Personalised Marketing Strategies

Sep 24, 2023

Personalized marketing strategies focus on delivering the right message, to the right person, at the right time. You’re essentially forming a strong connection between your brand and your target audience that helps to guide them through the buyer’s journey.

When done right, personalized marketing can be the deciding factor behind an outstanding customer experience that takes your brand to the next level and encourages repeat business.

Making the effort to deliver personalized messages can also make your brand appear to be more approachable. Faceless brands with marketing messages that are generic can come off as cold and uncaring, or worse, questionable.

On the other hand, marketing messages from a real person, or campaigns and broadcasts that are personalized, are opened far more often, perceived as more genuine, and convert higher. In other words, personalized marketing strategies take customer-centricity down to the individual level.

It focuses on showing your customers how your business can bring value to their lives, and then following through on that brand promise.

In this special report, we’ll show you how to seize the power of personalized marketing so you can increase conversion rates, maximize exposure, and ultimately, build a stronger brand.

Examples of Personalized Marketing Strategies

Chances are that at some point, you’ve been on the receiving end of personalized marketing campaigns. So, you probably already know how persuasive they can be.

But in case you haven’t, here are some examples of successful personalized strategies that I hope inspire you:

Amazon:

Amazon pioneered personalized web experiences in the early 2010s with its “customers also bought” widget. It uses a combination of technologies like predictive analytics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning to create a tailored experience for every user.

Their systems customize the content of your home page to recommend items that you might be interested in. They also serve widgets of similar items while browsing.

These personalization strategies all work together to give you the information you need. It’s a convenient user experience that makes online shopping much easier.

Netflix:

Netflix’s Recommendation Engine uses data like user demographics, browsing behaviour, and watch history to build a detailed profile of the user.

Each profile is then matched with some of Netflix’s 70,000 or so “alt-genres” (which is how Netflix breaks down genres, and tropes, and determines similar titles).

Spotify:

Another popular recommendation engine is Spotify. Like Netflix, Spotify uses all its data to feed machine learning models that identify patterns between all the content on Spotify.

These patterns help Spotify offer intelligent recommendations based on both abstract and objective markers like mood, time, location, and ambience.

Spotify is also well known for its year-end “Wrapped” playlists. Wrapped repackaged users’ data into a personalized playlist and shareable infographics for social media.

The shareable infographics were a huge hit with users, many found their listening history intriguing and wanted to share it with their friends. By sharing and discussing on social media, non-users were also enticed to join Spotify.

Starbucks:

Starbucks uses detailed user profiles from their app to run a personalized rewards system. Like other recommendation engines, Starbucks uses historic purchase data, location, weather, and other data markers to feed an algorithm that pushes personalized offers via email and the Starbucks app.

Note how most personalized strategies straddle different channels like email, website, and social media. You’ll want to prioritize the channels your customers are on.

All the companies in our examples include personalized marketing throughout different areas of their business, and sales funnel, rather than just one segment. This includes email, website and interface, social media and even geolocation.

When it comes to personalized marketing strategies, there’s no one-size-fits-all. You must take a targeted approach with clear goals and objectives.

Segmenting Your Customer Base

The foundation of a successful personalized marketing strategy is knowing your customers! This is done by using customer segmentation to divide your customers into groups based on interests, actions, and eventually, historical data.

Then, when you create your personalized marketing campaign, this could mean that two customers in a segment both receive an email about an upcoming sale, but the items featured in the email vary based on their individual purchase history.

How do you create customer segments?

The first step to creating customer segments is gathering information about your existing customers. There are several ways to approach this, depending on the size of your business and your available resources.

Whichever method you choose, you should aim to collect demographic (or firmographic) and behavioural data.

If you have an existing e-commerce shop, your existing martech stack (marketing technology stack) will probably offer useful data regarding your customers and leads.

You can integrate your existing stack using a customer data platform, which aggregates data across your touchpoints to build detailed profiles of individual customers.

If you’re not already involved in e-commerce, you can use your customer relationship management software as a starting point, but you’ll likely want to supplement that with analytics from other sources.

Audit your martech stack to see what you have available before you spend on gathering more data. Your ad-tech analytics and social media management tools are good places to start.

Once you’ve got this data, it needs to be analyzed to identify patterns and trends happening in your business. This can be done manually, but we highly recommend adding a customer analysis and segmentation tool to your martech stack somewhere down the line to automate the process.

Here’s a link to an article that further explains what a martech stack is in case you need more information: https://www.actioniq.com/blog/what-is-a-martech-stack/

There are lots of possible segments, here are a few to get you started:

Demographics

Age group
Gender identity
Sex
Occupation
Location
Life stage

Purchasing Behaviour

Spending amount
Product Interest
Repeat customers
Usage level
Stage of the customer journey
Customer experience

Personality Types

Risk-averse
Price-conscious
Non-urgent shoppers
Needs social proof
FOMO type buyer
Scarcity works well

Even though segmentation is time-consuming, it will set your business up for success in the long run. Because when you know how your customers think, you’re better positioned to deliver meaningful value that shows your customers you care about their needs and the experience they have with your business.

Personalize Your Brand

You can enhance the impact of your targeted messaging by forging actual relationships with your customers. While you don’t have to be on a first-name basis with your customers, simple gestures here and there can make all the difference.

We’ve compiled a list of ways to create “one-to-one” interactions with your customers to help you develop your personalized marketing plan.

Always Focus on Improving the Customer Experience

Customers are comfortable providing personal information when they know they will get something in return. They’ll download products, fill out forms, subscribe to newsletters and provide valuable feedback that helps you improve your entire marketing system.

By focusing on ways that you can continue to improve and enhance the customer experience, you’ll drive more repeat traffic to your offers.

Increase Brand Loyalty

Your personalized marketing strategy must treat your customers as unique individuals with specific preferences. You can do this by using smart segmentation.
Not only will this give you a competitive edge in both overall customer satisfaction but it will build brand loyalty.

Be Consistent Across All Channels

Your customers are likely going to interact with you across many different platforms, such as email, social media and mobile. And chances are, they’ll engage multiple times throughout the day.

This means it’s important to be consistent across all channels. You want your online shop experience to match your app experience, which should also match email messaging and so on.

Adjust Your Strategy Based on Location and Time

You’ve probably heard about optimizing your email strategy by sending out messages at a time that’s ideal for your target audience, but personalized marketing strategies take this a step further.

Rather than send out a campaign to everyone at the same time, automate your strategy to send messages based on the individual’s history of when they are actively online.

You can do this easily by setting your campaigns to go out based on a user’s local time. Or, you could use push notifications to remind them about sales and limited-time offers.

Create a Personal Brand Voice for Your Business

Hubspot found that emails that were sent by a real person from their marketing team had a higher click-through rate than emails that were simply from the company itself.

Both emails were technically from Hubspot, but the email from Hubspot’s human marketer felt like a one-on-one interaction. This in turn increased the perceived value of the email, as customers felt like the email was written specifically for them.

You can apply this strategy to your marketing emails by using “I” and “we” pronouns in the body of your email, talking conversationally, and signing off with your real name.

Create Automated Behaviour-Triggered Email Sequences

Behaviour-triggered emails, or simply triggered emails, are emails that are sent out automatically when a customer uses your digital products in a certain way. These triggers, or user events, are usually key moments in the customer journey where it would make sense for your business to step in.

Although the automation may take some work to set up, triggered emails have a 152% higher open rate than traditional emails. This is because they’re one of the most accurate ways to send targeted messaging.

If you’re going to set up triggered emails for the first time, bear in mind that most people already have specific expectations of when and how businesses should contact them.

Here’s a list of the common types of triggered emails:

Welcome, introduction, or onboarding
Cross-sell and/or up-sell
Lead nurturing
Cart abandonment
Customer satisfaction and feedback
Re-engagement
Upcoming recurring purchase

The most important thing is to make sure that the content of each email is personalized for the individual. Also, it’s worth noting that most people expect at least a welcome email when they join a newsletter, offer or mailing list.

Create Interactive Emails

One study found that over 50% of email recipients want to better interact with email-based content. Unfortunately, the technology for fully integrated interactive emails isn’t quite there yet and crafting interactive emails does require coding knowledge.

Despite this, interactive emails are becoming increasingly popular as marketers use them to create frictionless experiences across multiple channels.

These emails let recipients engage directly with the content rather than having to visit an external website or resource. For this reason, they’re more convenient and foster higher levels of engagement.

Common elements of interactive emails are things like image carousels, embedded videos and GIFS, motion graphics and animations, live polls, review or feedback forms, and adding a product to your cart.

Emails that collect feedback like polls and feedback forms can also be a good way to gather data for personalizing further communications. For example, a customer casts their vote on a live poll but doesn’t make a purchase.

In the re-engagement email, you can highlight the product they voted for in the poll, since they had shown interest in it before.

Create Personalized Web Experiences

Website personalization is a bit like a combination of everything we mentioned above! It’s a strategy that configures websites based on a visitor’s data. This includes behaviour, demographics/firmographics, and specified interests.

In doing so, your website can provide each visitor with a unique user experience by serving information that’s relevant and timely. If you’re just getting started with website personalization, we recommend starting with geolocation and device type.

However, keep in mind that personalization based on geolocation does not mean tracking your lead down to their exact location! Rather, geolocation tracks a visitor’s approximate location.

An example of personalization using geolocation would be adjusting the copy of your website to feature your nearby physical store.

You could also use geolocation to automatically localize the content of your website to different areas or countries (this includes language, copy, images, cultural references, etc.). For device-type personalization, marketers know that people don’t behave the same way across their devices.

Your customers may use their mobile phones for online shopping, and will only open their laptops when they need to do something more cognitively involved like choosing between two similar products.

Therefore, you can personalize your website to match each visitor’s device. For example, the mobile site would show more widgets containing relevant product offers. While the desktop version has a widget that helps leads compare product specifications.

Conversational Commerce

Conversational commerce refers to businesses using messaging technology as a form of interaction to win sales. Tools and platforms include website and in-app chatbots, live chat, messaging apps (WhatsApp, Telegram, Facebook Messenger, etc.), and voice assistants (Amazon Echo).

In comparison to email, conversational commerce is much more casual and flexible for the customer. Messages also have a higher open rate than emails (whether in-app or through a messaging platform).

Well-executed conversational commerce will integrate seamlessly into your marketing strategy and will be a great source of data for personalization. For example, website chatbots can nudge a visitor by offering to help with common problems related to the webpage.

Mirroring the visitor’s actions can help increase engagement by showing the visitor that you’re actively working to solve their problems. If you notice that visitors spend a lot of time toggling between pages to compare different items, consider mimicking the assistance of a sales representative in a physical store using a chatbot.

Instead of leaving visitors to look around by themselves, your chatbot could ask them about their preferences and guide them towards items the visitor might like. This saves time for the users and makes it easier for them to reach a purchase decision.

Conversational commerce can also mimic the experience of dedicated assistance in high-end retail stores. A customer could open a query, have their doubt resolved, and purchase an item without having to leave the chat.

Whilst not quite the same as being in a physical store, purchasing through the chat is still much faster than opening a query with customer service through a website form, waiting for a reply, and purchasing on the website.

If customized orders are a big part of your business, conversational commerce might be a more user-friendly option for placing orders online. Instead of trawling through countless checkboxes and subpages to place their order, customers can just type their order as they would say it in-store.

Chats that are saved and constantly accessible on proprietary apps or third-party messaging platforms are also a good way to provide post-purchase service. This can be used not only to respond to customer queries, but also for up-selling or cross-selling, re-engagement, and encouraging repeat purchases.

Final Words

You’ve got a lot of options when it comes to personalized marketing strategies. And as mentioned earlier in this report, there isn’t a one-size-fits-all method.

Your first step should be to decide what area of your business could benefit from personalized marketing. Then, take the necessary steps to implement personalization into those campaigns. For example, you could start by creating targeted emails, product recommendations, social media marketing, or custom video messages.

Getting a better understanding of your audience is key to knowing what areas of your business could be strengthened through personalized marketing campaigns. (And chances are, nearly every area of your business would benefit!)

When considering personalized marketing, think about how personalized marketing impacts the customer experience. This includes growing customer expectations, purchasing behaviours, email transaction rates and customer preferences.

By working towards a better understanding of your customer base, and their preferred channels, you’ll be able to create a powerful, fully coordinated personalized marketing strategy that takes your business to the next level!

And soon you’ll realize that having a successful personalized marketing strategy in place can be one of the greatest assets your business has to offer.