketing Strategy
Here’s how you should create a personalized marketing strategy by following these four steps;
Identify Your Customers
First of all, you should start by finding and identifying your customers. Therefore, it is very important to have as much information as possible about your customers. Like their names, addresses, ages, choices, education level, income level, etc.
It means that you should know your customers at every level in terms of location, contact, division, medium, etc. it doesn’t matter whatever your product is. Most importantly, the customers won’t be satisfied and limited only with your product/service.
For instance, if you’re a manufacturer of some company, then you follow the same principle of identifying and finding more information about your customers in order to develop a better relationship with your customers.
Differentiate Your Customers
As we know that people are different in two major ways; they have different needs and wants and they have different beliefs and values. When you have found your customers, now it’s time to differentiate them, so that you could find out the most valuable customers to focus on them.
Now, you should apply the same principle on your employees to find out their needs and values. Whatever result you find, it would help you to decide which parts of the customers to focus on that match with the needs and values of your employees.
Interact with Them
You must cost-effectively communicate with your target customers. It would be more effective and cost-efficient if the contact is online and automated.
For instance, a company spends a lot of capital on the call center to collect information. But the information collection won’t be difficult the next time, and the information would be more effective if it’s relevant, timely, and accurate.
When you come to interact with your customers, it’s better to start things up where you have left them. It doesn’t matter how much time lapsed has occurred between the current and previous interactions with your customers.
Customize
Finally, you should focus on one common thing that your company and the customer have, it could be customers’ needs and your company’s behavior. Now, you should use that factor in the manufacturing and marketing process of your product, so that the final service, packaging, and delivery would treat your target customers differently.
Businesses usually avoid the final step; consequently, they won’t be able to get the desired results.
Best Practices for Personalized Marketing
Here are some of the best practices of the personalized that you should keep in mind, they’re as follows;
Avoid
When you use customers’ tracking software, then you would come across with a lot of surprising data. Now, you have a responsibility for what information to choose that’s beneficial for your business and it won’t hurt anyone else. You should avoid all sort of information material that could be profitable, but it’s not moral and ethical.
For instance, exploiting the teens’ age pregnancy to your business advantage is creepy and unethical. However, if a customer is looking for shoes, then you save his time but recommending based on his previous choices, and it would be completely right and ethical.
Test
You have found the best-personalized content after a lot of research. If you did, then it’s better that you should test its effectiveness before going online, because you don’t know whether it works or not. After running the test at a small scale and you have checked its performance that it is bringing traffic and increasing the conversion.
Monitor
After successfully launching your personalized strategy, it doesn’t mean that your work is done. Now you should use Google Analytics to keep checking the statistics of your website and monitor how you can improve the result.
It’s better if you take some time to plan a better-personalized strategy to achieve better results. Analytics would tell the traffic, conversion, and bounce rate. You should also check the maximum staying time of leads on a certain page. It would give you an idea, why a certain product is working and others are not.
Revisit
One thing you have to keep in mind that the customers’ preferences and choices change with time. Therefore, you shouldn’t start the personalized strategy and then leave it later on. You have to keep revisiting your personalized marketing strategy. If it requires changing and updating, then do it and keep making changes until you get the desired results.
Consistent monitoring, updating, and evaluation would make you reach and satisfy your customers.
Examples of Personalized Marketing
Some of the famous examples of personalized marketing are as follows;
Netflix
Netflix, paid channel, tracks the previous history of the viewers. The tracking software checks the clicks, choices, and viewing time, and then recommends different shows. That’s much Netflix is committed to the personalized marketing strategy.
Amazon
The tracking software and algorithm of Amazon do the same thing. It tracks the previous buying history of each customer, and the products they have viewed. When a customer comes for shopping, the software would show them the same products where customers have shown interest previously.
Coca Cola
The company started the personalized marketing strategy in 2012 with the famous quote of ‘‘share a coke.’’ The customers started using it with hashtags along with their names. It became a very good example of personalized marketing in recent times.
Starbucks
Starbucks launched a gaming and reward offer, if you wing, then you’ll get the opportunity to win free order. The purpose was to get personal information from the customers, and they did. As a result, the revenue of Starbucks increases by approximately 2.56 billion US dollars.
Challenges of Personalized Marketing
Some of the challenges that personalized marketing strategy has to face are as follows;
Right Technology
One of the most important challenges that many companies face while following the personalized strategy is to find the right tracking algorithm and software that could meet your needs. The problem with the tech revolution is that things get obsolete very quickly, you have to work contently to keep up with the pace of technology.
Resources
Finding the right technology means years of research and development. We all know that R & D is very expensive, and it requires a lot of capital and resources that the new startups and businesses can’t afford.
Applying the Smart Segmentation
Smart segmentation means subdividing the customers based on the latest information. Sadly, many businesses and companies don’t follow the smart segmentation
Conclusion
After studying the article, we have concluded that a personalized marketing strategy is the future of marketing. Businesses and companies shouldn’t avoid using a personalized marketing strategy. However, challenges are real but when you’re committed, then you’ll find a way to overcome them.
