Personalization in Digital Marketing: The Complete Guide

Everywhere you look, modern brands are embracing personalization in digital marketing. Everything from the emails customers receive, to the push notifications on their smartphones are becoming more targeted and specific. It’s easy to see why. 

We’re living in a world where customers expect to be treated like individuals. 71% of customers say they expect companies to personalize interactions, and 76% feel frustrated when this doesn’t happen.

Ultimately, effective personalization is the key to connecting with customers on an emotional level, increasing sales, and earning loyalty. Here’s everything you need to know about unlocking the power of personalization in digital marketing.

What is Personalization in Digital Marketing?

Personalization in digital marketing is a strategy that involves leveraging customer data to target and retarget customers with content specific to their interests or pain points, across digital channels. It’s how companies contextualize the experiences, offers, and messages they send to customers.

Personalization isn’t a “new trend” for digital marketing experts. Business leaders have been using segmentation and dynamic content for years in ads and email campaigns. You may have even noticed companies like Amazon and Netflix using tools to deliver personalized suggestions to customers. 

However, as customer expectations evolve, companies are exploring more advanced ways to create unique journeys for their target audience. In fact, about 75% of business leaders say personalization is essential in digital marketing. Plus, many are embracing new tools, like AI and omnichannel customer engagement platforms, to upgrade personalization efforts. 

Examples of Personalized Digital Marketing Campaigns

Increasingly, personalization in digital marketing is becoming an omnichannel effort. Customers aren’t just interacting with your brand through email and social media. Their journeys involve countless touchpoints, from mobile push notifications to video platforms.

Examples of personalization efforts appear on every channel. Common options include:

Targeted Email Campaigns

With email automation software, companies can now create highly targeted email campaigns based on customer preferences, and behaviors. For instance, Sephora sends different emails to customers based on spending habits. Consumers who spend more than $200 automatically receive thank you emails with custom coupons they can use in their next purchase.

Targeted Social Media and Paid Ads

With paid advertising solutions, like Google Ads, or promotions on Facebook and Instagram, companies can target specific groups of customers with unique messages. You can create customer profiles and serve different ads to customers based on their location, demographics and more. 

You can even adjust marketing messages based on which device a customer is using, or whether they’ve interacted with your business before, using retargeting. 

Personalized Product Recommendations

Probably the most common form of personalization in digital marketing, unique product recommendations appear on countless sites and ecommerce stores. You’re likely already familiar with how Netflix uses AI to suggest content based on what you’ve watched in the past.

Plus, Amazon uses a personalization algorithm to suggest specific items to customers based on what they’ve purchased and reviewed in the past. 

Account-Based Marketing and Custom Videos for B2B

Personalization in digital marketing isn’t just for B2C companies, B2B companies are increasingly relying on personalization too. For instance, account-based marketing techniques involve companies creating specific customer profiles and sales strategies for each individual client they target.

Some companies even create personalized videos and product demonstrations to draw attention to specific product or service benefits based on what they know about their customer’s pain points.

Personalized Mobile Messages 

Now that around 65% of all ecommerce traffic comes from mobile devices, demand for personalization in mobile marketing is increasing. With the right engagement platform, companies can build highly personalized mobile journeys for customers, based on data like their location.

For instance, Starbucks used the GENESISX platform to design custom experiences for audiences located nearby a retail location, increasing sales by 15%. 

The Benefits of Personalization in Digital Marketing

Personalization in digital marketing isn’t just important because customers expect it. The right strategy is the key to building stronger relationships with customers, and boosting the ROI of your marketing campaigns. When you embrace personalization in digital marketing you:

• Strengthen connection with customers: Treating customers as individuals, and paying attention to their specific pain points and goals leads to better relationships. With personalization, you’ll earn greater loyalty from customers, and develop a stronger reputation as a stand-out brand in your industry.
• Better marketing results: With access to data for marketing personalization, you can design more targeted advertising campaigns. This ensures you’re focusing your time, effort, and money on connecting with the right people, improving advertising ROI.
• Increased revenue: Personalization significantly increases the chances of your marketing campaigns being able to convert customers. It ensures you can deliver the right offers and solutions to customers at the perfect time in their buyer journey, boosting sales.
• Better customer retention: Since you’ll have a stronger, deeper relationship with your customers when you send them personalized marketing messages, you’re more likely to earn their loyalty. This means you can spend less time and money on customer acquisition.
• Differentiation: Truly personalized experiences set your company apart from the competition. They show customers you’ve done your research, understand their needs, and want to deliver a fantastic experience across channels.

The Challenges of Personalization in Digital Marketing

Though the benefits of personalization in digital marketing are numerous, there are challenges to overcome. 63% of digital marketing leaders say they still struggle with personalization at scale. Often, this is a result of limited access to data, and the right technology. 

Gathering customer data effectively, while adhering to privacy laws and guidelines, can be extremely difficult. That’s particularly true now that companies like Google are phasing out third-party cookies. At the same time, identifying ways to use that data for smart segmentation can be complex. 

Many businesses still don’t allocate enough resources to their personalization efforts, and some struggle to unify their data effectively with the right customer engagement platform. As demand for advanced personalization grows, business leaders will need to rethink their marketing strategies.

How to Get Started with Personalization in Digital Marketing

An effective approach to personalizing marketing campaigns starts with a careful combination of technology, strategy, and data. Here’s how you can start launching more targeted campaigns.

Step 1: Create a Team, and Empower them with the Right Tools

To implement an effective personalized digital marketing strategy, you need a team of skilled professionals. This includes data analysts, campaign designers, content creators, and people who understand the solutions you’re going to be selling.

Unifying various team members, from product designers to sales reps, can help you to create more powerful marketing campaigns. Just make sure you’re empowering your teams with the right technology, such as customer engagement platforms and campaign design tools, like GENESISX.

All-in-one tools that combine design tools for interactive content, data analysis solutions, and AI will simplify and streamline your campaign strategy. 

Step 2: Collect and Segment your Data

While 81% of customers prefer companies that offer personalized experiences, many are still reluctant to share too much information with businesses. You’ll need to take a careful approach to collecting data to ensure you can retain consumer trust, and adhere to compliance guidelines.

Be cautious about how much personal information you request from customers in surveys and sign-up forms. When you’re using technology to track data, like purchasing behaviors and browsing histories, make sure you double-check the insights you get. 

Once you have your data, use it to create highly targeted customer segments.  You can split your customers into groups based on their spending history, product interests, location, and demographic data. You might even combine different types of data to create more specific micro segments.

Step 3: Decide Where you’ll Implement Personalization

As noted above, there are plenty of different channels and touchpoints in the customer journey that can benefit from personalization. In today’s omnichannel world, ensuring you’re taking a comprehensive approach to enhancing each part of the customer journey can be valuable.

However, it’s important not to be too aggressive with your personalization efforts too. For instance, bombarding customers with personalized messages on every channel isn’t just time-consuming and expensive, it can leave customers feeling anxious about how you use their data.

Use your own insights and analytical platforms to find the most effective touchpoints to target. For instance, if you know your customers spend a lot of time interacting with your business via a mobile device when they’re in store, you could focus on creating personalized push notifications and ads.

Step 4: Track Data and Follow the Trends

Finally, after you implement your personalized digital marketing campaigns, make sure you’re paying attention to the results. Monitor engagement and conversion levels across channels, and pay attention to the feedback you get from your customers. Consider using A/B testing to experiment with different elements of personalization in your campaigns.

Aside from tracking your own campaign data, make sure you’re paying attention to personalization trends and new technologies as they emerge too. For instance, smart and dynamic content for mobile purchasing journeys is becoming increasingly popular as customers use their smartphones to shop.

Plus, AI-powered solutions that can help direct customers towards products, proactively reach them with messages, or generate valuable insights about marketing campaigns can be useful too.

Perfect Personalization in Digital Marketing

Today, every company needs to invest in personalization if they want to optimize their marketing efforts, generate more revenue, and improve their relationships with customers. A comprehensive digital platform, like GENESISX, can help you design more intuitive, bespoke, and targeted experiences for customers throughout the buyer journey.

Combining data, AI, and campaign design tools, GENESISX makes it easy to guide customers through their shopping experience, leading to significant increases in sales.

Contact our team to learn more about the impact GENESISX can have on your marketing personalization strategy.