Personalizing Customer Experience: The New Age of Digital Marketing

Customer is king—that's one of the first things you learn as a marketer or salesperson. So, how do you attract a king's (or a queen's) attention to your brand? Provide them with the best personalized experience, of course!

Marketing is becoming more customer-centric day by day. This is especially true since the advent of smartphones allowing customers to access thousands of similar products at their fingertips.

That's why brands that want to conquer their industry target their potential customers with personalized campaigns and messaging. In fact, 63% of marketers concur that personalization has helped them see a marked increase in customer engagement and, consequently, conversion rates.

So, while it is not possible for you to get inside your customer's minds, you can still predict and even exceed their expectations by delivering a tailored brand experience through personalized marketing efforts.

What is Personalization In Marketing?

Personalization in marketing is a new methodology that uses real-time data collected through artificial intelligence and data analysis in order to create content, products, and services for a specific audience segment.

The personalized marketing approach provides brands with a deeper understanding of their customers. It helps them build meaningful relationships through tailored brand experiences delivered individually, one customer at a time.

A happy customer is the best brand advocate you can have. This means personalization in marketing not only helps strengthen your present customer relationships but also helps your brand attract and build new ones.

Benefits of Personalization In Marketing:

Most consumers are not looking to purchase products; they are scrounging the market for buying benefits. Maybe something that makes them look good or creates an impression? Or perhaps, something that helps them save time and make their lives easier.

Personalization in marketing helps to increase your brand awareness and double down on those emotional triggers in your ideal customer's head. It convinces them that they need to buy what you are offering. The more you can delve into and understand your prospect's emotions, the more you can customize your offerings and convince them to convert into revenue-making opportunities for your business.

Let's see some benefits of personalizing your marketing efforts for your brand:

Improve Marketing ROI for your Brand.

Did you know that 51% of marketers have stated that personalization across multiple touchpoints has helped them increase the ROI of their marketing efforts by 300%?

The usage of AI and automation allows you to save time and money while providing your customers with more useful advantages and enhancing their engagement with your brand.

This also means you will have an improved understanding of what qualities your customers seek in your offerings and tailor your products in the exact way. You will also discover who your customers are—the ones who actually have the need and the budget to buy from you.

Source: Tenor

This will prevent your brand from unnecessarily wasting time and resources chasing inviable leads, thereby reducing marketing costs for your campaigns and still getting better returns on your marketing budget.

Elevate Brand Experience for your Customers.

Did you know that if customers do not find your brand experience personalized enough, 45% of them will take their money and run to your competitors? Now, that will be a nightmare for your brand!

Personalization can help you avert such a disaster and help customers connect to your brand through a stellar customer experience. Your brand can develop genuine connections with your customers that give them the impression of personalized care by using the information you extract using technologies like data analytics, artificial intelligence, and automations.

No matter how solid you think your marketing plan is, you still need to keep an eye on how consumer expectations shift and adjust as necessary to create an excellent brand experience. Customers that have a better customer experience usually need less nurturing and convincing to invest in your brand's products and services.

Personalization also induces your customers to develop emotional ties with your brand, which translates into brand loyalty, which, in turn, inspires brand advocacy. Word-of-mouth marketing is still one of the best ways for a brand to attract prospects, and it all begins with a good product and great customer service!

Maximize Revenue and Take Over the Market.

Most businesses sell online today, which means, your prospects are currently faced with thousands of purchasing options at their fingertips. Personalization sets your brand apart.

Personalization in marketing helps you boost sales and increase revenue in the following ways:

• Emphasizing more on precise targeting of both your product or service and the content you build surrounding it.

• Enabling flexible and dynamic pricing depending on the prospect's demographic and psychographic attributes.

• Developing data-driven strategies for marketing campaigns that grab customer attention, promote your business, and position it as the best solution in the market.

• Improving each customer's experience with your brand through more precise and relevant recommendations.

  With personalization, you can outperform the competition by streamlining your potential customer's decision-making process and limiting options to the most relevant ones based on the data you have gathered.

How is Personalized Marketing different from Regular Marketing?

Personalization isn't a new buzzword in marketing and sales. It has been around, and you can probably pinpoint ten examples of it.

Perhaps, it is that sales email that calls you out by your name and asks you if you are interested in a new product the company has launched. Or maybe, your food delivery app sent you a push notification about the delicacies you abandoned in your cart and offered them at a 30% discount?

Regular personalization also uses data to extract insights into customers and make marketing communication more relevant to them. But the similarities end there.

Source: Frizbit

Personalization pulls information from real-time data to alter products and pricing to fit the customer's preferences and provide them with a more individualized customer experience.

Let's check out three criteria that sets personalization apart from regular marketing.

Data

Research indicates that only about 22% of customers are satisfied with the level of personalization they receive from their favorite brands. This means there is a huge gap to be met, especially when most brands have smartphone apps to engage and convert their users. This is probably why a well-executed personalization mobile app strategy can help you increase your marketing spend ROI by 8x and lift sales by more than 10%.

The data used in personalization marketing is even more granular and includes —

• Online browsing behavior of prospects

• Customer shopping habits

• Customer preferences and interests (such as discounts, free samples, or templates)

• Periods of activity (such as when most customers sign up or make more purchases)

• Inquiries seeking engagement from the brand.

  Level of Customization

Regular marketing only uses data they find about prospects online. However, personalization connects data from multiple touchpoints under both marketing and sales initiatives, including offline data gathered from the prospect's browsing behavior and in-store shopping habits.

Thus, personalization develops a unified view of each customer's buying journey and helps your brand cater to their needs and wants individually, in great detail.

Technology

This is the most important factor that transforms your regular marketing strategies into hyper-personalized initiatives.

Regular marketing needs basic data that can be collected through social media marketing automation and data analysis. Personalization, on the other hand, facilitates the collection of granular data using AI technologies like NLP and machine learning, predictive analytics, emotional trigger responses, big data analytics, and recommendation engines. Therefore, the latter can provide customers with a more customized shopping experience.

3 Ways Brands Can Personalize Their Marketing Strategies (With Examples!)

Let's understand how personalization works through the three examples listed below.

HealthifyMe

HealthifyMe is an app created in 2012 that has grown into India's most beloved health and fitness app.

HealthifyMe partnered with CleverTap, an industry-leading mobile marketing platform, to personalize diet and fitness plans for its users. The app helps its users track water consumption and calorie intake and supplies them with customized cloud-based nutrition and fitness coaching programs.

Using customer journey maps and AI-driven data, HealthifyMe engages and retains its users during their digital fitness journey. They create strategies using the best channels to deliver the right message to the right user at the right time.

Source: HealthifyMe

HealthifyMe uses CleverTap's services to create a visual campaign methodology. This allows them to target users based on their primary interests, real-time activity, and app behaviors. It also targets its customers with personalized content to increase brand engagement through automated email and SMS workflows.

Users signing up have to answer a few simple questions related to their capabilities and future goals. In return, they get specific diet and fitness training recommendations and are provided with real-time progress insights, personalized feedback, and even rewards for completing weekly goals.

HealthifyMe has a 4.5 rating on the Google Play Store and has a user base of more than 6 million customers.

Takeaway: Use advanced data intelligence technologies to craft and run more contextual marketing campaigns for your customers to increase conversion and retention rates.

Starbucks

Starbucks, everyone’s favorite coffee brand, uses a robust hyper-personalization marketing strategy to tailor the customer journey and provide each individual loyal customer with a unique experience in a “segment-of-one” approach.

The Starbucks app leverages AI to incorporate personalization in their mobile apps. Artificial intelligence helps the coffee brand use real-time data to send more than 400,000 variations of personalized messages to users. These unique offers are based on their activities, preferences, and past purchases.

Source: Youappi

This type of personalization takes the work out of the customer’s hands. The marketing team at Starbucks has successfully leveraged AI to predict their consumers' needs and satisfy them before they consider other options. In light of the heightened competition in the mobile space, this proactive outreach has helped them foster user loyalty and retention.

Takeaway: Using customer data to augment personalization marketing strategies is imperative in today’s mobile-first world. It can help increase customer loyalty and advocacy manifold.

Spotify

Spotify revolutionized the industry of music apps with its Discover Weekly feature. This function considers each listener's musical preferences, compares them to others who like the same songs, and generates a customized playlist for each user. To create personalized playlists for their user base of 381 million listeners, out of 70 million song tracks, Spotify makes use of machine learning technology to inform recommendations.

Oskar Stål, Spotify's VP of personalization, says they feed vast amounts of data like playlists, browsing history, and user interactions into ML models. These models then make smart associations between artists, songs, albums, and playlists.

Source: Spotify

There are many other factors that are accounted for. For instance, what time is it in the day? Is this music for relaxing or exercising? Is the customer using a desktop or a mobile device? These data points are utilized to provide more intelligent, specialized recommendations to users by integrating several of these ML models throughout Spotify's infrastructure.

This is how Spotify is excelling at its goal to provide its customers with a lifetime of stellar audio experiences.

Takeaway: It is impossible to exaggerate the value of data in providing customers with appropriate recommendations and information. The quality of your offers and personalization depends on the quality of your data.

Make Personalization Your Priority And Watch Your Brand's Success Soar!

Personalization is a herald to the future of brand marketing, as more and more customers choose to buy from companies that deliver products exactly suit their preferences. Thus, it is not simply a "nice-to-have" feature of your marketing strategy anymore; you need to incorporate it into your campaigns and initiatives ASAP!

It is important to mention here that there is no "one-size-fits-all" strategy for personalization. Start by evaluating the effectiveness of your current personalization efforts. Consider the unused data or set new KPIs to craft individualized marketing campaigns.

Leverage personalization in marketing to increase your brand's relevancy and attract ideal prospects. Sell them what they truly need, and watch your brand's success soar!