If you use Netflix or Amazon, you’ve seen how easily personalised user experiences make it for users to take advantage of a service. The movie recommendations on Netflix and the product recommendations on Amazon are based on algorithms that specialise in personalising the user experience to every individual user.
Personalisation can be a part of your marketing, as well. The more you personalise your marketing to individual recipients, the more likely they are to choose to continue to receive your marketing messages and to turn into paying customers. What follows are seven marketing personalisation ideas you can implement at your business.
Make sure your emails are from an employee and not the company
The easiest way to bring greater personalisation to your marketing experience is to make sure that your marketing emails go out signed by an employee. It’s a good idea to add a photo of the employee, as well. Putting a real human behind your emails makes for a human touch. When you make it look like it’s the company that’s sending out emails, and not an individual at the company, your messages can seem impersonal.
Address each email recipient by name
It isn’t a good idea to open your emails with a generic “Dear Friend” or a “Hi, Customer.” When you send your emails out with generic openers, you miss out on an important opportunity to reach out and establish a relationship with your email recipients. If people on your email list signed up to receive email from you, you probably have their names. Nearly every email service provider allows you to personalise each email that you send out, with the names of recipients. You should use the feature.
Segment your email recipient list
It isn’t a good idea to send the same generic email to every recipient. Different email recipients are likely to have different interests. You should make sure that you send emails out that are personalised to different recipient interests. It’s a good idea to create different marketing personas to describe your recipients and create different emails to appeal to them.
Build targeted landing pages for every marketing persona
Sending out different emails to target different user interests based on the marketing personas that they match is only the first step of personalising your marketing. You also need to make sure that the emails that different marketing personas receive have links that lead to customised landing pages. Whatever information a marketing persona is interested in, that’s the kind of landing page they should see when they click on a link in the email.
Build different LinkedIn Company Pages to target different recipients
LinkedIn Company Pages are a useful targeting tool. When a visitor visits your company’s product page on LinkedIn, LinkedIn Company Pages allows you to decide what products and services they see. You get to target different products and services based on a visitor’s geographic location, job title, and industry.
Talk to your customers and prospects on social media
Many consumers prefer to research the companies that they do business with over social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook. It’s important to not automate your social media accounts too much. For the greatest amount of personalisation, you should have an employee looking at customer communications and personally responding to them.
Make use of lead intelligence to follow up on sales
The intelligence or information that you gather about your leads – information about their demographics, the way to behave when they arrive when your site and so on – can help you define different customer personas. The information that you gather can also help your sales team personalise the sales emails that they create. Your sales team can personalise their sales pitch depending on what kind of industry the lead works in, what lead nurturing campaign they found them on, what channel the leads chose for their first conversion, and what kind of content they showed interest in on the way to their conversion.
Studies show that close to 70 percent of marketers plan to use greater personalisation in their marketing in the near future. If your business doesn’t personalize its marketing efforts at this point, you should start right away.
