Selling to a Market of One: Why Personalization Matters
Introduction
Personalization is not a fad, some contrived buzz sweeping across sectors and markets with no substance behind it. In 2023, it is safe to say that providing every customer with the right offers, content, and experiences—at the right time and place—will benefit everyone. Personalization is an imperative that will pay off for brands that pursue it with the right strategy and technology.
And there is good reason to place your bet on personalized marketing. After all, the consumers have spoken. 71 percent expect brands to deliver personalized experiences, and nearly 80 percent become frustrated by one-size-fits-all marketing. Companies that excel in personalization drive 40 percent more of their revenue from personalization compared to those that do not.
In this blog, we will walk you through some of the reasons that making personalization so crucial for top-line growth.
Targeted Outreach Improves Cost Efficiency
The same old spray-and-pray approach will at best be met with indifference from your audience. Over 65 percent expect relevant recommendations, tailored messaging, and targeted promotions. Treating your audience base as one indistinguishable mass will only drive up your marketing spending—all while earing little new clients in return.
Instead, why not only deliver a campaign or a communication to individuals with behavioral patterns and traits most indicative of potential interest in them?
When you can do so at scale, you stand to see major gains in your key KPI’s—click-throughs, sign-ups, reservations, purchases, wish list additions, and more. And the neat part? You will only get better at targeting the right segments, gradually boosting your cost efficiency.
Personalized Marketing Uncovers Hidden Opportunities
Segmentation hinges on your ability to organize your audience data and divide them into smaller groups based on shared attributes. However, what about all the visitors you do not know?
At any moment, almost 90 percent of your website visitors can be anonymous. While you may get a sense of which products and pages are getting the most traffic, converting those anonymous visitors is practically impossible—if you cannot identify them to keep the engagement going.
This is where personalization can also make a difference. Done well, this paradigm allows you to spot existing customers and create basic profiles for first-time visitors—paving the way for more tailored interactions next time around. While cookies have been the go-to answer for audience identification, their utility has declined in the wake of decisions by major companies like Google, Apple, and Mozilla to phase out third-party cookies.
Alternatives like SmartDX have emerged in response. They usually provide lightweight software development kits (SDK) that enable you to identify anonymous visitors, capture their data, and create dedicated profiles that form the basis of further conversion-focused marketing campaigns.
Speed Up Conversion at All Times
Sending out a targeted outreach campaign is not the end of your personalized marketing story. Just as importantly, you need to keep tabs on all the audiences dawdling on and passing through your digital channels, scanning for signs of behavior in need of intervention.
Conversion is the product of often multiple rounds of communications, and it matters a great deal to know when and how you should engage a customer to move them to the next step and closer to the finishing line.
For example, if a visitor on your new collection page is showing an intent to exit, you might want to keep them with an offer notification, or at least save a chance for retargeting by asking for their contact information. Tiny snippets of opportunities like this, when added up and acted upon at scale, will energize your conversion considerably. In fact, 59% of consumers expect contextual communications to key moments in their ongoing journeys.
Attribute Conversion with More Precision
Few things engender dread in marketers like the question of showing the actual impact of their marketing efforts. It is an unfortunate effect of both subpar technology and manual reporting processes.
Personalization shifts the focus of your marketing activities from your entire audience base to smaller target groups, and, eventually, individual customers. It places a major emphasis on granular, tailored interactions and consistent awareness of how such markets of one are navigating your customer experience. In other words, you will be able to determine when, how, and where conversions happen across the constellation of your channels.
Conclusion
Personalization has been a dominant buzzword for good reasons. We have looked at the ways in which it can transform your marketing for the better. Putting it into practice as a SMB, however, requires tools that can minimize the potential workload and expenditure.
Personalization has been a dominant buzzword for good reasons. We have looked at the ways in which it can transform your marketing for the better. Putting it into practice as a SMB, however, requires tools that can minimize the potential workload and expenditure.
Schedule a demo session to discover how it can work for you.
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