Master Personalized Marketing – a how-to guide

22nd July 2019

Personalized marketing – 72% of consumers get frustrated when they see ads that don’t match their interests of purchase behaviour. As a result, marketeers are under constant pressure to deliver more personalised marketing messages. What is personalized marketing and how can one master personalized marketing?

Personalized marketing in a nutshell

Personalized marketing is about reaching consumers at the right moment with the right message. The ad itself, as well as the advertising channel and time it shows, can be tailored to the behavior and personal characteristic of consumers. It’s the perfect tool to reach the modern consumer.

Personalization marketing goes beyond adding a customer’s name to your emails, it’s about personalizing your content across different channels. With this strategy, you use the customer’s profile, as well as contextual, historical, and behavioral customer data to serve experiences at the right time when the customer needs it. Digital marketers who use such a strategy witness an increase between 70% and 84% in the effectiveness of different key metrics.

How to master personalized marketing?

So, when you deploy a personalization strategy, the customer gets a unique, personal experience regardless of the customer’s place in the customer journey. This type of experience provides a differentiated, valuable customer experience. So how exactly do you do that? We’ll take you there in a few steps.

1. Create personas

The first step is to understand the consumers you want to reach. Who are the consumers you are trying to reach? – and why do they need your product/service? Find out their needs, goals and motivation. Then focus on their behavior: where do they find information? Which media channels do they use? Create personas for your current customer but also for the people you want to reach with your ads (a wider audience).

2. Define your customer journey

The next step is to define the customer journey. Map the different phases of the customer journey and analyze what customers need in those phases. Identify the touchpoints where a consumer interacts with your brand and investigate the customer’s expectations to be able to provide the customer with the right information at the right time.

3. Determine where personalization adds most value

When you have charted everything, it’s time to define at which touchpoints in the customer journey personalization adds the most value. Keep in mind that the personalization needs to help bring your customers to the next stage of their journey.

4. Manage and use customer data

The most important thing in personalized marketing is customer data and you use it. It’s relatively easy to get an insight into customers, however, to turn data into actionable insights you need solutions that allow you to reach them. There are various ways to use personalized marketing, ranging from email to advertising on social and the open web.

5. Personalized video ads

Video is booming and what’s a better way to stand out in the crowd than with personalized videos. Instead of using one video for all your customers adjust elements of the video based on the viewer. Think of for instance mentioning the location of the viewer in the video, show scenes that match their interest or only show products they’ve looked at.

How brands use personalized marketing

Heineken

To give you some inspiration see how Heineken did uses personalized marketing in the video below.

What Heineken did here is to personalize the video based on location, weather, number of terraces open nearby and the age of the viewer. It makes the video much more relevant and interesting for the viewer.

Van Gogh Museum

Another way to use personalized marketing by email. You can add the CRM data of customers in a video. Van Gogh, for instance, sends a personalized video to everyone who purchases a ticket on their website.

The Van Gogh Museum uses the data they gather from the online ticketing sales to improve customer experience before they visit the museum. You can see how the museum decided to add value at this touchpoint in the customer journey. You can read more about this example here.