Long gone are the days when just using traditional means of mass advertising such as TV commercials, radio announcements, newspaper advertisements, etc were enough to reach out to the customers and influence their decisions. Today’s customers have a consistent need to be engaged and sometimes entertained as well.

In today’s day and age, one not only needs to think of the means and resources to achieve personalization in our marketing efforts but also on how to do it well. The challenge gets compounded as what might be engaging for a certain person might not be engaging for others. Thus, the need to find ways to connect with customers on an individual level. The starting point of a personalized approach is knowing the customer well and segmenting them. Delivering relevant content and messaging to segmented audiences is the key to personalization.

Personalization on the most minimal level can also be very effective. Just using the name of the person in an email, instead of “dear customer” can go a long way in giving you a disproportionate response rate. Amongst the bigger brands that use personalization well, Amazon can be a good example. As not only do they know the customer, they also remember the customer. When you log into your Amazon account, a welcome back notification pops up and even while you are browsing products, you are recommended items based on your previous purchases or clicks. In this manner, Amazon is able to not only personalize their content but also increase their sales.

The importance of data and data collection

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The success of your personalization marketing strategy will depend on how and what kind of data you have collected. The way you measure this data will also play a huge role in the delivery. Data can be collected in various ways, be it creating user journeys, surveys, email chains, or just by simply having an online chatbox. Collecting product and feature specific data will help you make better recommendations, provide better quality and also deliver more. Getting feedback is another method of collecting data that can help you with personalizing content basis direct user inputs.

Once you have collected relevant data, you can start painting a picture of your user personas and deliver content or services in accordance with that.

6 Reasons why personalization works

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Effectively target specific audiences

The main advantage of having personalized marketing is that you can reach out to very specific audiences. By collecting data from surveys, questionnaires, user journeys, segmented lists, etc you can create campaigns targeting an audience based on their interests and activities.  

Create better content

Personalization helps you stand out in a crowd. It helps you create better content that can be tailored to the interest of your audience. An example of good personalization can be the Coca Cola campaign. Their bottles carried common first names, which helped attract a lot of people, mostly millennials.

Build deeper relationships with customers

Build a much stronger and deeper relationship with your customers. Customers will be able to see the care and consideration you have for them reflected through your content. They will feel much more connected to the product and company.

Gives a face to your business

Your business becomes more human. You will be able to establish an identity for your company and show that there is, in fact, a human side to your business. A live chatbox, a simple question or even a very simple birthday mail can go a mile in the eyes of the user.

Make better recommendations

Not only will you be able to know the needs of your customers better, but you will also be able to make better recommendations. A great example of good personalization both online as well as offline can be The Kimpton group of hotels. They have a social media team constantly conversing in various ways with their guests. Be it commenting on their tagged pictures or replying to their tweets. They even have a gallery on their website where they post images taken by their guests. Not only does this increase their credibility, but also increases the amount of data they have about their customers. With such data, you will be able to make better recommendations that will be appreciated by the customer.

Boost sales and conversions

Personalization marketing is not just about getting to know your customer, it is also about increasing your sales. These recommendations and suggestions will help your users make better choices and increase your sales. When you know exactly what the user wants, you will be able to provide exactly that, thus increasing your sales and conversions.

The SmartKarrot edge for personalization

SmartKarrot is an Engagement-As-A-Service(EaaS) solution that caters to all your engagement and incentivization needs. You can use this platform to engage, motivate and incentivize behavior changes amongst your users. The bouquet of features available on the platform enables you with personalization marketing with a simple plug-n-play interface!

SmartKarrot is an intuitive platform where you can create, manage, monitor and tweak engagement journeys, surveys, referrals and whatever it takes to keep your user base engaged and motivated.

SmartKarrot provides Smart Segmentation, where you can segment different types of users based on many different attributes and reach out to a particular audience set.  This comprehensive analytics suite created by experts that cuts down the learning time and helps you measure user data better. Insights provided help you deliver better results. You can now tailor-make your messaging based on these insights.

Listen to your audience, act on the feedback and communicate effectively all using one platform.

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