If you’ve ever wondered “Is it really worth it to personalize my marketing?” here are five quick stats you need to know.
Personalized marketing can:
- Boost your revenue by as much as 15%
- Cut your acquisition costs in half
- 96% of marketers say personalization helps them advance customer relationships
- 88% say they saw a measurable improvement in business results from personalization
- Personalized content makes your marketing spend up to 30% more efficient
The stats are in — personalized marketing works. It’s been growing in popularity for years, because consumers have come to expect a personalized experience.
It’s clear why this is the new normal — think about how personalized social media has become. With the rise of YouTube and ever-evolving AI algorithms, personalization has become commonplace in social media feeds. People expect to be served content directly relevant to them. TikTok is a prime example of this. The platform’s content-personalization algorithm has its 800 million active users spending an average of 52 minutes per day on the app.
Personalization is an essential part of engagement marketing, because it’s a strong building block for brand loyalty. Tailored offers are 8x more effective than cookie-cutter offers on loyalty program members. With the massive shifts in brand loyalty we’ve seen among consumers in the past year, it’s vital to work personalization into your strategy to help foster loyalty with your audience.
Clearly, personalized marketing has a lot to offer. But, how do you implement it? Here are a few quick ways to get started.
Know Your Customers’ Names — & Use Them
You’ve heard the old adage that everyone’s favorite sound is their own name. There’s verified science to that — hearing your name causes your brain to release feel-good chemicals like serotonin and dopamine. The same applies to reading your own name.
This is why knowing someone’s name, and using it, is a commonly recommended relationship-building tactic across industries. Teachers are coached to commit names to memory to help bond with their students. Salespeople use names as a trust-building, persuasive sales tool — and so should marketers.
Obviously, you can’t use someone’s name until you learn it. That’s why capturing your customer’s first and last name early in the process is vital. There are a few options for getting this info.
If you’re capturing emails for a newsletter, you have the option to capture their name on the same form — but, be careful, as requiring this could cause a decline in email captures if people don’t want to share their names. Offering a discount for this info — think “get 15% off your first purchase!” type of messaging — can help mitigate the risk of lost captures.
Or, try capturing just email on your newsletter signup and sending a quick survey as a follow up. You could offer an additional discount for filling this out — something like “Fill out this quick survey and we’ll bump your discount on your first purchase to 20%!” If that offer elevation feels too aggressive for you, it may suffice just to use personalization as the offer — “We’d love to get to know you better so we can send you personalized offers and discounts!”
In this survey, you can capture their name and even get some info to help you personalize their offers better. For example, if you sell jewelry, ask “Are you more of a silver or gold person?” File this info away, it’ll be handy in tailoring effective offers for them in the future.
Luckily, if you’ve captured emails from people by way of purchase, you’ll already have their name on file and a good amount of data to go on, too. Now that you have your customer’s name, use it! Your subject lines are a great place to start — people are 26% more likely to open an email that has their name in the subject line.
Tailor Offers to Fit What You Know About Your Customers
Tailored offers appeal to people the same way recommended content appeals to them in a social media algorithm. They’re more likely to act on the offer (or engage with the content, in the social media example) because it’s already been personalized to fit them.
Sticking with the jewelry-selling example, you can set up an email flow with higher conversion opportunity using what you know about your customers. This is where that survey comes in handy again — or that purchase history data you have on previous customers. Create an audience that combines all your past purchasers of gold pieces with anyone who answered “gold” on your survey.
Then, set up a promotion on gold items and share the discount code via a promo email or two with that audience (and don’t forget to put their name in the subject line). Boom — you have a personalized campaign that’s more likely to convert.
Key Takeaways:
Personalization is what consumers crave. Whether it’s the content they engage with on social media, or the products they purchase from retailers, the “tailored-to-you” factor just plain works.
You can quickly get personalized marketing to work for you by capturing the names (and other info) of your potential customers and using them in communications. Plus, put that consumer data to work with personalized offers to achieve more effective promotions.