Personalized marketing: Starter tips and examples

As consumer behavior continues its digital shift, the need for personalized experiences has never been greater. It's the secret ingredient that raises the bar and sets businesses apart in a sea of digital noise.

71% of consumers expect companies to deliver personalized interactions, while 76% get frustrated when this doesn’t happen, according to McKinsey & Company. The returns for personalized marketing are great too.

Personalization can reduce acquisition costs by as much as 50%, lift revenues by 5-15%, and increase marketing spend efficiency by 10-30%.

It is, however, important to note that mastering personalization requires more than just a few tactics. It demands a deep understanding of your target audience, thoughtful data analysis, and strategic implementation.

In this blog, we will cover the main examples of personalized marketing, the biggest challenges that brands should confront, and the core considerations for providing tailored experiences that deeply connect with audiences.

Examples of personalized marketing

Personalized marketing can take on several forms. The examples below are some of the most common tactics marketers can implement to enhance customer experiences, drive engagement, and increase conversions.

Tailored newsletters and emails

Nothing beats the good ol’ magic of a personalized email delivered straight to your audience’s inbox.

Email personalization typically revolves around custom subject lines, list segmentation, and dynamically customized content. Even minor adjustments, such as substituting a customer's name for a generic greeting in the email subject line, can yield significant impact. Additionally, tailored offers, cart abandonment notifications, and relevant product recommendations can make your customers feel recognized as unique individuals.

Personalized text messages

SMS is a direct personal communication channel that allows you to connect with your audiences almost instantly. Given how inseparable people are from their phones, SMS messages—with content and timing tailored to each contact—give brands a better shot at capturing their audience’s attention and securing better open and click-through rates.

At the fundamental level, it's about delivering the right message to the right person at the right time to encourage a desired action (e.g., account signup, form fill, discount usage). For example, you can use SMS as part of your abandoned cart strategy to bring more customers over the finish line.

Website personalization

Websites don't have to be dull or generic. Making your website—and landing pages—part of a consistent, evolving experience aimed at the individual customer will go a long way towards winning them over.

Tailoring your website means customizing content, layout, and elements (e.g., CTAs) to match a given visitor’s preferences and traits and deliver a web experience informed by their past interactions with the brand. You are fusing data of all sorts and from all sources—demographic, intent, behavioral, etc.—from the past and the present into one holistic view of the customer, one that informs and optimizes the webpage they are browsing in real-time.

To do more with your websites, webforms can be strategically included to capture the attention of website visitors and prompt them to subscribe to newsletters, receive exclusive offers, or participate in surveys. This boosts visitor engagement, grows your subscriber base, and ultimately helps you acquire more leads.

Content and product recommendations

Content recommendations are like having a knowledgeable friend who always knows just what you’d like to read, watch, or listen to next.

Picture a tailor-made recommendation engine, guiding your audience towards content that aligns perfectly with their preferences and interests, nudging them toward conversion and action. For example, a user who frequently visits pages on pet care may be presented with customized content that highlights pet-related products, services, or blog posts.

User experience (UX) personalization

Imagine visiting a website or using an app that feels like it was made just for you. That's the magic of UX personalization—it's like walking into a store and finding everything to be reflective of your taste and needs. From the content you see to the layout that fits your preferences perfectly, UX personalization creates an experience that feels uniquely yours, making every interaction a delight.

Location-based marketing

Real-time, location-based personalization entails utilizing geographic data to provide users with content, promotions, or recommendations that are relevant to their physical location. With the introduction of IoT devices and QR codes, you can enhance your customers’ experience further, enriching their online-offline journey with communications informed by their in-person actions and recent digital behavior.

Potential challenges

Lack of resources

Insufficient team bandwidth—something exacerbated by resource-intensive implementation plans—can hinder the introduction of solutions necessary for personalization projects. Stretched beyond its limit, your team will struggle to respond to customer behaviors and preferences, potentially affecting the overall effectiveness of personalized marketing efforts. This is precisely why user-friendly, scalable solutions matter for brands that wish to begin their personalization journey in earnest.

Privacy concerns

Most websites use third-party cookies to record information about visitors. These cookies track all types of data like location and device type to uncover insights for retargeting, personalized engagement, and marketing optimization.

The issue, however, is that many browsers are phasing out third-party cookies. This leaves brands in a difficult bind, where they are facing more pressure than ever to deliver targeted customer experiences while concerns around privacy and regulatory compliance are mounting. This is why vendors offering alternatives to cookies find themselves in growing demand, and brands can benefit significantly by identifying a reliable solution among a sea of contenders.

Technology integration

If your company has ever created an app, onboarded a new email marketing system, or even updated its payment processing system, you’ve probably had to answer the question: “How will we transfer our data to this new platform?”

This is not an easy feat for any company, and a poorly managed effort can result in data silos and fragmented workflows that add more complications to the picture. It is critical to have a scalable mechanism for consolidating all the valuable data from all the systems. It matters just as much to ensure that the new solutions can co-exist with the existing ones, which means minimal disruptions to critical processes.

Factors to consider for your personalization project

There are several factors that a brand should consider when trying to envision and roll out personalization.

Buyer personas

As part of a Go-to-Market strategy, a buyer persona is created after an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). Note that ICP and buyer personas are different. ICP is the description or type of company you want to sell to—they are usually about target accounts and their leadership audiences. Buyer personas, on the other hand, describe the potential buyers you want to market to—it’s about understanding specific segments of customers.

Buyer personas are fictional, data-driven portraits of your ideal customers, constructed based on research. They can shape the formulation of marketing strategies, and when utilized as data attributes, personas can add an extra layer of nuance to your segmentation efforts.

Establish key performance indicators

Every company’s personalization roadmap will be different, encompassing divergent priorities and components given the varied overall business goals. Figuring out the use cases is no more important than clarifying the appropriate key performance indicators (KPI) against which the personalization initiatives will be assessed. Simply creating a vast array of content options does not indicate a successful personalization initiative. Instead, the activities need to directly contribute to relevant KPIs.

Identify the most engaged channels

Analyzing your audience’s device usage patterns can yield valuable insights. Beyond data on device types, you can unearth intelligence on how they are navigating your mobile app and website, and which pages, screens, or event sections are drawing the most attention. All this data can empower you to create or refine your audience personas, improve recommendations, and optimize your digital customer experience in time.

Measure campaign performance and outcomes

Make sure you have all the necessary analytics in place to assess your personalized campaigns and customer journeys. Surface-level reach, engagement, and conversion rates are unlikely to reveal the finer details of your performance. What’s key is that this does not necessarily require a large investment in tools or technologies. It’s important to consider the whole experience spanning multiple touchpoints. The goal is to measure your campaigns incrementally and refine them along the way.

Test and refine your campaigns

As the audience analytics roll in, your brand should now have a sense of what’s working and what’s not, which segments are engaged, and which strategies are performing well.

Depending on your level of success, graduating to an automation platform may be in order. This will allow your team to move from limited, localized workflows to a more end-to-end, personalization approach that exceeds isolated interactions.

Conclusion

Personalization is no longer a good to have. It is an imperative for any serious marketers today. Assembling the right mix of strategy, talent, and technology for your company will lay the foundation for personalized audience engagement that can enhance your top-line growth.

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Get in touch with us today to learn how we can help you grow your business.