How Businesses Personalize Marketing–Common Tools and Approaches

Marketing is the driving force behind every business. Without marketing, you cannot inject new capital into the industry and move your goods. 

After all, customers won’t engage with something that they don’t know exists. 

That’s why the first goal of marketing is to create exposure. The second goal is to convince the audience that they will gain something by purchasing from your brand.

In the days of traditional marketing, this was relatively easy. All you had to do was put up some billboards and plaster your ads all over a neighborhood.

Now, it is not so easy. Due to the popularity of e-commerce, digital marketing has become a necessity. Since everyone is doing it, simply putting up ads no longer suffices. Brands must personalize their marketing efforts for their target audience to receive a positive reception. 

Let’s see how they do that.

What Do Businesses Need To Personalize Marketing

In modern marketing, two key elements are required for personalization: Customer Data and Segmentation. 

Here’s a bit more info about both.

1. Collecting Customer Data

Using IP geolocation, website heatmaps, account information, etc

To personalize something for someone, you need to know quite a bit about that person or their demographic. That’s why you need to collect customer data. 

There are plenty of ways to collect customer data if you have a digital platform. Here are some everyday things that you can learn through platform analytics.

• The demographic spread of your audience.
• The regions from which your customers hail
• Their behavior on your platform, specifically with respect to browsing and purchasing products or services.
• Your customer base showcases cultural and ethnic preferences.

These are some of the key things you can learn simply by analyzing your platform. All of this data helps with personalization later on. 

Do note that you cannot collect this information without your customer’s consent. You are legally obligated to provide a notice stating that using your services automatically grants consent, and that if consent is not given, the services willn’t be rendered.

2. Audience Segmentation and Profiling

The other thing businesses need for personalizing their marketing tactics is different audience profiles. Having different profiles enables brands to tailor their marketing approach to each individual.

These profiles can be as specific as the data allows. Without such profiles, it is nearly impossible to create a marketing strategy that caters to your audience.

How Do Businesses Acquire These?

Naturally, the bigger question is, how do businesses acquire this data, and how do they create the profiles? The answer is that they use a bunch of tools and software that can collect and analyze data to create customer profiles.

Here’s a general breakdown of the kind of software that is typically used.

• Customer Data Platforms

A Customer Data Platform (CDP) is a type of software that collects, unifies, and organizes customer data from multiple sources. These sources can include:

• Websites
• Mobile apps
• Email platforms
• CRMs

And other things of the sort. Great examples of such platforms are Salesforce Data Cloud, Adobe Real-Time CDP, Tealium Customer Data Hub, mParticle, and Twilio Segment.

• CRMs and Automation Software

CRM stands for “Customer Relationship Management.”  This is a type of software that does the following things.

• Stores customer data
• Tracks customer communication across different channels, such as emails, phone calls, messages, and texts.
• Manages sales pipelines to help follow leads and track ongoing deals.
• Automates follow-ups using various triggers. 
• Provides some level of automated customer support.

CRMs are incredibly helpful for managing large customer bases, and they have a massive role in creating profiles and audience personas. 

• Website Analysis Tools (IP location, Heatmapper)

There are many tools that a brand can use to collect information about people who visit their website. This information can be used to personalize their experiences and improve the success rate of marketing directed at them.

Some examples include:

• IP location checker. This is a type of online tool that uses the IP address of a website visitor to determine their approximate location. This is possible because IP addresses are associated with a specific area where they can be assigned. It is not pinpoint accurate, but it is enough to identify the city from which a person accessed the website.
• Webpage heatmaps. This is a type of tool that can create a heat map of any web page, showing which parts of the page receive the most or least clicks.  Brands can use this information to identify which products, categories, or ads received the most clicks, thereby learning the preferences of their audience.

So, with a combination of such tools and technologies, brands can easily collect data and create profiles for personalized marketing.

Effective Personalization Tactics That Businesses Use

So, once they have the data, what do they do to make use of it? Well, to answer that question, we have compiled a list of personalization tactics that make use of that data. Many of these tactics you should have experienced yourself as well.

1. Tailored Emails

Emails are one of the strongest methods of personalized marketing. They can be used in a variety of ways. For example, you can use them to inform your customers about new offers, special deals, and any other promotional event going on.

You can also use them for retargeting. Retargeting is necessary when customers have wishlisted items or abandoned carts. A quick email reminding them about the cart/list can prompt them to finish the purchase.

The best part is that all of that can be done in a highly personalized manner. You can use your CRM to see which customer fits which profile and then create an email that will resonate with them. For example, a thrifty person would be more likely to respond if you provide a decent discount on your promotions.

So, there is immense potential to tailor emails for specific personas to get the best reactions.

2. Personalized Customer Journeys

A customer journey is the complete experience a person has with a brand. This experience starts from the first moment the customer hears about the brand and lasts long after they’ve made a purchase. It includes every touchpoint and interaction, whether it’s browsing a website, opening an email, reading a review, contacting support, or making repeat purchases.

With a powerful CRM, personalizing customer journeys is a piece of cake. CRMS lets you follow customer interactions. You can easily track customer preferences across these interactions and ensure that the next touch point is tailored to elicit a good reaction from them.

Be it an email, message, advertisement, or any other marketing technique, all of them can be tailored using that info to improve conversions. The best thing, though, is that all the automatic actions that CRMs can take using triggers can also be personalized. 

3. Dynamic Website Content

Dynamic website content is a novel approach to website design. In this approach, the website design changes based on who is accessing it. It uses data points like:

• IP location (to find the region)
• Data from previous visits
• Past actions taken on the site
• Time of day
• Customer profile data (if logged in)
• Device type

This data is used to change the website design such that it is more suitable for that particular customer. Some examples of what can change in a dynamic website are: homepage banners, product recommendations, and messaging.

Of course, the various designs have to be created in advance, but that is not a difficult job for a UI/UX designer and a web developer.

Since a website is also part of a brand’s marketing, tailoring its design for each of its audiences ensures they get a personalized experience. As a result, they might convert easily from your site.

4. Retargeting Ads

Ads are obviously still a major player in the marketing industry. It’s just that now, you have to create different ads for different audience personas to improve the conversion rate.

So, what are retargeting ads? Ad providers use tracking pixels to check which website a user visited. The pixel provides some information to the provider, such as the user’s IP address and device type.

What happens is that when said user leaves your site and goes to another, ad providers identify them and show them ads for the site they just left. The ads are tailored to make them want to go back and check out the special offers and deals shown in the ads.

(Really creepy, I know, but it is unfortunately a thing. You can prevent that using an Ad blocker and a rotating IP address (via VPN) so that you can’t be tracked online.)

5. Loyalty and Reward Programs

A customer’s history is very useful for fitting them into an audience persona. This means you can provide a customized loyalty and rewards program.

Having such a program and promoting it is definitely part of a marketing strategy. Savvy brands can use email outreach, text message outreach, or even on-page CTAs (Calls to Action) to entice customers to enroll in the loyalty and rewards program.

The personalization aspect is determined by the type of program being offered. Not all customers exhibit the same buying behavior, nor do they have the same needs. A good brand will create several types of programs and offer them to customers that can make the most of each one. 

For example, a customer who only buys stuff occasionally should not be offered a program that uses FOMO (fear of missing out). That kind of program is good for people who buy a lot within a given time span.

Occasional buyers should be rewarded with unexpired store credit that they can use to earn discounts on their next purchase. 

This ensures that customers build a lot of goodwill towards the brand and interact with it more often in the future.

Conclusion

So, there you have it, some common tools, technologies, and approaches businesses use to personalize marketing and get more sales. The methods are varied and technologically advanced. However, we have explained them in simple enough terms for anyone to understand them easily.

Now, you know how brands collect data about you and use it for their gain by using personalized marketing.