Personalization

What is personalization?

As the name suggests, personalization is the act of delivering personalized marketing messages and experiences to your target audience and/or customers using the information you have collected about them.

If you want a more in-depth understanding of this topic, check out the FAQ section below:

Question #1: What are the benefits of personalization?

The biggest benefits of personalization are as follows:

1. Increased open rates – This applies specifically to email marketing. Addressing your recipients by name in the subject line is a great way to not only make your emails stand out, but also increase their odds of actually being opened.
2. Better engagement – When your target audience or customers feel as if you are speaking directly to them, they are more likely to engage with your content and marketing messages.
3. Higher conversion rate – When you send your target customers personalized offers that you know they are actually interested in, they are much more likely to say yes.

For example, if you run a camera store, offering deals on action cameras to prospects who you know are interested in action cameras will yield significantly better results than just sending them generic camera-related offers.

1. Improved customer retention rate – When you deliver personalized experiences and marketing messages to your customers, they feel more valued, which, in turn, makes them much more likely to stay a customer for much longer.

Question #2: How can I collect information that I can use for it?

You can collect information that you can use for personalization by:

1. Offering lead magnets – Lead magnets can be any free offer that your target audience or customers might find valuable—such as reports, consultation sessions, ebooks, and webinars—that they can avail of in exchange for their information.
2. Conducting surveys – This is a great way to get people to provide you not only with their contact information, but also their thoughts on whatever it is you are trying to get feedback about.
3. Conducting interviews – Just like surveys, interviews are also a great way to learn more about your target audience or customers.
4. Running promotions – When people join promotions, they obviously need to provide their information. But the type of promotions they sign up for also give you an idea of what types of products and services they might be interested in.
5. Running contests – This works in the exact same way as running promotions.

Question #3: Where exactly can I apply personalization?

You can apply personalization in things such as:

1. Emails – As we have seen earlier, you can use personalization to not only bump up the open rate of your marketing emails but also dramatically improve their ability to convert.
2. Automated chat messages – Just like with emails, you can also set up your chatbots to use personalization to make the conversion much more engaging and human-like.
3. Ads – If you want to get maximum ROI from your ads, you need to make sure to tailor it to your target customers’ specific needs.
4. Special offers – Just like with ads, can also use personalization to significantly improve the effectiveness of your special offers.

Question #4: What are the disadvantages?

The biggest disadvantages of personalization are as follows:

It takes more effort. It is easier to just deliver generic experiences and marketing messages to your target audience or customers than it is to collect information about them first and then personalize everything.

The good news, however, is that the benefits personalization brings to the table more than makes up for the extra work it requires. And it is not even that difficult to do, thanks to the wide array of data collection and personalization tools you can use to simplify the whole thing.

It can come off as creepy if you do it wrong. Too much personalization could make your audience or customers feel as if you know too much about them. The goal, then, is to just do enough personalization to make them feel valued—or, better yet, give them the option to either change the level of personalization they get or turn it off completely.