What do you think of when you hear marketers talking about personalisation? I would guess it’s emails with Dear *First Name* in the subject line, and you would be right, but there's so much more to personalisation!
Personalisation has become a foundation of digital marketing and according to research '57% of online shoppers say that they’re happy to provide retailers with personal data as long as it’s used for their own benefit'.
In this blog, we’re going to discuss 5 ways you can use personalisation right now to improve your sales and marketing activities.
Personalisation is the technique of using implicit or explicit data about your prospects and customers to make your marketing and sales activities more targeted, more specific, more relevant and more timely. By personalising the customer journey, you can improve conversion rates, speed up the sales cycle and increase the lifetime value of your customers.
1. Personalising outbound communications
Let’s get the obvious one out of the way. Personalisation can, and should, be used within your outbound communications including marketing emails, sales emails, and SMS. This could be as simple as using the contact’s name, their company name, or perhaps something more specific to their existing preferences with your brand. With an effective strategy, this can help your business to grow revenue.
What’s the benefit?
This type of personalisation will help your communications cut through the noise of a busy inbox, give context to your messaging, and ensure that the content of your messages is specific and relevant to the audience. Whilst we don’t endorse personalising every single email, and you need to make sure there is variation in the communications you’re sending, this is a first step to embracing personalisation and is often an easy and quick win to get things moving.
2. Using time-based or date-based personalisation
Whether we’re talking about explicit data provided by a contact, for example their birthday, or whether we look at more implicit data like time since last purchase, time since last visit, or time until next renewal, we can use dates and automation to personalise our sales and marketing activity.
Some great examples of this are:
- Pre-empting a customer’s renewal date with timely communications about your latest products.
- Contacting a prospect who you know has a specific date to work towards for a competitor’s contract renewal.
- Running time-based product nurtures using key information about the lifespan of your products to dictate the timing.
Why you should be using time-based personalisation
Even the most effective marketing messaging will be wasted on its audience if the timing is wrong. Using implicit date data can ensure that your messaging arrives in your target’s inbox at the most pertinent moment, which will maximise conversions. Timely marketing can often be perceived as helpful, providing your customers with exactly what they needed, just when they needed it.
3. Using landing pages and chatbots on your website
Your website is not only core to your customers’ journeys, but it's a key channel that you own and control. You can personalise your visitors’ experiences when landing on your website by using dynamic content that changes based on who they are, where they are, or even which device they’re using. On top of this, you can also use chatbots to personalise the experience further.
For example, if a contact has come from a paid campaign you’re running on LinkedIn, why not personalise the landing page to ensure that the topic from the ad is reflected on the page, giving the journey more continuity. Then, if the visitor is a recognised return visitor, why not use a chatbot to personally greet them?
There is a fine line between clever, targeted personalisation, and making visitors feel stalked, so make sure you’re using data that has been sourced legitimately and with the contact’s knowledge.
Is website personalisation for you?
Assuming you have the tools in place to do this, website personalisation can be very effective when it comes to improving conversions. However, to really see the benefit, you want to make sure you’re deploying the technique on high-volume pages as this is one of the higher-effort strategies listed in this blog.
Not only does it rely on having the data to segment your audience with, but in some cases, also the cookies that are stored on their devices. So, we recommend using this technique after checking you have the data and the numbers to make it successful!
4. Product-based personalisation
This one is particularly relevant to B2C and Ecommerce businesses, namely companies that have specific products or service packages that they want to market. Again, using implicit or explicit data, you can deliver marketing and sales communications to segments of your audience based on product affiliation, preference, or purchasing history.
This could include abandoned basket campaigns, post purchase nurtures, product lifecycle campaigns and renewals, or specific cross-sell or add-on communications.
Product-based personalisation also includes product recommendations. Whether this is driven by powerful AI tools or curated manually by your team will likely depend on the scale of your business, but ultimately, well-chosen product recommendations will enhance the customer journey and provide additional touchpoints for your customers to convert.
Who should be using product-based personalisation?
For B2C businesses, these automated personalisation campaigns are your bread and butter and should be high on the list of automations you want to build into your customer journey. But for any business that wants to focus on repeat business, renewals, or cross-selling and upselling, understanding the journey your customers take before, during. and after purchase can make this type of personalisation a very powerful tool.
5. Customer-lead personalisation
We mentioned implicit and explicit data a few times in this article, and for good reason. The data on which you build your personalisation campaigns is vital. If you don’t have the data to support what you’re trying to do, then it just won’t work.
Explicit data
Whilst explicit data includes some obvious data gathered from standard forms and chatbots, like name, birthday and so on, we can also look to put the power into our customers’ hands by offering them preference centres and surveys to be more granular about which communications they want to see. This can take the form of; tell us which products you would like to hear more about or even if you don’t want to see marketing campaigns relating to Father’s Day, just let us know.
Not only can this approach help you make your communications more relevant for your customers, but it also promotes transparency that many consumers will find appealing, helping you to build trust.
Implicit data
Implicit data includes behavioural data (like prospects visiting your site, or consuming specific content) as well as reading between the lines on their explicit data to draw insights. For example, a prospect visiting the site and consuming content that has been marked as relevant for the decision stage of the funnel might indicate that the account owner should pick the phone up and make a call. However, the same action but with content from the consideration or awareness stages should trigger nurture workflows personalised to that buying stage.
Summary
Personalisation isn’t just about using tokens to make an email sound more personal; it’s about using the data you have at your disposal to make your sales and marketing activities more relevant and timely for your customers and prospects. It can be an extremely powerful tool when it comes to improving conversion rate for your campaigns, but also for increasing your customer lifetime value by driving cross-selling and upselling opportunities.
If you want to find out more about how to leverage your data and the tools you already have access to, reach out to Innovation Visual and our team of experts who can help you deliver greater ROI from your existing tech stack and databases.
You can also learn How To Use Personalisation To Generate More Leads in our DMA episode below.
