Buyers are absolutely bombarded by marketing every day—and they’ve gotten really good at sifting most of it out. Personalization is how we marketers can get our messages through those thought filters to create a connection with even the most distracted buyer.
Marketing personalization has evolved far beyond addressing customers by name in an email (although that still helps). There are now sophisticated ways to make sure you’re delivering highly relevant ads and content to precisely the right audience at exactly the right time.
The best part is that these strategies are available to every type of business, from large enterprises to local mom-and-pop shops. In this guide, we’ll show you several ways to personalize your marketing and share examples that will inspire your work. We’ll also establish a few guidelines so your personalization doesn’t come off as creepy and you handle your customers’ data with care.
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What is personalized marketing?
Personalized marketing targets individuals with tailored content, products, and offers based on their specific behaviors, preferences, and demographic information. It uses customer data to create relevant messages that resonate with each person’s unique needs and interests, making it much more attractive to your target buyer.
The idea behind personalization in marketing is to make your prospects feel like a message or offer was designed just for them.
Imagine you see a random ad for a waterproof winter coat. There is a pretty low chance that you’ll need it right then.
Now, let’s say you regularly visit REI.com, have signed up for marketing emails, and have set a preferred store location. Your town is due for its first big snowfall of the year, and you get an email from REI offering a three-day discount on their new line of waterproof winter coats with your name and city mentioned in the email.
That gives you an idea of how personalized marketing works and the data you need to do it. Let’s get into more details so you can start converting customers fast.
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What are the benefits of personalized marketing?
Personalized marketing takes a little extra effort, but the payoff is big. Here are a few of the ways personalizing your marking can help you grow.
Buyers like it
First and foremost, personalized marketing makes sense because your customers prefer it. 71% of buyers say they want companies to deliver personalized interactions. And two-thirds of customers say they expect brands to understand their needs.
That all makes sense. Most people would rather not have their laptop and smartphone screens filled with irrelevant promotions for things they’ll never want to buy.
Builds trust
Who would you trust more, a salesperson who asks questions and explains product benefits specific to you? Or one who keeps listing fancy features that don’t solve your exact problem?
Most of us would say the first one, and that’s how you can build trust as a marketer with personalization.
Here’s an example. I recently searched online for washable rugs. Washability was my primary concern (my dog and I trek a lot of mud in the house). I searched that keyword on Google and looked at product pages that offered that feature.
I started seeing Instagram ads from rug companies, but this one stood out.
It was the only ad to focus on washability. Now, I can’t say for sure that Tumble serves different ads to people who visit different pages on its website. But if they do, this is the perfect execution of personalized marketing. I believe they have a product that solves my main challenge.
Grabs attention
You may have heard about studies done to show what happens when we read or hear our own name. Essentially, parts of our brain responsible for impulse control and decision-making (among other things) light up. That’s why you can create an instant connection with someone who’s scrolling through their inbox by adding their name to an email.
There are many other ways to stimulate that connection and get people to stop scrolling. Include an image of their favorite hobby, mention their job title in a subject line, or call out a product they’ve been researching. All of these stand out in a crowded field and snap us out of our brain fog.
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Lowers your cost of advertising
We talk a lot about marketing as a whole, but personalization can also lower your cost of pay-per-click (PPC) advertising in three ways. First, you need to collect customer data in order to personalize ads. That data also helps you tighten your ad targeting. So, instead of targeting an expensive keyword like “running shoes,” you can target something less competitive (and less expensive) like “trail running shoes for women.”
Second, personalized ads are more relevant to the people who will see them. Google uses ad relevance to assign your ads a Quality Score. The more relevant your ad, the better your quality score, and the lower your ad’s cost-per-click (CPC).
Third, those super-relevant ads are also good for increasing your click-through rate and decreasing wasted clicks. People are more likely to click an ad when it feels like it’s for them. And they’ll avoid the ones that aren’t. Both of those actions add up to a higher return on your ad investment.
Increases loyalty
I love it when a barista at my local coffee shop remembers my name. It’s a little warm and fuzzy feeling that keeps me coming back.
Those personal touches work in digital marketing, too. Sending things like birthday emails, personalized promotions, and reminders when a consumable product may be running out all endears us to a brand.
They remembered!
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What are the guidelines for personalized marketing?
There’s a responsibility that comes with marketing personalization. After all, you’re gathering and handling customer data. Plus, you often have to tread a fine line between making marketing more relevant and looking like a creepy stalker. These guidelines will help keep you on the right path.
Gather data responsibly
Personalization relies on customer data to work. Whether it’s personal info you’ve gathered from a lead generation form or behavioral information based on where someone clicks on your website—you have to gather and manage that data responsibly.
In general, you’ll need to keep up with privacy concerns, regulations, and changing data collection options. Here are a few tips for ethically collecting and storing customer data:
- Include an unsubscribe button: Always give people an easy way to unsubscribe from emails and back out of data collection.
- Create and publish a privacy policy: Make it clear how you gather customer data and what you intend to do with it.
- Protect customer data: Take steps to make sure your customers’ data stays safe.
- Be transparent: Communicate clearly with your customers if there’s a data breach or a change in your privacy policy.
Avoid retargeting too aggressively
Retargeting is an important part of personalized marketing since it puts promotions in front of people who have shown interest in a specific product. But if you take it too far, you’ll annoy the audience you want to convert.
Specifically, put a reasonable time frame on your retargeting ads. For small impulse items, a day or two should be enough. For larger purchases where buyers take longer to make a decision, like real estate, you might cap it at a few weeks or a month. Retargeting a potential lead for several months is unlikely to net anything but frustration.
Don’t over-personalize
Personalized marketing has a lot of benefits, but if you lean too heavily on it, you’ll stifle customer discovery and drown out your brand messaging.
Here’s what I mean. Say someone shows interest in your yoga classes, and all your ads and emails only highlight that service. You may inadvertently keep them from learning about your other offerings, like reiki sessions and activewear shop. Some of your marketing should be very personalized, but much of it should not.
How to create a personalized marketing strategy
Once you get into personalizing some of your marketing campaigns, you’ll find an endless list of ways to do it. Use these steps as your guide to get started.
Set your goals
Just like any journey, you need a destination before you can choose a route. Your goals will dictate everything from what data you gather to which channels you choose.
It’s okay to start with a broad goal like “increase the effectiveness of our email marketing” or “get more leads from social media.” The next few steps will help refine the rest.
Gather data
Gathering clean, trustworthy data is the crux of a successful personalized marketing strategy. You’ll need to decide which data is important and how you’ll collect it.
For example, if getting more from your email marketing strategy is important, then you’ll need to gather email addresses to grow your subscriber list and track some behavioral (buying habits) and personal (first name, birthday) data to personalize your emails.
The next question is, “How do we gather that data?”
A few options for this example would include:
Generate customer and segments
Much of your personalized marketing will target subgroups of your customers (as opposed to a single person). Customer segments help you identify and target those subgroups.
To create a customer segment, first decide which characteristics the people in that subgroup need to share. It could include age, income, interests, behaviors, and many more.
Once you’ve identified the right common characteristics, place all leads and customers who share them into that group. That’s who you’ll target with your personalized messages.
Decide which channels you’ll personalize
Each marketing channel presents its own benefits and challenges for personalization.
Email gives you a lot of control and hyper-personalization options, but it’s harder to get people to give up their email addresses. Social media marketing gives you access to larger audiences faster, but you’ll rarely be able to match the one-on-one personalization of email.
Think carefully about your goals and what data you’ll realistically be able to gather, then match them to the right channel.
Map out your personalized content
The next step is to lay out what content or ads you’ll create, who will see them, and when you’ll share them.
This is where your goals and channel really come into play. Let’s say you sell kitchen goods. Your goal is to increase repeat purchases and loyalty from existing customers. And email is your chosen channel.
You’re content map could look like this:
- What: Write a blog post with cake recipes and create an ad for a stand mixer.
- Who: People who show interest in baking cakes.
- When: When someone buys a cake pan or when an email subscriber looks at baking-related product pages.
Williams Sonoma held a sweepstakes to gather data for future marketing personalization.
Review, edit, repeat
Just like any marketing campaign, you’ll get a lot more out of it when you review the results and iterate to improve them.
What you review will depend on all of the other factors (goal, channel, etc.). The key here is to set specific timeframes for your analysis. In the early days, you may want to audit results multiple times per week. Once things are dialed in, you may just need a monthly review.
Improve with AI
AI lead generation and management tools can help during every stage of your personalization strategy.
For example, you can use AI copywriting tools to speed up ad and blog post creation. Dynamic websites are powered by AI. And Google Ads offers several AI-enabled tools to help you target the right audience.
6 types of personalized marketing with real-world examples
Let’s see how successful brands use some of the most popular types of personalized marketing.
Retargeting campaigns
Remember my search for the perfect washable rug? Several rug brands remembered it, too. Here’s a retargeting ad I saw while on a completely unrelated website.
When retargeting, it’s really important to showcase something your target customers will want to see. These may be products they showed interest in, such as in this example. It could also be a bit of clever copy that speaks directly to the problem they’re trying to solve.
Personalized marketing emails
Here’s a simple but effective email personalization tactic from a clothing brand. All they did was add my name to the top of a promotion email.
That will certainly catch my attention. Notice that it also highlighted the value of the promotion next. That’s an important lesson. Personalization alone doesn’t convert customers. You need to offer something of value and make sure it’s clearly stated.
Personalized website experience
I really like how this direct-to-consumer dental products brand personalizes its website experience. They offer a discount in exchange for you answering a one-question quiz and entering your email address.
With that little bit of extra data, the brand can tailor my next website visit by showing me products that help get my teeth whiter. They can also show customer reviews that mention whiter teeth to really help convince me.
Personalized videos
It may seem like personalized videos would be really hard to scale, but AI has changed that.
Check out what Disney does to welcome its new vacation club members.
Most of the video is the same for every viewer, but a few frames showing the family’s name give it a personal touch.
Even a small business can do this with an AI video editor.
Personalized SMS marketing campaigns
Text messaging is usually a one-to-one communication channel, so it’s the perfect place for a little personalization.
Look at this example of SMS marketing from another dental products brand.
This one coupled personalized SMS marketing with an AI chat agent to take the experience to the next level.
Location-based marketing
There are lots of ways to personalize marketing based on someone’s location. Geofencing and geotargeting are two options.
Check out how Dick’s Sporting Goods did it. They combined user behavior with geographic data to show recommended products.
This is an easy strategy to duplicate on your website. You can incentivize visitors to allow location services by giving them live store stock updates.
Personalized marketing done right
The key to great personalized marketing is to go in with the right attitude. It can never be about using personal information to trick someone into clicking a link.
Instead, personalization should always be about prioritizing your audience. What will help them learn? Where’s the best place, and when’s the best time for them to interact with your message? How can you make a more personal connection while protecting everyone’s privacy?
If you go into it with those questions in mind, you’ll attract more loyal customers to your business. And avoid coming off as creepy.