The idea of personalizing your marketing has been around for some time now. However, we find most businesses are satisfied with attaching first names to the top of an email and calling it a day. Let's take a closed look at why proper personalization matters and how to do it better than the status quo.
Personalized marketing refers to tailoring the marketing experience uniquely to the individual.
This starts with a deep understanding of the customer - what problem(s) the individual you’re targeting has that you can uniquely solve, for example - and extends through to how you design a set of campaigns in engaging & serving their needs.
At its laziest, this is slapping a customer name on an email and moving on. But at its best, a personalized campaign should feel akin to a one-on-one conversation between brand and consumer, where you engage at the right time/place, with the right messaging or content, and serve the right product / service / promotion experience that your customer wants.
Personalized content speaks directly to us and resonates, with a strong majority of consumers saying they expect companies to know who they are & understand their needs.
And importantly for you, a personalized approach increases the likelihood your customers engage with you and take the action you’re looking for - surveys show that 76% of customers are more likely to purchase from brands that personalize their marketing(1).
Critically, this is true across the customer journey - the same survey found that 78% of customers were also more likely to re-purchase from brands that personalize interactions & recommend to their friends & family.
As an added benefit, personalized marketing can minimize wasted time & money for businesses. By crafting strategies that serve & drive strong impact with specific pockets of customers, you can set aside broad sweeping approaches that can be more expensive and/or don’t work.
(1) Source: https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/growth-marketing-and-sales/our-insights/the-value-of-getting-personalization-right-or-wrong-is-multiplying
Start by figuring out your business objectives - what’s most important for you to solve today? That could be new client growth, preventing churn, or enhancing long-term usage & loyalty - this will define how you tackle the following pieces.
From there, move on to understanding your customers (or potential customers).
We like to first segment customers using the data we have on hand - this could be demographics or geographic groupings for new customers; product purchased or initial spend for first time customers; or buying patterns or usage cohorts for long-time buyers. The segments you choose should be informed by your business model and objectives defined earlier.
From there, round out the data with customer conversations - look to understand what problem each cohort needs solved and how / why they chose (or should choose) your product / service. Critically, to execute a personalized strategy, you’ll need to really unpack why these segments are unique from one another. This is harder than it seems!
Should anecdote not align with data segmentation, it’s okay to go back and iterate. But once that’s set, you should know (1) what customers you want to target; (2) why they should choose you. Let’s next consider the how.
There are a number of ways to personalize your marketing: where & when you engage with the customer, what content you serve them, any product or service promoted, pricing / discounts attached, etc. Figure out what’s most important to personalize based on your understanding of your customer segments above.
By way of simple example, perhaps you sell luxury travel experiences. Your goal is to grow purchases of repeat trips from existing clients. You’re specifically focused on clients who (i) have only purchased one trip from you; (ii) spent above $x on that first trip; (iii) are families with children over a certain age. Your research may suggest your target buyer cares most about bespoke experiences that cater to the family, tends to purchase trips on impulse regardless of cost, and appreciates more personal, tactile forms of outreach.
In this case, you’ll focus on reaching them at the right time & place with the right package, rather than waiting til a great deal is available. You may reach out after the client’s first trip with a thoughtfully designed handwritten card & personal note, welcoming them home & thanking them for their booking. Then, you may follow up with a suggestion for an exclusive travel experience in a destination complementary to the one they visited. Each card delivers the unique experience your client seeks, offers well-informed & thoughtful information in the form of a follow-on suggestion within their wheelhouse, and serves their appreciation for personalized vs. generic communication.
By deeply personalizing your outreach, you show your customer you understand their needs, value them, and increase the likelihood you continue to win their business.
GenAI has the potential to entirely transform the extent to which your marketing efforts can be personalized.
Consider for example, the process of segmenting your customers. GenAI offers the ability to dramatically increasing the size of data sets you can leverage to create and understand customer segments, potentially improving your understanding of your customer cohorts. In this instance, it's critical to layer atop your own customer conversations and anecdotes to validate and further that understanding.
In another case, you could foresee leveraging LLMs in designing & producing more bespoke customer journeys and content - down to the individual level. A model might take in thousands of customer intent signals in determining when & how to engage and deliver personal & tailored content. We're a ways away from models being able to do so well, which is why it's important today to supervise your experiments and ensure they're focused on your broader business objectives.
To get started, we recommend identifying the portions of your strategy which you understand best and have the best data for. That allows you to scrutinize the output of these models more closely, ensuring their reliability.
At PenPals, we leverage AI at two stages we’re confident it moves the needle & we can course correct if anything looks off: (i) personalizing messaging we include in handwritten cards & landing pages based on our customers’ preferences; and (ii) insights on engagement from integrated handwritten card campaigns, which our customers use to understand impact & tailor follow ups.
PenPals helps businesses run personalized handwritten outreach. We handle strategy, production, and mailing - complete with genuine ballpoint pen & ink, branded stationery, and first-class postage. Our integrated campaigns include landing pages & offer you the tracking / insights of digital campaigns. Get in touch to see how we can help you include handwritten mail in your personalized marketing strategy.