Personalized marketing, or one-to-one marketing, is an essential part of modern marketing. No successful online marketer can afford to be without it.
What Is Personalized Marketing?
It can be defined in a number of ways, but in general, the goal of personalized marketing is to deliver individualized content and product suggestions to your target audience. This is accomplished through gathering data, analyzing it, and using various forms of automated technology to help you deliver the right marketing messages to the right people.
What Are the Benefits of Personalized Marketing?
The main benefit of personalized marketing is to engage customers more deeply by demonstrating an understanding of what they want or need. In terms of prospective customers, it helps build a relationship by making each person feel like you know them as an individual, and are not just spamming to the masses.
It also offers a better overall customer experience. The more they get to know you, the more they are willing to share data about themselves, and the more you can help them to find what they really want and need. They will be willing to engage with you more, downloading free reports, taking eCourses, participating in surveys, and so on, getting great value from you and giving you invaluable information in return that can help you refine your marketing messages and keep them coming back for more.
Studies have shown that 80% of all sales in a business are generated by 20% of customers. This means repeat customers are the lifeblood of any business. Most marketers spend so much time looking for new customers that they don’t pay attention to the ones they already have. Personalization can help solve this problem, making those on your list feel like they are valued and that you “know” them well.
Through this feeling of connection and loyalty, they will be more likely to shop with you than another business, which means more revenue for you. Personalization can also make this easier by presenting a unified brand across all marketing channels, such as email and social media, mobile and apps.
Small Businesses Can Do It Too
Personalization probably sounds great if you have a large staff and huge marketing budget, but what is a lean and mean small business to do in order to keep up? There are a number of key issues to consider.
* Technology – Being able to track individual customers will require various forms of technology, from something as simple as the personalization field in your email marketing platform, to retargeting to try to make the sale from someone who already visited your site but did not buy.
* Time and attention – Business owners need to learn the technology and software, and pay attention to the intelligence that is being gathered.
* Creating accurate customer profiles – Sometimes you get so much data, it is difficult to merge it all into one customer profile you can then use to market smarter, not harder.
* Segmentation – Many marketers just start out with one list, which then grows and grows. But not every person on the list has identical needs and interests. Segmenting your lists more accurately can lead to more sales. Email marketing platforms like AWeber.com have recently introduced tags to try to help segment large lists.
* Successful personalization – The first step is to find a content personalization engine that you can afford and which meets the needs of your particular business. Here is a useful checklist of questions to be answered about each engine you are considering: https://boomtrain.com/content-recommendation-engine-checklist/
The solution should be easy to set up and implement on your site. It will take a few days to get up and running fully, but will soon start to provide relevant content suggestions to your customers. Then it is a question of you making the most of the data you capture and observing its impact on your sales.
