Personalized Marketing Strategies For The 21st Century

This article was written by Emmanuel Olutokun, an experienced brand strategist and growth enthusiast.

Personalized marketing refers to the delivery of services to consumers in manners that exudes the feeling of importance. It can also be referred to as consumer/user experience design.

It’s predicated upon the truth that consumers gravitate more to brands and businesses that know their needs and deliver it in the best way possible.

This is different from mass marketing where we make one size fit all.

Technology and big data has made it possible for brands to deepen relationships with consumers online.

Experience is the keyword for the consumer. How do they feel when they come in contact with your platform. Is the ambience welcoming and the product relevant. Digital ambience could be as little as average page load time.

Some of the channels that can be personalized are website, Web App, Mobile app, Email, Digital Ads, Push notifications.

Here are some strategies that makes some brands do better in Personalized Marketing.

1. Design with empathy: You need to be aware of the feelings and behaviour of your customer. What are they searching for or his of the most interests to them. Use this information to design a multichannel experience that keeps them hooked and coming back.

2. Develop an OmniChannel approach: the interesting thing about today’s consumer is that they have a complicated path to purchase. Investing in one or two channels is not enough particularly if you’re a global brand. This is where SaaS tools like Salesforce marketing come in. These platforms tracks the consumer journey across the web in order to deliver the best experience to the consumer. First party data.

3. Test everything: Continuous testing helps stay on top of the constant change in consumer behaviour. It could even help solve ad fatigue. Split test contents, subject lines, visuals, content placements, designs etc. As an example, Netflix can have up to 9 movie posters for a particular movie and serve you recommendations based on your interest over time. If you are interested in action and adventure, a scene that depicts your interest will be used.

4. Cross sell and Upsell: Cross selling simply means getting your customer to purchase a product that’s related to what is already being bought while Upselling is persuading customers to purchase a premium or upgraded version of a product. If you’ve ever tried to purchase an hosting service you’ll notice the adds-on that come with like a Security plugin, most you buy it because you need it. Relevant product recommendations, “people also viewed” or “you might be interested in this” tab makes the shopping experience worthwhile. I came across a creepy report on how Target knew that a teenager was pregnant even before her family knew. You can read it here https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target-figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/#68e4a3a96668

5.  Segmentation and Smart Targeting: audience segmentation is a crucial part of personalization being able to effectively use first part data in non-creepy manners. There are narrowed data points like a salesforce love score which assigns a score to each customer based on their activities on your website. This makes it easy to determine which audience I should be targeting at particular time.

As an addition research suggests that consumers are more responsive when addressed with their names.

Some tools that helps track, monitor and manage customer interactions in varied degrees include Salesforce, HubSpot, Zoho & Adobe

HubSpot has some good certification courses to help get familiar.