Everyone likes the personal touch.
It might be someone you wouldn’t expect remembering your name. Or the coffee barista knowing your usual order without you having to ask. These personalised moments make us feel special.
The same is true in marketing. Personalisation is a way of connecting with your customers, building a loyal relationship, and showing you care.
In our essential guide to personalised marketing we look at how companies use personalisation to gain a competitive advantage. We explain what personalised marketing really is, how it benefits brands, and how you can integrate it into your campaigns.
What is personalised marketing?
Personalised marketing is delivering an individual message to a customer.
It could be showing them something that’s relevant to their interests. Or simply addressing them by their name.
Whatever it is, personalised marketing grabs their attention by creating an immediate connection.
How important is it?
Everyone’s talking about personalisation, but how do the figures stack up?
According to research, organisations who’ve invested in personalised marketing will outsell others by more than 30% in 2018. And apparently 94% of senior level executives believe that delivering personalisation is critical to reaching and retaining customers.
So, if personalised marketing isn’t on your agenda, start making plans to change that.
Personalisation examples
We’ve established that personalised marketing is a must. Now, let’s look at how to do it.
Here are a few examples of what you can achieve…
Personalised emails
Every marketer can make a tweaks to their emails to personalise them.
You can add the recipient’s name, include relevant content, and send messages triggered by individual actions. You can even tailor the time when the recipient receives the message.
These adjustments help grab attention and build a rapport with the recipient.
We love this example of personalised email marketing from Pizza Express. Not only does it include the recipient’s name in the eye-catching creative, but it also gives them a birthday treat.
Personalised web content
Your homepage, product pages, and checkout can be personally curated for every visitor.
Tailoring these elements around a customer’s browsing and buying habits makes it more likely they’ll find what they’re looking for. This is a great way to increase your conversion rates and give a personalised customer experience from start to finish.
Clothing retailer Very released a fully personalised homepage which we loved. It incorporated the customer’s name, featured personal recommendations and even referenced the current weather conditions.
This type of marketing is an important step towards tailoring the entire browsing and buying experience around the individual.
Personalised recommendations
Streaming services such as Netflix and Spotify are the norm now. And with so much of our time spent online, it’s easy for streaming brands to really get to know us.
These brands track what we watch and listen to, and match it with their other customers’ behaviour. By doing this they can spot trends and make personalised predictions of which artists and movies we like.
Netflix keeps us hooked by continually offering personal recommendations based on what we recently watched. The streaming service profiles our viewing habits against others and offers up recommendations that keep us glued for hours.
Personalised promotions
Most marketers have heard about personalising content, but what about promotions?
To personalise promotions, you can base your offers on previous shopping habits or simply personalise the call-to-action.
These simple steps make your offers more relevant and eye-catching to the customer. This helps to increase your conversion rates.
Boots does a great job of personalised promotions. The chemist offers Advantage Card members personal promotions based on their previous shopping habits and points balance.
Personalised packaging
Personalised marketing doesn’t need to be restricted to digital.
Recently Coca-cola demonstrated that there’s nothing more powerful than putting your customer’s name on your product. What better way to build rapport with potential customers than naming a product after them?
After years of declining sales Coca-cola struck gold with its ‘Share a Coke’ campaign. The personalised bottles appealed to people who found their name and couldn’t resist picking one up.
Personalised direct mail
With so much post flying through our doors it can be hard to get people to open up your direct mail.
Now marketers are going one step further than simply sticking the name of the customer on the envelope. Many brands are actually incorporating people’s names into direct mail creative making a very personal piece of post.
The National Trust regularly personalise direct mail by featuring the name of its members on leaflets. It’s a great way of building loyalty with a very personal token of appreciation.
Personalised customer service
Nothing has more impact than personalising your approach to customer service.
Doing so means your customers won’t get frustrated by impersonal standard replies and dismissive responses.
Tailoring your approach around the person leads to happier customers who are more likely to stay.
First Direct regularly tops the bill in customer service polls. It’s Customer Service team aren’t scripted and they’re not timed on their calls either. When they take a call it’s about building a rapport through a personalised experience.
Personalised posts
Personalisation cuts through the noise on social media. Now, everything consumers see on popular social media platforms is personally curated for them.
The algorithms choose which updates they get shown. They also profile interests to personalise which adverts appear. Without this algorithmic curation there would be an average of 150,000 updates vying for each consumer’s attention.
Paid social media advertising allows you to build custom audiences to serve personalised posts to. These audiences can be based on interests.
Matching content with interests makes your advert more personal. This gives your customers a reason to stop scrolling and see what your brand has to say.
Takeaway
With so many possibilities for personalised marketing it can be easy to feel overwhelmed. But personalisation doesn’t need to be hard. Start with a few basics and build up to the bigger stuff.
The first step in personalised marketing is getting to know your customers. Our single customer view, PureIntelligence, lets you build up a picture of your customers: who they are, what they like, and what they’re likely to do next.
Our software helps you gather all information you need into one view so can spot patterns and new opportunities. And you can even use the customer insight to start personalising your offline marketing channels too!
But it doesn’t stop there. Once you know who your customers are, you can deliver personalised marketing through our personalisation software, PureTargeting. This lets you send tailored emails and personalise content on your website.
Whatever campaign you decide to do next, the possibilities of personalised marketing are within reach.
