Understanding Your Audience: The Key to Personalization
It seems like i find it a bit strange how often brands say personalisation, but what they mean is targeted ads for products we’ve already bought. There’s a marked difference between seeing someone in a store and offering them exactly what they want, and just shoving whatever you want in front of them. The way I see it, understanding your audience is key to meaningful personalisation. But there’s one caveat - people change.
So do their interests and opinions. With all this change, it can be hard for businesses to keep up. That’s not to say don’t try.
Continuously collecting data about your audience can be invaluable. And if you’re not sure where to start, social media is usually a good bet.
Sort of. That’s where people go when they want to say something loud enough for everyone to hear. Keeping an ear open for this ‘everyone’ can occasionally pay off. Once you have the data, use that information to create segments within your audiences.
Sort of. These customer segments need to be loosely homogeneous since keeping them too rigid or defined would cause more issues than it would solve. And segments are only as good as the data that supports them. It’s no longer enough to simply ask customers their gender or age, knowing which colour they like best or the kind of music they listen to on their commute provides much better opportunities for personalisation.
Personalisation walks a fine line between being helpful and coming across as creepy, and most brands have yet to get the hang of it. But it could be worse, really - not knowing your audience at all or relying on assumptions made decades ago is a surefire way to isolate people who would otherwise fit right in with your brand personality.
Data-Driven Insights: Leveraging Analytics for Tailored Experiences
People say the internet never forgets. Not only does it remember, it keeps records of where you were, who you were talking to, what you were searching for at 3 am. It also knows the number of coffees you have in a day. If the internet had a personality, it would be a cross between a super-villain and your very friendly neighbourhood stalker.
While this may scare people off the internet altogether, it is not all bad. In fact, data analytics can give marketers the edge they need to increase business and revenue. Here’s an example - by tracking customer behaviour on your website or app, you can learn about their preferences, pain points and even things they are likely to buy but have not discovered yet. You can use this information to create content and experiences tailored to their needs and interests - your business is more likely to convert leads into sales by engaging the audience with what they are looking for.
That’s not all. Real-time data lets brands create experiences for specific audience groups - based on interest, geographical location and engagement. For instance, a brand’s goal is to increase engagement on social media platforms.
By tracking trending hashtags and consumer behaviour during a specific period, a brand can leverage this information to create content that resonates with people at that time - like Valentine’s Day or Earth Day. Sort of. It may be slightly creepy when companies follow their customers around the internet, but personalising customer journeys makes sense for both parties involved.
Instead of wading through irrelevant options, consumers can find exactly what they need without breaking a sweat. In this way, data-driven insights are generally winning the marketing game.
Dynamic Content: Creating Relevant Messaging for Users
There’s something a little dehumanising about walking into a shop you frequent, only to have the shop assistant ignore you. And I mean, really ignore you. They might as well be asleep, or they could be robots - it’s difficult to tell.
It would make you feel like you don’t matter. And chances are, you might not come back again. So why do so many digital retailers approach their communication in the same way. Sort of.
It seems like a bit of a silly thing to do, especially considering that there are loads of ways to personalise communication on your site or app. Dynamic content lets your users feel seen and recognised, across all touchpoints. This can have a pretty big impact on both your conversion rates and how loyal your users are to your brand.
While personalisation is often limited to a name or location, dynamic content can include things like products similar to what your user has already browsed, brands they may be interested in, or even the country-specific language that makes their journey easier to navigate. These things can make your content feel exclusive to your user - not in a ‘hey there stranger’ kind of way, but in the way people who have met more than once can be acquainted with one another. And while it can seem tricky to get started with dynamic content and personalising your journeys if you haven’t done it before, there are tools and companies out there that can help.
Even getting started on a small scale can supposedly make users feel more at home with you than they may have otherwise felt. And making people feel seen is always worth it - both for you and for them.
Journey Mapping: Visualizing Customer Interactions
It’s a funny thing, how quickly we tend to forget what it feels like to be a customer. We go straight for the hard sell or toss out what we think is rarely a pretty attractive discount, but that’s not the sort of thing that gets a potential buyer to feel invested in the product or the brand. Maybe they’d buy once or twice, but they probably wouldn’t come back again because they don’t feel connected to the label. More or less.
And this is why journey mapping is such a clever tool - it gives us the opportunity to understand what it feels like to walk in our customer’s shoes. Journey mapping allows us to visualise our customers’ journeys in a way that helps us make sense of their thoughts and feelings throughout their interactions with our business.
It offers us a bird’s eye view of how they come to know about us and then decide whether or not they want to buy from us, by providing invaluable insights into how various brand touchpoints can impact their behaviour. It also enables us to truly look beyond numbers and data and make decisions based on empathy, rather than speculation. The best part. It acts as an effective diagnostic tool, helping businesses identify bottlenecks and pain points within existing marketing strategies, while also highlighting potential opportunities for improvement.
It clearly marks out where customers appear to be dropping off and provides clues as to what can be done differently. More or less. The way I see it, this opens up new pathways for personalisation - which is what most customers are looking for today.
Journey mapping has so much potential when it comes to developing new ways in which businesses can interact with customers - particularly those in the retail space. In fact, we could go as far as saying that it could help brands predict future customer behaviours as well if done correctly. And this could mean more opportunities for personalisation - which could then translate into higher conversion rates.
Well worth investing in, I’d say.
Automation Tools: Streamlining Personalized Communications
I keep coming back to the pace at which clients expect a high volume of personalised content on different channels. Sure, it’s how you connect with your audience. But is it really possible to push out different kinds of content at once. From what I’ve seen, it does take a lot of time and effort.
That means extra resources – think people, money, and expertise. Not all businesses have access to this. And that’s where automation steps in to help with scaling up personalised communication. The first thing you do is choose an automation tool that best matches your needs.
There are many options available so this can feel overwhelming if you don’t know what you’re looking for. But once you do find your match, give your tool the right data to work with. What this does is personalise messaging at scale while retaining the uniqueness of each message.
The result is more engagement and sales – and a great reputation for personalisation.
Measuring Success: Evaluating the Impact of Personalization Techniques
I think personalisation has sort of become the mainstay for most businesses to connect with their customers and, in the process, foster brand loyalty. And for good reason too. Customers now expect brands to know them inside out (well, almost. ) - and I think with the amount of consumer data that’s being collected these days, it does seem like a fair ask.
But whether a personalisation technique works or not is something I see businesses struggling to evaluate. Now the most common metric seems to be conversion rate or ROI. More or less.
I mean, if it works, it’ll bring in more sales. But as marketers, we know that there are several other things to consider when measuring the success of personalisation efforts - from more open rates to higher engagement on social media. Brand loyalty is also a strong indicator of success. If you’re doing it right and your customers like what you’re doing, then they will definitely stick around.
And spend their hard-earned money with you. But here’s something people often forget to consider - sometimes these numbers need time to add up. And you may not always get results immediately after implementing a new personalisation technique.
As long as you’ve aligned your goals to your customer’s journey and are keeping an eye on those metrics, you’re on the right track. At the end of the day, I do believe that brands are capable of creating journeys for their customers that take them from prospects to loyal patrons and brand advocates. And personalisation has plenty to do with this journey - as well as its success.