What Is Marketing Personalization?
Marketing personalization is a strategy that focuses on delivering personalized marketing content to individual consumers by using data, digital technology and automation. It’s also known as one-to-one marketing or personalized marketing.
Common examples of marketing personalization include:
Individualized Emails Based on a Customer’s Account History
In email marketing, personalization often takes the form of product recommendations, targeted informational content, onboarding messages and special offers. When customers create an online account with a brand, they provide personal information such as age, gender and location.
Brands also track metrics like account creation, how often customers log in, and shopping cart activity. With this data, marketers use automation to deliver highly targeted email messages tailored to each customer’s needs.
Personalized Advertising Based on Purchases or Web Activity
Automated, targeted ads that follow users from website to website are among the best recognized types of marketing personalization. Websites use tiny text files called cookies to track users’ movement across the web, and build profiles of individual browser habits.
To better understand customer behaviors and interests, brands also gather purchase and search data. The result is that when a customer makes a purchase online, or browses for a car or a pair of shoes, they’re likely to see ads for those or related products as they continue moving about the web.
Specific Offers Tailored to a Customer’s Preferences and Interests
Personalized offers like a coupon for your favorite product or a special offer for a complimentary item create value for both brands and consumers. Consumers expect the brands they do business with to know them and understand what they are looking for, and a growing majority of consumers recognize the value of sharing their preferences with those brands.
Marketers capture this information through a variety of mechanisms, including favorited items, loyalty programs, mobile wallets, wish lists, preference centers, and purchase histories, and use automation to push out tailored content that meets or predicts customer needs.
Event-Triggered Messages
When a customer takes an action such as checking in for a flight or abandoning an item in a digital shopping cart, they are increasingly likely to receive messages related to that specific activity via SMS, push, email and other digital channels.
Event-triggered messages generate a significantly higher response than mass-marketing campaigns, making this an important strategy for leading brands. Marketers use automation and customer journey builder tools to set specific events as triggers for automated messages that are timely and relevant to an individual customer’s specific context.
Other common examples of event triggers for personalized marketing messages include a first purchase, shipping confirmations, transaction notifications or changes to an order.
How Personalized Marketing Differs From Traditional Marketing Approaches
Traditional mass marketing focuses on casting a wide net to reach customers through various media, including print, broadcast, direct mail, phone, and outdoor advertising. Marketing personalization is targeted to the individual and offers a higher level of engagement between brands and consumers.
This approach focuses primarily on digital media and relies on digital technologies to collect and analyze data, and deliver messages through mediums including email, websites, social media, mobile apps or SMS.
What Are the Benefits of Personalization in Marketing?
Marketing personalization offers numerous benefits for both consumers and brands. It creates significant value and convenience for consumers, while helping brands grow revenue, foster customer loyalty and cultivate brand advocacy. In fact, for many consumers, personalized marketing is no longer just nice to have. It’s an expectation.
This trend is reflected in the following marketing personalization statistics.
- 91% of consumers say they are more likely to shop with brands that provide offers and recommendations that are relevant to them. – Accenture
- 80% of consumers are more likely to purchase a brand that provides personalized experiences. – Epsilon
- 90% of U.S. consumers find marketing personalization very or somewhat appealing. – Statista
Key benefits of marketing personalization include:
Improved Customer Experience (CX)
Today’s empowered consumers expect to be treated as individuals, making good personalization essential to delivering a great customer experience. Brands that can meet customers wherever they are with timely, individualized, contextual content tend to see the best CX ratings. Research has shown that a positive experience with a brand is more influential than great advertising.
Stronger Brand Loyalty & Retention
Loyal customers are the best customers, and consumers tend to be more loyal to brands that understand them and what they’re looking for. Delivering personalized messages based on customer behaviors and preferences significantly improves your chances of cementing brand loyalty and converting customers into brand advocates.
Enhanced Customer Engagement Through Personalization
Consumers are exposed to thousands of marketing messages every day. In this cluttered and competitive environment, brands are much more likely to earn a response when they personalize those messages, whether that’s through email, a mobile app, a website or another channel.
Increased Conversions & Measurable ROI
Customers are significantly more likely to purchase products or services from organizations that provide personalized experiences. Brands that effectively personalize their messages consistently see improved results and ROI, including reduced acquisition costs and increased customer spending.
How Digital Marketing Personalization Works
The digital and mobile revolution has paved the way for today’s increasingly sophisticated approaches to marketing personalization. These strategies are also made possible by various technological advances in data collection, data analysis, automation and artificial intelligence (AI).
Modern marketing technologies (martech) enable brands to pair traditional demographic data, such as age, gender and location, with behavioral data from websites, digital advertising, social media platforms and mobile applications. By combining this data, marketers can gain a more complete understanding of individual customers and their needs, preferences and behaviors to improve personalization.
Using powerful tools like customer relationship management (CRM) and data management platforms, brands then analyze and organize this data at a massive scale and create individual profiles for customers and prospects. Based on these individualized customer insights and profiles, marketers leverage martech, automation and AI to deliver highly tailored messages and experiences to customers and prospects.
These advances also allow marketers to assess the effectiveness of messages in real-time in order to iterate and optimize these strategies for continual performance improvement.
Data-Driven Personalization Strategies
Marketers can use behavioral and demographic data to deliver highly relevant content for each customer. With data-driven personalization, brands can meet customers where they are on the customer journey. Here are some examples of data-driven personalization strategies to increase customer engagement:
- Segmenting audiences based on browsing behavior, purchase history or engagement.
- Delivering personalized content or offers based on location, device or past interactions.
- Using predictive analytics to stay ahead of customer needs.
These strategies not only increase engagement but also build trust with customers.
AI-Powered Marketing Personalization Tools
AI-powered marketing personalization identifies patterns, predicts behavior, and optimizes messaging across channels without manual intervention. AI-powered personalization tools are adopted in real time, whether that’s through dynamic content recommendations based on user behavior or automated segmentation as new data is collected to keep marketing campaigns relevant and engaging.
Implementing Personalized Marketing Campaigns
Implementing personalized marketing campaigns begins by mapping the customer journey and identifying the touchpoints that will have the most impact. Using data-driven personalization strategies and AI-powered technology, brands can orchestrate customized cross-channel marketing campaigns tailored to customer needs across multiple channels.
Current Trends in Personalized Marketing
The ongoing growth in marketing personalization is driven by a number of key trends.
Growth in Digital & Mobile Technology
The digital and mobile revolution has provided an unprecedented opportunity for marketers to achieve the gold standard of true, personalized engagement. Today’s consumers conduct a significant portion of their business online and on their mobile devices.
As a result, brands can now take advantage of the full context surrounding a consumer — what they’ve purchased, what they like online, and how they behave when they visit your website — to engage via their mobile device in a way that feels more personal.
Changing Consumer Expectations
Consumer expectations are on the rise, and personalizing content with only a subscriber’s name is no longer sufficient. What consumers want now is real-time, relevant content tailored specifically to their individual needs.
Achieving this level of personalization demands advanced customer intelligence and tools that enable brands to leverage insights for creating marketing content that offers substantial customer value.
Geotargeting & Proximity Marketing
Emerging geotargeting and proximity marketing technologies empower brands to send personalized, contextual messages to customers based on their geographic location at any given moment. This type of location-based marketing provides the ability to personalize content based on the context of the individual user.
For example, by triggering a notification when a customer enters or walks by a brick and mortar store, marketers can bridge the physical and digital context to provide actionable content at the exact moment it can be used.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) & Automation
Advancements in AI and automation enable marketers to leverage AI platforms for analyzing vast amounts of data, allowing them to predict customer behaviors and identify patterns on an unprecedented scale. Current and emerging AI-powered tools can also automate the timing, communication channels, and content of messages.
This powerful combination empowers marketers to create and quickly refine highly customized and personalized experiences.
Real-Time Personalization Technologies
Customers expect timely, relevant messages. Real-time personalization allows brands to use live data from websites, mobile apps, and other digital touchpoints to update customers in the exact moment they’re likely to engage.
Whether updating a website’s content based on a user’s browsing history or dynamically recommending products based on user actions, real-time personalization ensures customer interactions feel relevant and engaging.
Privacy-First Personalization Approaches
As consumers become more aware of their data privacy, they expect brands to handle their information responsibly. First-party and zero-party data are simple ways to collect the information you need directly from users to build trust and create personalized experiences tailored to their preferences.
Getting Started With Personalized Marketing
Personalized marketing requires a thoughtful strategy, the right mix of technology and ongoing monitoring to ensure your campaign efforts are effective. Here are a few smart ways to get started with personalized marketing:
Creating Your Personalization Strategy
The first step to personalized marketing is to create a clear strategy. Start by defining your objectives and understanding the needs of your customers to determine where personalization will have the most impact. Is your goal to increase engagement or boost conversions? Answering questions like this will help align your strategy with measurable outcomes.
Essential Tools and Technologies
Marketing personalization relies on a set of tools and technologies to collect and analyze customer data. Use marketing automation and analytics tools with your CRM to uncover insights about your customers, guide campaigns and deliver personalized experiences at various touch points.
Measuring Success in Personalized Marketing
Always align the metrics of your personalized marketing strategy with your goals, such as engagement rates, conversions, and customer retention. Utilize A/B testing and continuous performance tracking to refine your messaging over time. This approach will help you determine whether your campaigns are resonating with customers.
Want to learn more about how marketing personalization can deliver results at each stage of the customer lifecycle? Contact us today!
Marketing Personalization Frequently Asked Questions
What Are Some Examples of Successful Personalized Marketing?
The most successful examples of personalized marketing are those paired with a cross-channel marketing strategy, delivering timely and relevant messages that meet customers where they are.
For instance, you could send a push notification to inform your customers about a promotion or a personalized email with product recommendations based on their behaviors and preferences to engage them at every touch point.
What Are the Best Practices for a Personalized Marketing Strategy?
A personalized marketing strategy should utilize rich customer insights collected through privacy-protected information, such as first-party and zero-party data. After data collection, test your messaging on different audience segments to learn what resonates and adjust your approach as needed.
How Can Marketers Personalize Marketing Effectively?
Use AI-powered personalization tools to track insights in real-time. By continuously tracking insights and refining them, brands can create personalized experiences and foster loyalty.