How to Increase Revenue With Personalized Marketing

Did you know that marketers who personalize the website experience for their customers could see up to a 19% increase in sales?

As consumers become more discerning about brands and as they use multiple devices to complete transactions, personalized experiences now take an even greater importance for the consumer and the marketer alike.

E-consultancy reports that 52% of online marketers agree that personalizing content is an essential process of their online marketing initiatives.

Here’s how to augment your ROI through personalization:

Collecting the right data

Without the appropriate data, it simply would not be possible to deliver customized experiences to your audience. The good news is that consumers are willing to provide data if it will help in personalizing their experience.

In an era of the Internet of Things (iON), it is possible for brands to collect consumer information from a multitude of touch points; from email, to social media to mobile apps, gathering information has never been easier.

A combination of the right technology and the right team is paramount to aggregating the right data about your target audience.

Personalize your emails

It is a proven fact that personalized emails have higher click through and engagement rates.

Personalizing subject lines and addressing recipients by their name is a prerequisite but it is not enough.

Take the next step by delivering personalized email content based on your customers’ needs. For example, once a customer visits your website or subscribes to your mailing list you could ask them to tell you why they did this. This way, you can start to send them email content that is targeted to their needs and expectations. Jessica Alba’s Honest Company does this very well.

Segmenting your mailing list into persona based on their user behavior and other attributes such as gender, location and age is at the heart of email personalization. This also allows you to send highly relevant emails to different recipients depending on their individual attributes.

Another way to personalize email is to consider your recipients’ time zones and location based on the data you have available.

All in all, consumers who receive emails that are customized to their needs are likelier to convert faster than those who receive mass-targeted, irrelevant emails.

Website personalization

Did you know that 40% of consumers spend more money on brands that personalize the shopping experience through a multichannel approach?

Dynamic website personalization (DWP) is a smart functionality that allows your website to deliver different types of content to different site visitors depending on their user-behavior and where they are in the buying cycle.

Netflix and Amazon are good examples of companies that utilize web personalization to boost engagement and sales.

Delivering personalized content on your website is a sure-fire way of shortening the buying cycle. Think about it this way, when a customer visits your site and the type of content they see there relates to just what they have been looking for, they are more likely to convert than if the content was not customized to their needs at that particular time.

When personalizing your website, the content you deliver should be based on relevant browser behavior such as the types of products they have browsed, their purchasing history, as well as abandoned carts and products.

You could also segment your site visitors and deliver personalized content based on segments such as past behavior on the website, demographic data, and purchased products/services so you can cross-sell or up-sell accordingly etc.

There is no shortage of tools you can use to create dynamic website personalization experiences. Visual Website Optimizer and Personyze are two good resources to get you started.

Social media personalization

Are you delivering the same content to everyone in your social community? You probably are annoying some people and not getting much ROI from such as indiscriminate efforts.

Social media personalization, just like email personalization, requires you to segment your audience in order to deliver experiences that are relevant to your community.

Most social sites provide detailed analytics and a way to mine information about your audience. Whether you are targeting your audience with Facebook or Twitter ads, sharing content to Google Circles, or retargeting them on the News Feed, it is now possible to deliver these to a very specific audience based on their attributes and user behavior.

Adopt a multi-channel approach

If your online strategy entails optimizing for mobile only, you are missing the point. Consumers are increasingly using omni-channel approaches to interact with brands and to complete transactions.

From email to mobile to desktop to physical stores to ecommerce to TV… it is an ongoing cycle and no one channel should be optimized over the others. Instead, your personalization efforts need to be integrated and incorporated across all these touch points, in a way that offers a seamless customized experience for the consumer.

For example, if a customer places an item in the shopping cart using their mobile device, they should be able to see this item on their desktop later on.

Research shows that multi-channel consumers are up to 50% more profitable than those who use only a single channel to shop. Brands that use a multi-channel approach to personalization generate higher returns on marketing.

Personalized Marketing

If you are not personalizing, you are probably delivering an experience that is not resonating with your target audience. On the contrary, customizing content to your audiences’ needs provides the most effective way to get the most returns on your marketing costs.