5 effective ways to incorporate more personalization into your marketing
Did you know that 80% of consumers are more likely to make a purchase when brands offer personalized experiences (HubSpot)? This means personalization in marketing is becoming more important than ever before, and it can help business owners increase their sales, grow their customer base, and more.
In this article, we’re going to outline some different ways you can incorporate more personalization into your marketing so you can reap these rewards, too. Let’s get started.
Use SMS marketing to send personalized discounts and product recommendations
Most consumers are used to receiving text messages from people close to them — this means that SMS marketing offers a great way to build stronger connections with your customers! This form of marketing involves sending sales notifications, deals, and more to your customers via short and snappy text messages. With people on their phones so often, it’s very likely people will open and engage with them — in fact, SMS marketing messages have an open rate of 99% (RedEye).
To personalize your SMS marketing campaigns, when collecting your customers’ contact details, you could provide them with the opportunity to opt into receiving certain types of messages based on their needs and interests. For instance, you could allow people to only receive notifications about sales, only get information about new products, or both! This is a great form of personalized marketing that will help ensure you’re only sending the right messages to the right people. You could also send birthday discounts or recommend products based on a customers’ past shopping behavior, which will help you further personalize their experience.
If you need help with your text marketing, consider using the services offered by Emotive. Their SMS marketing software is automated and allows for two-way responses, meaning you can communicate with your customers without having to give your team a lot more work. Additionally, the company promises a 5x return on your investment, so you don’t have anything to lose.
Supercharge your content marketing with personalization
Content marketing should be a huge part of running your online business. It’s the process of publishing articles on a blog or knowledge base in order to educate your website visitors and build trust with them. This is ultimately a strategy that can make more sales!
Personalization can also help you supercharge your content marketing efforts. A tool like Optimonk is useful for personalizing your website to make your customers feel special. One easy strategy to implement is to add recommended articles and content to the end of each blog post. This will let you send more relevant content to people who are likely to be interested in it, personalizing their experience of reading your blog.
You can also show different types of content to different types of people. For instance, if someone is new to your website, you could send them a piece of content aimed at people new to your industry. This will help educate new customers and ensure they feel understood by your business, increasing their chances of shopping with you.
Tailor your paid advertising with retargeting
Retargeting is a paid advertising strategy that lets you catch the eye of people who have visited your website before. You can ensure they will be shown ads for your services or products on a platform like Google or Facebook, and you can show them items they’ve previously shown interest in, allowing you to personalize their browsing experience. Retargeting helps to keep your business top of mind for your prospective customers, which will encourage them to shop with you down the road.
Whether you’re advertising on Instagram, the Google search results, or on another platform, you should have the option to set up a retargeting campaign. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn all have internal programs that can do most of the legwork for you. Additionally, here are a list of third-party options where you can launch retargeting campaigns:
- SharpSpring Ads: Lets you create retargeting ads and display them on websites, newsfeeds, and social platforms
- AdRoll: Shows retargeting ads to your prospective customers on websites they frequent
- Criterio: Uses data to place ads on channels where retargeting ads have been successful in the past
When setting up your own retargeting campaign, take a look at all of the options available to you and see how you want yours to be implemented.
Use customer behavior to personalize your email marketing
Consumers are typically used to receiving and benefiting from email marketing, so this is a great channel to use. That being said, most people receive dozens of marketing emails per day, which means you’ll need to do something slightly different, and personalization offers a great way to stand out in a customer’s inbox and ensure your messages are opened. Furthermore, personalization can help your emails to avoid spam and promotions filters, thus improving your overall email deliverability rate. For more information on email deliverability, check out this resource from ActiveCampaign.
One way you can personalize your emails is to put the recipient’s name in the subject line or body of the email. Similar to how you set up your SMS marketing, you can also segment your email list in order to ensure that certain people are only receiving the emails they want from you. You can set up your email marketing in segments, allowing people to only subscribe to sales notifications, new blog content announcements, or product launch notifications, for instance.
You can also personalize your emails based on a customer’s past behavior with your business. For instance, if they leave something in their cart, you could send them a reminder email, perhaps with a small discount to push them closer to a purchase. Or, you could shoot them some post-purchase product recommendations, suggesting different products that complement the items they bought.
Chat with website visitors in real-time
When people land on your website, they might have questions or concerns about the products or services that you offer. You can help personalize their experience and address their questions by chatting with them in real-time if they would like some support.
One great way to do this is with a live chat option that pops up for website visitors. You can set up a live chatbot that answers basic questions about your business or products. If the query is more complex, you can give people the option to connect to a live agent.
Pherrus Financial, a tax consulting firm, does a great job of providing a helpful live chat service on their website. As you can see in the image above, they have a chatbot that appears for all website visitors. If they’re not interested, a user can easily click away. If they do need some questions answered, however, they can provide some information about their situation and then be contacted by the firm.
This is a great way for Pherrus Financial to personalize their website experience for the user. Different people who visit the website will have different needs and, by letting a user quickly and easily tell the live chat service what they need help with, Pherrus Financial can help encourage more people to become clients.
Consider offering a live chat on your website. Even if you don’t allow an option to connect to a live agent, a service like this can help make your website visitor’s experience easier and much more tailored to their individual needs.
Summary
Personalization is power — in this article, we outlined how you can incorporate more personalization into your marketing to increase your email deliverability, draw more people to your website, and ultimately secure more sales!
With our tips in mind, think about how personalization can help to improve your business, then get started!