Social media marketing enables you to connect with your audience on a more personal level – but what about your website, your email, and all of your other channels? How do you create a unique and personalized experience for all of your visitors, leads, and customers?
This is becoming more and more of a consideration, particularly when it comes to eCommerce and retail businesses. As more organizations start using AI and machine learning to improve the user experience, not doing so could, eventually, see your brand left in the dust.
In this post, I’m going to share some of the best tools for 1-to-1 marketing, in order to help you implement a personalized marketing strategy for your business.
Why do you need to implement personalized marketing?
Personalized marketing, or 1:1 marketing, is a marketing strategy that utilizes data and technology to deliver individually-focused marketing messages and experiences to your prospective customers – via websites, emails, mobile apps, and other digital marketing channels.
Some good examples of personalized marketing that will be familiar to anyone who’s ever had an Amazon account are those emails you get regularly with personalized recommendations, or those “people who bought this also bought” lists of products that you can find on Amazon product pages.
With this type of technology, you can not only learn a lot about your audience and their buying and browsing habits – and segment them into better-targeted groups as a result – but you can also send them personalized messages automatically via email and your website, which include only the products that each person is likely to buy.
And that brings us to the biggest benefit of personalized marketing – by showing your prospective customers only the products that they’re interested in, based on real-time data, you’ll increase your sales, cross-selling, and up-selling opportunities.
As noted, with this technology improving and becoming more accessible, more businesses are starting to employ it. As customers get more accustomed to such experiences, this will give them a leg up against their competition, and it’ll also enable them to create better user experiences for their prospective customers.
The potential benefits here, based on research, include:
- An increase in conversion rates (63% of marketers report an increase in conversion rates as the number one benefit or personalized marketing)
- An increase of up to 15% in profits
- An increase in customer lifetime value and loyalty
If you’re ready to start leveraging this (relatively) new technology, here are some of the best tools to help:
Pure360
Pure360 is an e-commerce personalization tool which enables you to create personalized experiences for all of your leads and customers across email and your own website – all automatically.
You can start by gathering valuable data about your audiences’ online browsing habits and behaviors, then use that knowledge to build segments which will enable you to target with the right marketing messages and recommendations.
By creating these segments, you can then set up marketing automation flows, as well as all kinds of email triggers like cart and browse abandonment, and your leads and customers will automatically receive emails based on their preferences, behavior, and past purchases.
Speaking of email, another very cool feature is that Pure360 can also find out and which times each individual usually opens their emails. With this knowledge, you can then ensure that your triggered and marketing automation emails are sent at the best possible times to ensure an increase in open and click-through rate.
As for your website, you can create dozens of SmartBlocks to ensure that visitors see only relevant content, and products that they’re likely to be interested in, instead of an amalgam of all your offerings.
As shown in the screenshot above, you can create SmartBlocks like “holiday recommendations” (including weather reports if you want to take it one step further), “people like you also buy”, or “products purchased after viewing this (product)”.
Evergage
Evergage is a real-time marketing personalization platform which can be used by different industries: eCommerce/retail, financial services, tech companies, travel and hospitality, and media and entertainment.
With the apps behavioral tracking, you can learn a lot about your audience, including anonymous visitors – what their real intent is while on your website, what their preferences are in terms of products, browsing, and content, which devices they’re using, where they’re from, what their IP is, and much more.
This then enables you to deliver more relevant messages and content, as well as incentives, at the right times – both on your website and/or on your mobile app.
All of this data, combined with machine-learning analytics, enables Evergage to even make proactive suggestions for how you can improve engagement across your digital channels (website, apps, email) and make more sales.
There are various ways to use this data for building personalized experiences – for example, you can recommend products to individuals based on their preferences in terms of pricing and brand, change the categories and adjust site navigation on your website or app, and send them triggered messages via web or email if you detect inactivity or the intent to leave your website.
Strands Retail
Strands Retail is another personalization platform, this one built with retail businesses in mind (which, as noted, are the best-suited types of businesses for this type of technology).
As with the previous tools, you can start by segmenting your audience into specific groupings based on in-depth data about your visitors and customers, including their browsing habits and history and other important information about their personal preferences.
This then enables you to boost your conversion rates, sales numbers, as well as your customers’ lifetime value by sending them personalized emails for shopping based on their interests and past purchases.
As for your website, Strands Retail gives you access to over 100 marketing modules to help you create a personalized user experience across your website: your home page, your category, and your product pages.
For example, you can add modules like “top sellers this week” or “customers like you also like…(these products)”.
You can also set up A/B testing to continue to optimize the user experience across your channels – and ultimately, to continue to grow your sales and conversions.
Conclusion
Businesses of all shapes and sizes, and across all kinds of industries (but particularly e-commerce and retail) can massively benefit from implementing a personalized marketing strategy. It enables you to learn a lot about your audience and their preferences, to build omni-channel user experiences for your visitors, increase your email open and click-through rates, and ensure that your website visitors and app users aren’t bombarded with content and products that aren’t relevant to them.
And while traditional marketing automation tools do offer personalization features, they’re not nearly as powerful as true personalized marketing. Worth considering in your approach.