Personalisation in marketing, and digital marketing, has come a long way over the past few years alone.
Personalised marketing used to be a matter of something simple, such as putting the customer’s name on the website when they return, in order to further develop a relationship.
Nowadays, personalisation has become much more advanced, allowing for deeper and more meaningful customer relationships, that encourages conversions and increases sales on both ecommerce stores and other websites.
Marketing automation offers deep personalisation and dynamic content. If you need more information, read our post on what is marketing automation and how it works for your business.
But what are the big benefits that personalisation offers in digital marketing?
Conversions
For any business, investing in personalisation is to drive conversions, and increase sales. Personalisation can help to achieve this in a number of ways, including:
- Pre-filled personal details – By remembering purchase information, shipping addresses, or other details, it removes one barrier that would otherwise stop the customer from converting.
- Providing the best deals – Personalisation helps to find the best, most relevant deals for the customer in particular, which encourages them to convert, as they do not have to hunt for the deal suited to them.
- Customised content – Personalised content can encourage customers to engage and do business with you, such as personalised subject lines, greetings, or references to previous actions taken in email campaigns.
- Landing pages – Specific landing pages pre-loaded with customer information
By remembering past behaviours, you can present relevant product or offers that appeal to particular customers, and increase conversions. It’s a win for both you and your customer.
Build Relationships
Over time, personalisation allows you to make the relationship with your customers more intimate as the relationship matures, and you gather more data on habits and preferences.
B2C and B2B relationships differ, but rewards for individuals can still bring past relationship closer, and create new ones.
It’s in the name, but personalisation aims to add a personal touch, to what would otherwise be a rather impersonal process.
Personalisation makes customers feel a little more special, as it can help replicate the feel of one-to-one communication that
Whether it’s B2C or B2B marketing, at the end of the day, it’s still human to human – and we all like a bit of personal communication.
Lead Nurturing
Personalisation allows you to personalise messages or offers along each stage of the marketing or sales funnel, and encourage potential customers to be driven further down the funnel.
Generalised content can be promoted to customers at the beginning of the funnel, with more specific content based upon their behaviour or chosen products being sent to them further down the line.
Personalise Calls
There’s no need to limit the collected customer data strictly to marketing.
When you or your sales team calls up potential or existing customers, having personalised data to hand can really help generate a natural, informed conversation, and help the customer make a purchase.
Personalised information from customer behaviour can really make a difference, as you have the intelligence to improve business-wide messaging and communications.
Welcoming and Fresh
Personalisation can help keep your website fresh to potential customers.
New website visitors can receive a more welcoming entry point, that appeals to newcomers.
Returning customers can be shown specific messages or content which interest them, and aligns with where they are in the sales cycle.
The website can also be personalised in line with any campaign referrals, offer conversions, or previous web pages they have visited.
Customer Engagement
Increasing engagement with your customers can be difficult, but personalisation can certainly help.
Personalised content or messages can keep customers on the site for longer, as the personal edge will encourage them to click or read.
Alongside this, any outbound marketing campaigns, such as email campaigns, can benefit from personalised messages. Quality, rather than quantity, is key. For instance, personalised email campaigns will reap better open and click rates than generic emails, where it used to be a matter of sending the same email to as many people as possible.
Customer Experience
At the heart of it, personalisation improves the customer’s experience of browsing your website, and digesting your content.
As you are providing relevant content, you are providing information they will actually find useful.
Personal touches also allow you to create an emotional connection – which means they are benefitting from a better customer experience along the way.
Customer Retention
By offering personalised messaging, retaining your existing customers becomes easier, as you develop a relationship.
Examples of personalised marketing that helps with customer retention includes:
- Loyalty programmes
- Personalised offers
- Suggested products
- Suggested repeat purchases
Alongside this, follow-up emails help retain existing customers, as you can thank customers for the conversion, provide recommended next steps, or offer complimentary products or services down the line.
Better Marketing
Overall, personalised digital marketing helps improve your marketing efforts overall.
Your marketing will become predictive, rather than reactive. You can offer and provide what the customer wants before they even request it.
The best marketing gives customers the right information to the right people at the right time – which personalisation can achieve.
Whatever form of content you wish to provide, personalising your content or outbound marketing campaigns helps to improve otherwise generic marketing methods.
Personalisation adds to customer understanding, as you can help them with any pain points they experience, and manages to differentiate your brand from the competition.
The Future of Personalisation for Digital Marketing
As customers use connected devices more and more, it develops new ways to connect and engage with customers – which all ties into personalised digital marketing.
In the future, successful companies will find innovative ways to connect with customers that remains appropriate, and helps the customer receive a superior experience, that also helps your business generate more sales.
Find out more on how our marketing automation services can help you personalise your emails, content and other marketing.