Personalised marketing has become one of the key strategies for marketers across the world as organisations continually look to get as much return on investment on their spend as is practically possible. Seldom will you find a singular approach for an entire customer base because customers now, for most products and services, are as diverse as they have ever been.
There are some simple steps you can follow to help personalise your own marketing strategy to attract more customers to your business.
Get to know your customers
The first point is, on the face of it, an obvious one but is also one that is often taken for granted and overlooked. Organisations frequently strategise around their customers without first understanding who their customers actually are and getting to know them. It is almost impossible to personalise towards a particular type of customer without knowing whether that customer even exists in the first place.
There’s no shortage of ways of being able to do this which can include but is not limited to:
- Spending time in-store and meeting customers directly
- Speaking with frontline staff who interact with customers on a daily basis
- Engaging on any number of social media platforms
- Looking at online customer reviews of your product
- Focus groups
- Analysing CRM data and more…
By investing some time and energy at the beginning of this process, you’ll give yourself the strongest possible foundation for success.
Segmentation
Segmenting your target audiences is an important step to get right as it’s what will influence what your customers will eventually end up experiencing as part of their customer journey with you. Again, this can often be overlooked but it’s important to pay attention to the detail and to get it right.
There are a number of ways to segment your customers which broadly speaking span across four different categories. These are:
- Demographic – Age, gender, socio-economic etc
- Geographic – City, state, country where the customer resides
- Psychographic – Personality, attitudes, lifestyle etc
- Behavioural – Purchasing behaviours, frequency of purchase
By grouping your customers using these categories and subcategories you can start to identify and establish the patterns and similarities between who your different customers are and what they are purchasing. This data not only allows you to understand but inform your own personalised marketing strategies going forward.
Self-personalisation
When it comes to personalised marketing you can never really have too much data and while you’ll have your own sources for segmenting your customers as described above the best source is from the customer itself.
Giving your customers the opportunity to self-personalise their own profile and influence their own customer journey will only help and aid your efforts to be more efficient with your marketing. In an era of comms saturation, customers appreciate the chance to create and set their own bespoke preferences to make sure they hear about the products they’re interested in.
This adds greater veracity to the data you’ve already collected about your customers and will help you strategise more precisely for future customers who match those profiles.
Personalising your various channels
It’s important to acknowledge that personalised marketing isn’t something you apply to any one particular channel alone but should ideally touch on as many of your channels as possible.
This will inevitably require a bit more time and energy on your part as the tools and their capabilities across each channel vary from one to the next. The better you can accomplish utilising these, the more efficient your personalised marketing strategy as a whole will be.
You may even find that you have segmentations that are channel-specific, for instance, the demographics and behaviours of those using Facebook might differ from those who receive your EDMs which might again differ from those that find you via Google Search and AdWords.
By casting your personalised marketing net across the different channels that you use you’ll also bring cohesion and consistency to your brand’s voice which means you’re more likely to a have seamless messaging across your platforms too.
Monitor, test and refine
Like everything else in marketing, personalised marketing is something that evolves over time and to get the best out of it, so must you. It’s arguably even more relevant in some ways as an individual’s preferences, attitudes, behaviours and circumstances can change over time.
The key here is to monitor, test and refine your personalised marketing strategies across your various channels regularly. One needs to be content with the fact that no single one strategy, no matter how successful at a given point in time, will be able to sustain itself indefinitely.
While that is the long term view, it is also important to be mindful of this in the short term too. A/B testing and multivariate testing is a great way to do this to give you quick and immediate results. Whether it’s testing different variants on landing pages, using different target audiences for Facebook Ads, trialling different templates for EDMs – refining your strategies on a regular basis will ensure you get the most efficient results you can.
Power with personalised marketing
Personalised marketing has quickly become a key marketing strategy for modern businesses and organisations around the world and if you’re able to execute your plans across as many channels as possible, you’ll be able to deliver the experience your customers want and achieve your business objectives at the same time.