Personalization can be an effective means to cultivate customer engagement and deepen customer loyalty, as well as play an integral part in developing successful sales strategies.
Consumers appreciate companies that make them feel special, so this article focuses on ways you can incorporate personalization into your marketing and sales strategies.
1. Personalize Your Emails
Personalization in ecommerce enables merchants to offer shoppers a more tailored shopping experience and increase sales. Personalization helps build relationships with customers and help them find products tailored specifically to them.
McKinsey reports that 71% of consumers expect brands to provide personalized interactions and can become disappointed if they don’t. Companies which succeed at cultivating customer intimacy tend to experience faster growth.
Personalizing products to increase sales is as straightforward as adding the name or location of a prospect to their email or website content. Just be sure that they have given consent for this data sharing by opting in through all forms and making sure all forms can be unsubscribed from marketing campaigns at any time.
Consumers are over three times more likely to purchase from brands offering personalized experiences, than from those that do not.
2. Personalize Your Website
Personalizing website content to attract and retain customers can be an effective strategy to engage and retain them; however, companies must exercise caution not to overdo it as this could potentially alienate consumers who can become upset by overly personalized messaging and abandon the brand altogether.
Accenture conducted a study revealing that 69% of consumers only want personalization based on data shared directly with brands rather than third party data sources, and 70% expect brands to provide an opt-out option for personalized marketing campaigns.
Personalizing website content allows businesses to boost smart upsells and cross-sells by identifying products that will most appeal to each customer and increasing the total items sold per transaction. Personalized web pages also allow salespeople to tailor conversations with prospects and leads so as to demonstrate an in-depth knowledge of their needs.
3. Personalize Your Calls
Marketing operates on an one-to-many level; sales is more personal, so personalization can make a substantial impactful statement about what the seller’s offerings mean to him or her.
Customers tend to show greater loyalty towards a brand when it shows that it knows and understands them, such as by providing personalized customer support. Customer relationship management (CRM) tools are capable of doing this by compiling data from social media channels, websites and physical retail stores in order to build detailed profiles for both new and existing customers.
Personalized product recommendations have been shown to increase conversion rates by 15% and decrease acquisition costs by as much as 50%, as well as boost brand loyalty by upping brand awareness – in fact 56% of consumers say that brands who understand their needs and desires tend to stay loyal longer.
4. Personalize Your Products
Customers increasingly expect personalized experiences from brands, which includes name recognition, location-based content delivery and recommendations matched to preferences. Brands who fail to fulfill these customer expectations risk losing out on revenue opportunities.
Personalization is an integral component of sales strategies as it can foster customer loyalty and build customer retention. Over 40% of frequent shoppers only purchase from companies offering tailored shopping experiences.
To effectively implement personalization, marketers must collect first-party consumer data via customer journey analytics platforms and collect initial consumer data to identify customer needs and develop marketing campaigns that address them.
Personalization should not come at the cost of privacy. Customers expect businesses to protect their personal information and provide a clear policy on how they plan on using it.
5. Personalize Your Services
Personalizing products and services to sell them more effectively is a powerful way for brands to differentiate themselves from the competition. This could involve tactics such as product recommendations based on past purchases or facial recognition in physical retail stores. According to research conducted by startup bonsai, 69% of consumers are willing to share their data with brands to receive personalized marketing and sales experiences.
Personalization is rapidly revolutionizing marketing, shifting away from assumptions about audiences toward methods that target buyers based on their needs. Customers expect personalized interactions from brands they visit; when brands fail to deliver this promise they become angry. Thus, personalization has become an indispensable capability for marketers that should be integrated into every marketing and sales strategy plan.