Enhancing Customer Experience Through Personalized Digital Marketing
Highlights
Personalized digital marketing is the new standard in customer outreach.
Data-driven findings — such as organic search habits or how someone navigates your website — are the foundation for any personalized marketing strategy.
To be successful, however, a personalized marketing strategy needs to include great content and build trust.
Today’s buyers have high expectations. Generic, one-size-fits-all communications simply don’t work — today’s customers expect their providers to fully embrace personalized digital marketing.
On the phone, they expect to be recognized and served by someone who knows their account. When they see an email, text message, or pop-up ad, they expect it to be tailored to their needs and interests.
In short, buyers now expect sellers to take the extra step toward enhancing customer experience through personalized digital marketing.
Understanding the Digital Marketing Landscape
Getting personal in marketing is not a new phenomenon. Marketers have long tried to tailor their outreach through audience measurement, segmentation, and other techniques. Then, the internet and mobile phone changed the game and launched the new era of personalized digital marketing.
Online behavioral metrics — organic search habits or how someone navigates your website — are now the foundation for any personalized marketing strategy.
A major part of personalized marketing is picking up clues about potential buyer behavior across different touchpoints. A Microsoft study of online marketing found that the best performers have greater visibility into this kind of journey information and gain an incremental lift in return on investment (or return on ad spend) of more than 45%.
A personalized email is now much more likely to be opened and read than one that is generic.
It’s important to keep in mind, however, that personalization all by itself is not a solution. A study of behavioral targeting that tracked millions of ad transactions at a large U.S. media company found that personalized, cookie-enabled ads only drove about 4% more in revenue, despite the fact that they were triple the price of generic ads.
An over-reliance on personalization can lead you to overly narrow your audience to the point where you will be unable to generate real ROI. And no amount of personalization will make up for a marketing campaign that is fundamentally flawed.
PRIME 8’S EXPERIENCE WITH PERSONALIZED DIGITAL MARKETING
Consider our experience helping a global technology services provider that was seeing low ROI on a marketing campaign that offered a free trial program. Because it cost relatively little to make this offer, marketers at the company saw it as a scalable, cost-effective way to target the small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) that make up the majority of the customer base.
But when our consultants looked at the data from past campaigns, they saw the problem right away: SMBs rarely responded to the free trial offer. The trial had much more appeal for enterprise clients, so changing the focus to large enterprises significantly drove up the campaign’s ROI.
Personalization Through Data Analysis
Personalized marketing is data-driven marketing — using all the information at your disposal to connect customer experiences over both time and touchpoints and making each one of those experiences as compelling and valuable as possible.
CUSTOMERS VALUE PRACTICAL HELP
In a study of the features users found most helpful when navigating a website or a mobile app, survey respondents generally pointed to very practical functions that helped link past engagements or purchases with current activities — such as reminding buyers of favorites, wish lists, saved-for-later lists, recommendations based on past purchases, purchase-again options, and most recently viewed tools.
All of these data points have a proven track record of driving sales and supporting an experience that customers found valuable.
This kind of personalization is viewed as a sign that the seller is trying to better serve their users by helping them narrow down the options to consider. Suggestions that may not be right on target are easily ignored. And when the benefit of getting good recommendations is strong enough, users may even be willing to help fine-tune future recommendations — in effect, contributing to further personalization.
Content That Connects
Marketing takes many different forms, but good marketing always informs and educates the prospect, creating that much sought after “aha, I want that” moment.
To help that process along, many companies have turned to personalized content marketing — creating blog posts (like this one), white papers, landing pages, infographics, and more that speak to specific marketing personas.
CREATING DATA-DRIVEN CONTENT
Creating great content starts with great art — writing, editing, design, videography, etc. But there is a science to it as well. At Prime 8, we’re a big fan of getting very data driven when it comes to developing content, taking advantage of tools such as SEMRush, BuzzSumo, Google Trends, or Trends.co to discover what different marketing personas are searching for.
We also focus on mapping each persona’s customer journey across various channels, identifying which types of content they’re most engaged with at each stage of the process.
Building Trust and Loyalty
Personalization is all about delivering a message that’s more convincing and persuasive. But when it’s done right, personalization also creates trust and loyalty. While consumers are accepting and even enthusiastic about personalization, they are also more aware of the value of their information and their right to protect and keep it private.
The Microsoft study cited earlier notes that today’s high-performing digital marketers “are aware that they must get smarter about advancing customer-focused marketing without crossing the line when it comes to data collection and use.”
Today, many of the top performers in digital marketing are shifting their focus away from highly deterministic approaches that rely on personally identifiable information. Instead, they’re turning to more probabilistic but still personalized models (such as marketing personas), applying machine learning to anonymous data points.
At Prime 8, we find that clients who are serious about marketing personalization are also more transparent about how they use data and are willing to engage with their customers on how they handle data-related privacy issues.
Taking the Next Step to Enhancing Customer Experience Through Personalized Marketing
Personalized digital marketing is the way forward. It’s not just about being relevant — it’s about delivering real results combined with an enhanced customer experience, while building the trust that is essential for any long-term, mutually beneficial relationship.
Prime 8 can help you get more from your marketing by working with you to find the best way to personalize your outreach. Reach out to us to explore how we can help you reach your personalized digital marketing goals.
