With an enormous amount of data, you are ready to get your online personalization started. Personalizing your content create something valuable, both for you as your clients. That’s because you get to know your target group even better while showing them the content they want. Already 90% of all consumers think personalization is essential to connect with a company, and, therefore, feels more comfortable with making a purchase1. In this blog, you’ll find out how to get started with online personalization!
Personalization in online marketing
We’ve probably all seen some form of personalization at a particular moment in our life. Customized email subjects or ads of a company’s website you just visited. Something you might not know is that personalization can go way further than ‘Hello [contact first name]’ and remarketing banners.
Think of it like walking into a store and have some of the employees walk over to you to help you out. Based on the way you look, the items you viewed or, if you’re a regular customer, based on your previous visits, they can recommend you certain clothing items, know which coffee you like or where you prefer to sit in the cafe.
It’s the same for online personalization. Based on your online behavior and known personal data, you can give your target group personal recommendations and personalize your online content. You can apply this in virtually any online marketing activity, and we’d love to tell you all about it. But first, it’s essential to show you how to get started with personalization.
Getting started with personalization
Personalization is only possible with a good dash of data. Although more and more online users tend to watch their privacy closely, there are still enough possibilities for you to get information.
One way to get information is by simply asking for it with download forms. Here, your customers can leave their details to get valuable content like ebooks, webinars, templates, etc. in return. Or they can subscribe to your newsletter to receive exciting content regularly. 57% of consumers will leave their personal information, as long as they can benefit from it2.
Besides asking, there are many other ways to get your data:
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Online statistics of your website/webshop (from Google Analytics and Google Search Console)
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Statistics of social media
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Data collected from newsletters and other email marketing campaigns
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A/B testing
You can also find much information about your target groups online and offline, or let an external company research your target groups and create personas.
Personalization in emails
Now you know how to get data, it’s time to get started personalizing. Customized emails are probably the most popular way of personalization, but not everyone is getting the most out of it.
Besides adding the first name of your readers in the subject line or salutation of your newsletter, you can also personalize by segmenting your mailing lists. The results are impressive: an increase of 41% in unique click rate compared to ‘standard’ email content3. Besides that, segmented, targeted emails generate up to 58% of all revenue4. This is because readers get personalized content based on the web pages they visited, articles they read, their interests, age, and branch they work in. That’s how they see recommendations specifically for them and offers based on their birthday or interests. By personalizing content, the relation with your company feels more personal and individual for the consumer. And that’s what it’s all about.
Personalize your website
You can also personalize your website or webshop in several ways. Online personalization doesn’t stop with showing recommendations based on visited web pages. Marketing automation tool HubSpot also offers a great way of showing personalized content. With ‘smart content,’ you can show different segmentations of your target group, varied content. Based on online behavior, your target group gets the content - image or text - they want to see at a particular moment.
With chatbots or virtual assistants, you can also send your target group to the pages relevant to them. By letting these bots ask your audience about what they’re looking for, they can send them to specific pages. That’s how your audience will quickly find the answer they’re looking for. Or you can use chatbots by helping customers with ordering their food. By remembering the previous orders, they can help customers re-ordering the food they like.
How marketing automation can help you out
There are several ways to personalize your content. Besides that, some tools can help you analyze all the data you have collected. Take a look at HubSpot, for example. This tool and other marketing automation/inbound marketing tools collect all the data in one place and helps you analyze, segment, and personalize.
At Sterc, we also use marketing automation tool HubSpot for several things besides personalization. When you’re interested in getting started with personalization or another online marketing activity, we would love to help you out.
