Digital marketing has significantly evolved over the past 10 to 15 years. It’s no longer enough to put up a website and hope your target audience finds it or blast out generic promotional emails. To get the attention of potential buyers, you need to personalize your communication to them so they feel engaged. If you don’t, your competitors will. Consumers today want to engage with a brand that listens to them and understands their needs and wants.
The Importance of Personalization
Customizing experiences to your target audience is no longer a luxury that’s nice to have but now something your business can do without. Failure to develop an individualized customer-focused approach to marketing can be the difference between closing a deal and watching your rival make the sale.
Today’s consumer expects to be wooed with product recommendations tailored to their needs and free trials of products they are genuinely interested in. Most internet users appreciate how YouTube filters content recommendations based on their Google searches.
You expect to find some level of this kind of personalization when you log into an e-commerce website. According to an Accenture survey, 91 percent of consumers are disposed to buy from vendors who remember what they searched for last and offer related suggestions.
When providing a personalized experience, you also stand a chance of increasing sales. That recommendation is customized to your customers’ preference and has a high chance of prompting them to buy something, even if the product features nowhere on their priority list. Such recommendations tempt buyers into making impulse purchases.
Have a Plan
Before you make any changes to your brand image, you need to have a plan detailing the steps you will take to personalize your brand. Creating a customized experience for your customers should start with a strategy for collecting the data you need to create customer profiles.
The data includes the details like how much time they spent on your website and which areas they viewed the longest. If they bought items from you before, it would include their purchase history. You can integrate a customer relationship management (CRM) system into your website to help with this.
An even more effective way could be to bring in professional help. Maintaining a company image is a lot of work. Find a brand strategy agency that will take care of everything from planning to executing the personalization strategy.
Fast Responses
Whether your customers compliment your products or complain about them on social media, you need to respond in a timely way. This will give them the impression that you are listening to them and are interested in their feedback. Instead of a distant company only keen on making a sale, your customers will view your business as a caring friend they can easily get in touch with during good or bad times.
Using automated responses or bots has the opposite effect. It will give your clients the idea that you have other priorities than listening to their feedback. It can undo the brand image you work so hard to create.
Look at Data
If you’re going to provide a personalized customer experience, you need data. Data will help you understand the behavioral patterns of your target demographic. It will include statistics like how frequently a customer logs into your site and what products they usually buy or view. It will also indicate if they responded to offers targeted at them.
The data obtained can help you create a profile of your customers if you analyze it carefully. Customer behavior analysis also helps determine how these customers perceive your brand.
Use Names
If you have received any newsletter of late, chances are the email started with a greeting addressed to you by name. This is quite deliberate; you are more likely to be interested in correspondence addressed to you in a personal way than a generic message pumped out to thousands of readers.
In addition to addressing your recipients by name, you need to give them the impression that the email was sent by a human being, not a robot. This is the reasoning behind a growing trend of newsletters being signed off with a person’s name.
Personal on All Fronts
One of the keys to successful marketing is consistency. It would be a shame for a customer to be lured to your website by a wonderfully personalized email, only for them to be put off by an impersonal experience. For your personalization to be effective, you need to adopt the same approach on all interfaces where you interact with your customers—hence the need for a strong plan.
