6 June 2024 |
By - Sudha Mariappan
Personalization has been around since the twentieth century. This type of marketing is so old and ingrained in our practices that, without it, there is no way we can successfully market our products.
The concept is simple, as each customer has their own preferences and buying behavior. For example, have you ever tried talking to a 5-year-old? If so, you know what it’s like to try to understand their language. But if you want to get things done with them, you need to know their language.
Now, looking into your marketing strategy, imagine your customers as five year old, not literally, but think of them as people who have their own unique language, and as marketers, we need to decode that. If you’re not speaking that language, your marketing messages might be getting lost in translation.
Overall, personalization is the key to bridging that gap between a marketer and the customer, really understanding what the customers’ preferences are, and making sure your communication hits the mark.
So, let's see if you’re really speaking your customers’ language, aka personalized marketing and discover how it can make your brand stand out.
The beginning of personalization in marketing:
Fragmentation is a term used in the 1880s to describe how retailers used their loyal customers’ preferences and marketed goods according to their preferences. When there was no sign of any type of marketing in the 1880s, only word of mouth and eavesdropping were the forms of marketing.
After the 1880s, mass marketing was introduced. Advanced transportation opened up parts of the economy to new consumers who never really left their locality. Unification, also as a term, originated from the transition of the economy from being made up of separated regions to becoming one larger region at that time.
However, personalized marketing was difficult without any way to collect data about customers. Improvements happened, and retailers were able to produce more customers as the market became larger.
It was only after the 1980s that a term named ‘ segmentation’ came and personalization in marketing was introduced. The standard products were changed into customized products, which can be used by many customers instead of only one set of customers. Which later on turned into hyper-segmentation, reaching up to the level of one-on-one marketing.
Why Does Personalization Matter?
Personalization isn't only putting someone's name in an email greeting. It is about understanding and taking your customers’ needs into account. Their preferences, likes, and behaviors.
When executed well, personalization has the potential to change general marketing efforts into targeted and highly engaging experiences. Your customers will become highly relevant and trust you to buy your products.
Having better personalized marketing leads to:
Better experience for your customers: The customer experience generally gets improved through personalized marketing. The specific needs and interests of your customers should be taken into account in order for them to feel valued and understood.
Higher Engagement: More focused attention as well as involvement from users are triggered by customized content. People tend to interact once they identify themselves with materials they find online.
More conversions: Personalizing can cause higher conversions. When designing with personal recommendations and deals, customers will find themselves purchasing more from your services.
Customer Loyalty: Personalization creates an attachment. When customers feel respected and understood, they tend to recommend you more often than not to others.
So, the real question is, what are the steps that you need to put in place in order to make your marketing efforts personal?
Below are some steps through which you can learn about your customers’ preferences:
Collecting and Analyzing Customer Data:
Data forms the backbone of any personalized marketing strategy. It is through collecting it from customers that we get insights on what they prefer, how they behave, and what they need.
Surveys and Feedback: A customer survey helps you get direct comments that can help you improve your services.
Purchase history: By checking out your customers’ purchase history data, it can be beneficial to analyze what their preferences are.
Use website analytics: analyze the website traffic to understand how customers’ interact with your site and how often they do it.
Using Social Media Insights: Social media has a whole new game of algorithms. By using their analytics, you can find out the impressions made by your customers. Whether they just visited, clicked on some link, or they liked or subscribed, all are necessary to know their behaviour.
Segment Your Audience:
Once the data is available, you should break down your target market into separate divisions with similar features. Segmenting your audience is important because, by doing this, you will find it easier to segregate through your multiple bandwidths of customers.
Below are some factors that will help you segment your customers:
Demographics: Demographics are a good basis for separation. It includes age groups, for instance, when children are catered to differently from teenagers and adults. This is because there can’t be one method applied universally to all people. Different age groups crave different things, and it is essential to understand that.
Geographics: Another type of division includes geographic regions. It is when target customers are separated according to the areas depending on where someone is located. City people might have different preferences than inland or coastal people. Geographical segmentation is very important because, by knowing the particular preferences of the targeted area, it’ll be easier for marketers to market their product and increase their brand value.
Psychographics: This involves the particular interests, values, and lifestyle personalities that an individual customer has, which serve as grounds for forming rounded customer profiles. Marketers often create brand personas, known as fictional customers, to really know the preferences a customer might have while buying their product. For example, you have launched a furniture business, and a 36-year-old working woman might need to work from a home office table for her tech-related job.
Behavioral: It is inclined towards specific customer habits and preferences, in turn informing promotional strategies. This data will help them if they want to increase their customer base by enhancing their loyalty programs. These include giveaways, contests, and discounts.
Now that you have segmented your audience, you can proceed with the personalized content you have intended solely for your special customers, with their special messages. This could include:
Email Campaigns: Personalized emails that address your customers by name and offer content based on what their interests are, or even provide them with recommendations of your product. When customers’ subscribe to your email, they will get personalized emails, with even personal experiences shared along.
Product Recommendations: Personalized product suggestions include what you bought before or saw previously. Apps such as Amazon, Instagram, and Facebook use previously bought products to attract more sales by using the term “similar products.”. Customers, when they see the product's recommendations, often have a high chance of buying it.
Targeted Ads: When you open a website and see ads displayed on each and every corner of it, or if you open an app and see the product you might have just googled before, these are known as targeted ads. These are advertisements intended for selected customers who share the same interests. For example, when you google “winter clothes," after a while, you will find the same products on different platforms.
The best example of personalization marketing is Soptify. Users are in love with the app’s curated playlist, and features, such as “Discover Weekly” and “Daily Mix.”. By analyzing the listening habits and preferences of the customers, Spotify has made records for being the best at personalized marketing, as they make sure to create curated playlists that are tailored to each user’s taste, introducing them to new music they are likely to enjoy.
The Future of Personalization
The scope of personalization marketing expands as technology advances. With the use of AI and machine learning, it instantly gathers large data sets, hence making it possible to take actions that are curated specifically for individuals using their customers’ internet habits.
An AI driven chatbot would be able to analyze text from customers and provide answers within seconds during communicative processes within websites or any social media marketing.
Furthermore, by examining previous activities associated with customers, companies could predict their future behaviors even before they place orders, thus ensuring that clients are served according to their needs.
Omnichannel personalization guarantees consistency and personalization in all interactions, from landing pages on websites to social media.
As a marketer, it is important to build a strong relationship with your customers, make strategies to increase engagement, and drive better results for your business. To achieve that, personalization marketing can be a powerful tool to get close to your customers.
To avail any services regarding digital marketing, connect with us at info@ontogendigital.com. Subscribe to us for more blogs.