How Personalization Wins Over Customers

Users have come to expect personalized marketing messages — ads that not only cater to their specific product preferences, but appeal to them as individuals.

Successful marketing personalization means using your brand’s available data to treat each prospective customer as a unique entity. Businesses who tend carefully to each individual’s interests in meaningful ways enjoy more efficient digital campaign efforts, encourage larger transactions, and gain a higher concentration of loyal customers.

Creating a Working Relationship

Personalizing ads boils down to your brand’s ability to learn from every interaction to better inform the next. When an ecommerce site uses a potential shopper’s previous activity to show similar products or complementary items, it establishes a mutually beneficial relationship with that user and makes them feel valued. As your marketing efforts guide users through the sales funnel with timely and beneficial ads, the experience should take on a conversational quality rather than a stale sales pitch, engaging users in a uniquely-customized exchange with your brand.

The goal of any brand should be to cultivate healthy long-term relationships with its customers through each successful engagement. The optimal way to spark those kinds of relationships is with a dynamic approach that feels entirely integrated and seamless for new and returning shoppers alike.

How Personalization Defines the Consumer Journey

A customer’s path to purchase is rarely linear. Personalizing the interactions between brands and shoppers often requires multiple lines of communication throughout various stages of the sales funnel. Here are a few impactful ways brands can customize their messaging:

1. Host Relevant Content. Customers frequently take their initial steps toward conversion with questions that need answering. Be it through a helpful company blog post or a targeted video based on your users’ search history, it’s critical to position your brand as a reliable source of truth to address these questions. Establishing trust with customers through freely-available information is one of the easiest ways to fast-track their path to purchase.

2. Personalized Offers. Major social platforms have universally enabled brands to build campaigns around past customer interactions. The combined powers of dynamic retargeting and audience segmentation can deliver ads featuring products of interest to extremely qualified shoppers, whether those users added products to a cart before abandoning the purchase or simply browsed your digital marketplace. Utilizing these remarketing tools across each platform to their fullest extent will aid your business in catering to the individual user.

3. Exclusives. The added incentive of exclusive offers, either through limited availability, special deals, or membership-only products makes a significant impact on perceived desirability. Enticing audiences with offerings in exchange for following the company Facebook page or creating an account on a branded website produces useful data for fine-tuning your personalization efforts.

4. Better Email Follow-ups. Personalized emails can deliver all the product offerings listed above in the form of a friendly reminder, alongside links directly to where the customer last left the checkout process or to a digital coupon. Emails can also provide helpful recommendations for shoppers who previously completed a purchase. Remember to keep these messages relevant and personable — nobody likes a subject line addressed “Dear customer,” or “To whom it may concern.”

Using First-Party Data to Enhance the Customer Experience

Tailoring an experience for individuals requires data. Tracking cross-device activity and using pixels from different shopping platforms builds a more complete view of how customers interact with your content, and creates an experience catered for them rather than the demographic or similar pool of customers to which they belong.

The good news is even as third-party cookies fall out of style, the overwhelming majority of customers are willing to provide basic personal data for a better brand experience — and even more are willing if a business is transparent about how that data will be used. Nobody likes to be bombarded with spam ads, which is why most shoppers respond more positively to ads adapted to their personal preferences.

Improving your brand’s personalization practices benefits both sides of the business-customer relationship, building loyalty and trust among shoppers new to your products while highlighting areas of your marketing strategy that may warrant some refining.