Marketing Personalization for The Best User Experience

As an active integrated marketer, you are familiar with marketing personalization--delivering brand messaging and content tailored to an individual customer. But do you know how or why you would want to use it? Below is an overview of why and how to use marketing personalization, adding Artificial Intelligence (AI) to your marketing toolkit, and tips for overcoming customer barriers. 

Why Personalize?

Every business wants to differentiate itself from its competitors and provide the best user experience for customers. Personalization is a creative and meaningful way to do this, getting away from generic, one-size-fits-all marketing. Your customers are more than their demographic, sociographic, or psychographic data. It is necessary to discover what motivates them, capture their real-time behaviors, account for changing preferences, and understand their experiences during the customer journey.

Personalization helps to overcome customer concerns about security and sharing data. Getting personal with your messaging also generates greater engagement, better responses, more conversions, and customer loyalty. Personalization lets you get in front of the right customers, with the right experiences, in the right places, at the right time.   

How Do You Personalize?

Email segmentation continues to be the primary way that integrated marketers create personalized messaging. This technique allows you to categorize your audience by its unique characteristics, targeting different groups and sending custom messaging that will resonate with them. Personalized outreach is ideal for just about any marketing campaign: display or retargeting ads, on your website or landing pages, in emails, direct mail, or with automation tools like chatbots.

Consider the totality of your customers and personalize their entire journey. Look into user activity and find where they encounter “bumps in the road” to determine how you can smooth their path or reach out to overcome hesitation. Continue personalization efforts long after the first conversion—cultivate your customers’ loyalty, responding to their changing interests and behaviors.

Adding AI to Your Marketing

Artificial Intelligence (AI) can also play a significant role in achieving marketing personalization. The platform scans all your incoming and accumulated data far more effectively than you can, building a vision of the entirety of a customer’s interests, online behaviors, history, etc. The AI then assigns the correct pre-determined (and personalized) messaging or offers based on the data you select. AI also allows you to do this at scale, easing the burden on you and your team to compile customer data manually. 

AI is constantly learning and can help you to adjust your outreach to personalize your conversations with customers. It captures insights based on customer behaviors in-store and at your website, retargeting customers accordingly. You can also use AI to send personalized messages to customers based on triggers you have set up—the items they click on, cart abandonment, adding items to their wish list, etc. 

Overcoming Barriers

Customers often hesitate to share their details with integrated marketers because they are unsure what will be done with their data or fear that providing their information may lead to security issues. As it turns out, though, many people are willing to trade their concerns in exchange for a great deal.

Individually personalized deals that reflect customer interests or historical preferences through customization often overcome customer wariness. Making customers feel valued is another way to entice them to give up their data. Taking the time to get to know their interests and send customized messages that provide offers on things they need make customers feel like you know them. You should also be straightforward about gathering customer data to avoid a feeling that you’ve tricked them or used “big brother” tactics to get their information. Instead, let them know that you want to improve their experience and send them relevant offers.

Conclusion

The key to personalization is getting the complete picture of your customers and generating personalized offerings. Leverage the vast amounts of data available to you about each customer to create curated experiences. Continue to be transparent about your purpose in asking for information and make strides to encourage every customer to feel valued. Go deeper with personalization and match your message to the moment.