In this day and age, customers want to spend their money with brands that can offer them a personalized user experience. According to personalized marketing research done by The Institute of Direct and Digital Marketing, 82% of marketers who employ personalized marketing tactics see a boost in their open rates, and as much as a 56% boost in overall revenue. And all of that starts with your marketing campaign and content, because that’s the first thing potential customers will encounter.

So, it’s obvious that personalized marketing works. And while it’s definitely something you should start doing, things aren’t that simple.

How Hyper Personalized Marketing Can Increase Your Sales and Why its Worth the Effort

You see, creating a personalized experience for your customers involves a lot of hard work and resources. Apart from creating highly personalized content, you need to gather demographic and sales data and use the appropriate tools in order to make sense of it and apply it in a meaningful way. There is also the data coming from social media and customer's personal information, which helps you really zero in on what they want.

But, that is a matter for another article. In this one, we will focus on how you can raise your sales through personalized marketing. Check out the following types of personalized marketing.

1. Create Personalized Marketing Messages

Instead of sending out just one identical email to all the users in your email list, try to personalize the email messaging for each individual.

For instance, if your brand or company is hosting seminars or promotions around the country, you can send a personalized message containing the name of the person, as well as their hometown, along with information about when you will be arriving there. Bands and touring musicians this. They will send a personalized email to their followers and let them know about when the tour will be stopping by the followers’ hometown.

One way to boost email engagement further is to add personalized video messages to your emails. Videos can be personalized in several ways. One-to-one messaging is great for sales follow-up. Or you can segment your list according to product usage and send videos based on that.

The level of customization depends solely on the wealth of data which you have collected from your subscribers. The more you are able to obtain, the more personalized your marketing will be.

2. Use Automation to Lead the Customer Down the Sales Funnel

While having a potential customer subscribe to your email list is a huge step, you still have a long way to go before you can convert them. This means that you will need to keep sending them emails in order to develop a relationship with them and earn their trust, as well as engage them in some way.

Collecting as much specific information about them, besides their name and email, is crucial, because it will allow you to divide your list into segments and to create a separate workflow for each one. For instance, you will send different emails depending on their actions or where they are in the purchase process.

If their shopping cart is full, but they haven’t yet bought anything, you will send them a reminder that their cart still awaits them. If they became your customer, you can send them a follow up email which promotes products which are complementary with the ones they have already purchased.

3. Use Metrics to Guide Your Personalized Marketing Efforts

Most marketing tools and software out there allow you not just to collect data on your subscribers, but also to capture and analyze detailed information about the effectiveness of your personalized campaign.

In addition to knowing which one of your emails brought them to one of the landing pages on your website and when, you can also gauge the effectiveness of emails containing offers, special discounts, and limited promotions. When your email list is segmented, you will be able to tell which customers are taking advantage of your offers, and under which conditions, which will allow you to perfect your strategy even further.

4. Use Customer Browsing Data for Better Marketing Personalization

One of the most valuable sources of information for your personalized marketing is browsing data. When a potential customer visits your website, they will be asked to install tracking cookies, which will help you track their activities while on your website. While they can get around that by making use of incognito browsing, you can also apply fingerprinting scripts, which will track their activities regardless.

Why would you want to do this? Amazon is a great personalized marketing example. And if it’s good enough for Amazon, it’s good enough for you.

Amazon and other shopping carts use algorithms to come up with product suggestions you’ll be most interested in. They use customer information such as previous purchases, items in their shopping cart, as well as likes and ratings for items on the website.

5. Personalize Your Website in Accordance with User Behavior

Behavioral targeting approach will enable you to modify your website in real time, based on user actions, which provides yet another level of personalization. The best part about it that it can take on many shapes.

For example, if a user wants to make a purchase through your USA website, which doesn’t deliver to Asia (where the user is from), you can direct them to your other website which does make overseas deliveries.

Another example would be to show the contents of their abandoned shopping cart, or a pop-up with a sign-up form, in case they are browsing your store without registering previously.

If the user in question is a repeat customer and has made more than 3 purchases in the past week/month/year, you can display a pop-up which informs them about their loyalty discount. This also applies to other design elements of the website. For example, use a different website layout or different banner and images, depending on whether the user is registered or not.

6. Always Ask for User Permission

Image: Kai Pilger at Unsplash

In light of the recent Facebook data collection scandal and the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR,)  you should always ask your users for permission to communicate. That’s how you build trust and get them to disclose even more information about themselves.

One way to do it would be to allow them to login to your website or service using their social media login, instead of creating a separate account. Instead of preventing them from browsing your website further in case they haven’t allowed cookies, ask them to enable cookies, but allow them to keep on browsing even if they don’t do so.

Limit the amount of mandatory information that they need to provide and compose Terms of Service and other policies in a way which is clear and accurate. In case they are still not willing to disclose more information than they have to, you can convince them by offering a small discount or a gift in exchange for more information.

Conclusion

Even though it seems like a lot, the truth is, most tools for personalized marketing automate a great deal of the work for you. In fact, you can pretty much automate the entire communication with your potential customer, from the moment they have browsed your store for the first time, right up to the moment when they have made their first purchase.

But, having those tools is not enough in itself. You still need to know how to make the most out of the information users have provided you with, and to build their trust, so that they become repeat customers. We hope this article will help you do that.

Author Sarah Loise actively creates and maintains new content on MyMathDone.com. She also consults with start-up businesses on commercial matters, off-the-shelf business systems, merchandise, and engineering.