Personalization Archives

In News

3 Ways to Personalize Your Marketing for Higher Engagement

April 9, 2024 No Comments

Use these three key tips to successfully incorporate personalization into your marketing.

In the early 2000s, Starbucks made writing customers’ names on cups a standard. Every time you ordered a drink, the barista would make sure your first name was written right on your grande mocha latte.

However, no one would have guessed that this simple, personalized gesture by Starbucks would become the next viral meme. With millions of different names to nail down, errors would surely be made. The problem was that some misspellings weren’t just a little wrong, they were very wrong — so wrong that the internet loved it.

Personalizing every drink seemed a daunting task, but the payoff was worth it — even when you factor in those viral flubs. Snapping a photo of your morning Starbucks is still an Instagram mainstay to this day, regardless of whether they get your name right.

Starbucks cashed in early on something people intuitively crave: personalization. A recent study on consumer engagement found that 86% of consumers feel personalized experiences increase their loyalty to a brand, while 66% said they would quit a brand if their experience wasn’t personalized.

Here are three ways you can incorporate personalization into your marketing without having to ask, “How do you spell that?”

1. Address every prospect by first name using dynamic or variable data

Luckily, computers are much more reliable than the human hand when it comes to spelling names. You can add prospects’ first names to mailers and emails to grab more attention and make a longer-lasting impression.

Leveraging someone’s first name is a good step toward creating a personalized experience. One study found that personalization in marketing, including naming, can significantly improve brand attitude and purchase likelihood without being perceived as intrusive.

Hopefully, you’ve already crafted emails using dynamic first-name codes that automatically substitute each recipient’s name into every email. You can also incorporate first-name tags into your subject lines for an added boost.

In the specific case of direct mail, research shows that most people prefer personalization. One study found that the response rate to direct mail increased by 135% when it was personalized by the recipient’s name and was in full colour. When all factors were combined — meaning name, colour and database information were personalized to each recipient through something known as variable data — the response rate went up even higher to 500%.

When you add that on top of the fact that studies put direct mail’s response rate at 500-900% better than other advertising channels, you have a powerful tool for boosting your bottom line.

The key with personalization is creating a personal connection without coming off like you are invading their privacy. Any information that you use should be either public record or first-party, provided directly by your customers and clients. Once you have the data, put it to good use with personalized messaging.

2. Target prospects based on context and interest rather than demographics

Marketing trends will have you targeting buyers like a game of Guess Who. Is my ideal customer a man or a woman? Are they older or younger? Do they wear a hat?

Demographic-based targeting focuses on who you want as your customer — but not the why or when behind the customer’s own experience.

But we can flip the script with contextual targeting, which focuses on the why and when of delivering ads. For example, with contextual search, a person who looks up “landscape lighting ideas” will see an ad about that same topic in their feed. This allows shoppers to find you faster.

You can also use geotargeting and a little creativity to find people likely to want or need your product or service. For example, if a woman often visits an organic grocery store or vitamin shop, she might respond well to other types of wellness products or services. A gym could target her and offer a month of free membership or a free yoga class at a studio.

The future of this digital marketing strategy anticipates prospects’ needs before they even start looking to fulfil them.

3. Automate responsive triggers that will personalize the customer journey without extra workload

Personalization is a great way to get prospects interested and even lead them straight to a sale, but what if their attention gets lost along the way, or you want them to bring them back for repeat purchases?

Automated marketing can help fill those gaps. Using the same example from above, a woman who is focused on wellness may see a yoga studio’s ad and visit their website to learn more. That is certainly a win. However, how do you get her to return to your website if she leaves without converting? Realistically, only a fraction of your website visitors will convert, after all.

Retargeting ads are an obvious answer that is hopefully already in your arsenal. Personally, when it comes to re-capturing attention, I’m for pulling out all the stops — and that means leveraging the high response rate of direct mail. Using a relatively new technology called direct mail retargeting, you can automatically retarget unconverted website visitors offline. With retargeted mailers, the woman in the above example would receive a mailer offering her a free yoga class within 24 hours of a website visit.

Abandoned shopping carts are another way to funnel interested buyers to a close. Send emails or postcards to prospects who put items in their cart but never followed through with a purchase.

Your message could say, “Forget to check out? Come back — we have a special offer just for you!”

The type of automation you put in place will be based on your specific industry. Take some time to think about actions and behaviours that could trigger a mailer or digital ad, and you’ll be on your way to a future of business growth and success.

BY JOY GENDUSA

ENTREPRENEUR LEADERSHIP NETWORK® CONTRIBUTOR

Founder/CEO of PostcardMania. Joy Gendusa founded PostcardMania in 1998 with just a phone & a computer (no funding or investments), and today we generate over $100 million annually with 365 staff. I’m passionate about helping small businesses succeed at marketing and grow — because when small business does well, we all win.

Sourced from Entrepreneur

In News

How to Harness the Power of Personalization in B2B Marketing

January 9, 2024 No Comments

By Samuel Thimothy

Here’s what you can do to reach more business-to-business customers and make your campaigns more efficient through the power of personalization.

Featured Image Credit: Getty Images

By Samuel Thimothy

VP at OneIMS.com, an inbound marketing agency, and co-founder of Clickx.io, the digital marketing intelligence platform.

Sourced from Inc.

In News

3 Ways Ecommerce Brands Can Use AI for Personalization

October 5, 2023 No Comments

By Shane O’Neill

How AI is revolutionizing ecommerce, from personalized ads to dynamic pricing and enhanced customer support.

The Gist

AI powerhouse. AI for personalization enhances individualized ecommerce experiences.
Tech advantage. Machine learning dynamically adapts prices, boosting consumer appeal.
Customer support. AI-enabled chatbots provide personalized, emotionally intelligent assistance.

Attention ecommerce brands: The days of blanketing consumers with vaguely relevant ads are over.

Seven out of 10 consumers now expect brands to personalize ads and product recommendations, and 76% get frustrated when this doesn’t happen, according to McKinsey research.

In response, nine out of 10 businesses, including Coca-Cola, Netflix and Sephora, are investing in the practice of using artificial intelligence (AI) for personalization to give consumers a one-to-one experience, or something close to it.

In a nutshell, personalization in ecommerce uses data to show customers products and deals tailored just for them. Instead of asking shoppers to sift through a list of products, personalization uses a customer’s purchase history and browsing behaviour with the brand to suggest the most likely item that person would buy.

To return the favour, 78% of consumers are likely to make repeat purchases from companies that personalize, according to the same McKinsey report mentioned above.

Yet personalization will only boost customer satisfaction, brand loyalty and sales if it’s executed precisely. And to do that requires culling insights from droves of customer data that humans simply cannot process and analyse manually.

And this is where artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP) come into play for ecommerce brands.

AI for Personalization in Ecommerce

Personalization in ecommerce is still possible without AI, but it relies on grouping customers into “personas” based on shared demographics or interests. While this is an adequate approach, today’s consumer can sniff out when they’re being marketed to as a persona rather than an individual.

AI-based personalization is much more specific, using advanced algorithms to scan volumes of customer data and deliver information to you based on your own specific behaviour.

“AI’s ability to process data in real-time and adapt on the fly to create personalized experiences is a key advantage for ecommerce brands,” said Kristin Smith, managing director and retail commerce lead at Deloitte Digital. “It also helps that AI isn’t prone to human mistakes and can work 24/7.”

With advanced personalization now expected by the majority of consumers, ecommerce brands have a variety of ways to utilize AI to deliver tailored shopping experiences. Here are three of them.

1. Product Recommendations for the Individual

One of the clearest examples of using AI for personalization are the tailored product recommendations we see in emails or when logging on to our favourite ecommerce brand’s web site.

Here, complex machine learning algorithms mine your previous purchases, cart adds, product reviews, and product interactions, and generate personalized product recommendations in real time.

This customer data becomes the basis for training an algorithm that continues to learn and improve on the accuracy of recommendations as it receives new data.

Example to Emulate: Netflix

Netflix is a recommendation trailblazer. The streaming giant’s recommendation engine, called NRE (Netflix Recommendation Engine), uses algorithms to analyse data from each member’s viewing history and generates hyper personalized movie and TV show recommendations.

2. Automated Dynamic Pricing

Constantly adjusting product prices is a necessary but time-consuming task. By incorporating machine learning into pricing, ecommerce brands can automatically adjust prices in real time based on their own manufacturing costs, competitor’s prices, market demand and seasonality.

AI-based dynamic pricing benefits consumers by:

Monitoring the competition and adjusting prices to ensure customers get a fair price.
Offering real-time personalized discounts based on a customer’s behavior. For instance, if a person continually shows interest in a product, a dynamic pricing algorithm could entice that person with a time-limited discount.

Example to Emulate: Amazon

Amazon is the king of AI-based dynamic pricing. The ecommerce giant uses machine learning to update the prices of millions of products several times every day. Its repricing algorithm factors in product demand, stock availability and customer behavior. This allows Amazon to consistently offer the most competitive prices.

3. Personalized Customer Support via AI-Powered Chatbots

Using NLP and sentiment analysis, today’s chatbots understand not just text but also the emotion behind customer support requests.

When you combine sentiment, access to customer data and speedy responses, it’s easy to see why chatbots are now a personalization tool. Today’s chatbots can greet customers by name, recommend products and discounts based on purchase and browsing data, and even help customers complete online purchases.

Example to Emulate: Sephora

Most ecommerce chatbots can handle rudimentary customer inquiries, but the more innovative chatbots also serve as shopping assistants.

Cosmetics retailer Sephora is a prime example. Sephora’s website chatbot answers questions about returns and exchanges. But it’s also a virtual assistant that asks customers questions about their skin tone and makeup preferences and then gives tailored recommendations.

The Big AI Personalization Challenge: Relevant Data

The benefits of using AI for personalization are clear, but the success of your strategy hinges on your data.

Kristin Smith of Deloitte recommends that ecommerce brands ask themselves the following questions regarding customer data:

What is the quality and source of the data your brand is trying to use?
Does the brand have permission to collect and use the data they have?
How actionable and granular is the data?

“Many organizations have customer data only at a high level,” Smith said. “But high-level, demographic data does not always translate to actionable insights for personalization.”

In addition to having the skilled staff in place to implement and maintain AI tools, the entire marketing and data team should always ensure that the data the AI algorithms are using is unbiased and specific enough to actually help the customer connect with your brand and buy from you consistently.

“There will be a rabbit hole of ideas for data points AI can collect for personalization,” said Derric Haynie, head of demand generation at Pipe17 and co-founder of Ecommerce Tech.

“Maybe you’re going to test new products based on previous purchase history. Or test personalized emails based on when customers last visited the site. There’s a lot to personalize, and the nature of personalization is recognizing each person has a different customer journey, and catering to it.”

Feature Image Credit: Blue Planet Studio

By Shane O’Neill

Shane O’Neill is an award-winning journalist and content marketer with more than 20 years of experience covering digital transformation, content marketing, social media marketing, artificial intelligence, and ecommerce. His work has been recognized nationally, earning an ASBPE Award for Blogging and a Min Editorial & Design Award for Best Online Article. Shane’s experience as both a B2B journalist at CIO.com and InformationWeek and as a content marketing director at tech startups gives him a unique insider/outsider perspective on tech innovation. Connect with Shane O’Neill: https://twitter.com/smoneill

Sourced from CMSWIRE

In News

Generative AI for Email Personalization: A Hallucination Wrapped in Confusion

May 30, 2023 No Comments

By Chad S. White

The potential for generative AI creating highly personalized emails may be premature, as current AI technology falls short in several areas.

The Gist

Scaling limitations. Generative AI struggles to efficiently create highly personalized emails without significant manual intervention, limiting its practicality at scale.
Traditional superiority. Existing personalization methods and machine learning models are more effective, reliable and risk-averse than current generative AI approaches for email personalization.
Unproven potential. The performance and return on investment of generative AI personalization in emails remain uncertain, with unclear benefits and possibly diminishing novelty.

Let me be blunt: We are so far away from generative AI writing personalized emails in any meaningful way. So very far. Yet, I keep hearing people suggest that generative AI will be writing highly personalized emails to individuals in the not-too-distant future.

I don’t think this is a realistic expectation at any significant scale, with any degree of automation and with a reliable expectation of increased performance — much less a positive return on investment. Let me explain why.

Not at Scale

The best example I’ve seen of generative artificial intelligence (AI) writing a one-to-one email was a meeting request for a salesperson. First, that’s a pretty generic request — and, in the example, amounted to 10 words. Not a big time-saver. Second, the salesperson is chaperoning the AI, and if they don’t like what’s written, they either have to edit it or write a follow up prompt for changes, which further reduces the time-savings. In that example, the degree to which it was personalized was achieved through manual intervention and not automatically driven by the recipient’s past behaviours, demographics or other criteria — which is the traditional definition of personalization.

While generative AI will get much better in the years ahead, that example is a very realistic example of how generative AI would be used in a “blank page” email situation right now, given generative AI’s many faults and limitations, including its propensity to “hallucinate.” That use case appropriately minimizes the risk by (1) asking for a routine request, (2) keeping the text short and (3) having the output monitored and approved by an employee before it’s sent.

Not Automated

To date, I’m not aware of any brands using ChatGPT or any other large language model (LLM) to incorporate personalized content into an email. And there’s a good reason for that: It’s unnecessary.

Traditional methods of personalization are highly effective and are far from fully utilized — due to siloed and unreliable data. And machine learning models for product recommendations and send time optimization are even less utilized. These existing tools are tried and true and offer solid returns with much more control — which is to say, with far less risk — than generative AI.

In fact, when generative AI is ultimately used for personalization, I predict it will be fed content that’s been personalized using traditional methods. Put another way, any personalization done by generative AI will be done on top of traditionally personalized content. That approach would minimize generative AI’s opportunities to introduce inaccuracies, biases, plagiarized material and other problematic content while simultaneously focusing generative AI on the kind of personalization that only it can do.

Just what are these new forms of personalization that only generative AI enables? Here are a few:

Tone. Some subscribers are receptive to more aggressive pitches while others are much less so. And, of course, there’s a whole spectrum of potential tones that could be used. Generative AI could rewrite copy on the fly to better align with what subscribers respond to best.
Vernacular. Language varies in significant ways by geographic region, education level, religious beliefs and other factors. Especially if it’s informed by sales and support correspondence, generative AI could adapt a brand’s messages to match the recipient’s language usage.
Image backgrounds. Generative AI for images can enable brands to create highly personalized images based on the subscriber’s location, industry and more. For example, an outdoors retailer could place a model in any number of national parks depending on the location of the subscriber or knowledge of where they like to hike or camp.

As with all personalization, a big part of the challenge will be securing enough data to make sound decisions. But even if that hurdle is cleared, there’s the question of performance and generating a return on investment.

Unproven Performance

Oracle Marketing Consulting has identified more than 170 segmentation and personalization criteria that can be used in digital marketing campaigns. However, just because you can personalize a message using a particular data point doesn’t mean your subscribers will respond positively to it. Through experience and testing, each brand must discover which factors truly move the needle for them. The same is true for generative AI personalization.

Even if you have the data to try to personalize the vernacular of your emails, for example, it’s currently unclear if this would be a winning approach. It’s likely that at least some subscribers would find this kind of personalization creepy and manipulative.

It’s also likely that some performance boosts likely wouldn’t be sustainable as the novelty wears off. The history of first-name personalization likely provides a good example. A decade and a half ago when it was new, first-name mail merges moved the needle for a while. But it quickly became a hollow gesture and a gimmick because it generally didn’t signal that the email’s body content was any more relevant to subscribers. First-name personalization got brief bumps when brands gained the ability to personalize images with a subscriber’s name and again when they could personalize videos with their name. But subscribers still view these as technological stunts that don’t signal anything meaningful.

Generative AI personalization may have the same effect, drawing attention away from your message and to the technological stunt of personalizing an image with the skyline of the person’s home city, for example. Sure, it will be cool the first time you encounter it, but the novelty will fade quickly because it’s based on relatively easy-to-obtain geographic data that doesn’t speak to the person’s needs or wants. Plus, attention-grabbing tactics often don’t translate into better performance.

Uncertain ROI

Even if generative AI personalization can boost performance, a positive return on investment is unlikely — definitely not at current “per token” price levels. And given email volumes, it’s possible that generative AI personalization may never make financial sense except for highly targeted campaigns.

It’s worth noting that many of our clients have seen lacklustre returns when using predictive subject line writing tools like Phrasee and Persado. These tools have been around for many years and are primarily driven by machine learning models where wording recommendations are based on the historical performance of a brand’s subject lines and other copy. If models that are trained on historical performance can’t reliably generate a strong ROI, marketers should be deeply sceptical that generative AI tools with no access to performance intelligence can.

Muddied Terminology

A big contributor to this premature idea of generative AI personalization is that some people are using the terms machine learning, AI and generative AI almost interchangeably. While they’re all loosely related, they’re far from the same. They operate using different algorithms and models, have different goals, are built on different datasets and are appropriate for different use cases.

With generative AI and AI in general being so hot right now, brands need to work extra hard to be clear-eyed about what’s possible now and what may perhaps be possible at some point in the future. Just like in the late ’90s when adding “.com” to company names was all the rage, now .ai domains are super popular. Just like then, in some cases these are just aspirational or opportunistic marketing moves.

Generative AI will ultimately be huge, and brands should absolutely experiment with and get comfortable with it. However, we’re in the hype-iest part of the hype cycle, so proceed with caution and ask lots of questions.

By Chad S. White

Chad S. White is the author of four editions of Email Marketing Rules and Head of Research for Oracle Marketing Consulting, a global full-service digital marketing agency inside of Oracle.

Sourced from CMS Wire

In News

AI’s Role in Digital and Retail Personalization, Part 1: The Big Picture

April 25, 2023 No Comments

By Justin Racine

Now more than ever, the convergence of retail and digital commerce has never been more important.

The Gist

Dreams and the path. Desire leads to personalized journeys and trajectories, as seen in my this author’s own story of buying a Mustang and getting a marketing internship.
The evolution. Personalization has been around for decades, evolving from traditional relationship marketing to email marketing and now AI-powered personalization in almost all aspects of life.
Three-part series. This series will explore three main components of personalization in retail, digital, and the intersection of dissonance and action.

When I was in high school, I pined for a fast, cool-looking muscle car to be my first vehicle. At age 16, all I could think about was a convertible Ford Mustang — and I was really determined to buy it. My parents, being the traditional people they were said, “Son, if you want this — you need to work for it — that’s how life goes.”

So, I did what any 16-year-old would do — I decided to find a job at a local golf course as I played quite frequently with friends and thought it would be something I would enjoy. (It was.) Sure enough, I saved up the money and was able to buy the Mustang I wanted so desperately.

But what happened next is what would forever alter the course of my life in a personalized way.

An Internship and a Transformation

While working at the golf course — I also was attending classes at a university, specifically for a degree in marketing and advertising strategy. Part of the course curriculum required me to get an internship; and, well, working at a golf course didn’t quite cut it. I gave my notice and told the owner of the course what was going on and he said, “Justin, we loved having you here and hate to see you go — you know, I also work as a general manager of a medical product distribution company — we could use someone like you this summer.”

Eager to upgrade my Mustang, I accepted and spent the summer learning marketing and advertising within the medical space.

We All Have Our Personalized Journeys

This story is important to set the stage of this article. We all as humans have our own journeys, personalized to what’s important to us. For me, it was a Mustang convertible — my desire to have that car set me off on my own personalized journey and trajectory. I later accepted a full-time position at the above-mentioned medical products company and spent the next 13 years learning and absorbing as much as a I could, which provided me with the path to that I’m still on today.

The same holds true for consumers today who demand experiences built on AI-powered personalization. Consumers want and demand things in their lives, and marketers and advertisers must provide personalized journeys to help them intuitively find what they want, and ultimately — change the trajectories of their lives. But to do so, requires a little help from our computer conscious friends.

Personalization, From the Start

The term personalization is somewhat new, thanks to the vast and wide adoption of technology and AI that allows brands to display products and services that we desire; that being said, personalization has been around for decades and traditionally took on another term, Relationship Marketing.

The ANA (Association of National Advertisers) describes “relationship marketing” as “a strategy of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) that emphasizes customer retention, satisfaction and lifetime customer value. Its purpose is to market to current customers versus new customer acquisition through sales and advertising.”

This holds true, to a point.

At its core, relationship marketing has really always been around. A customer visits your business, purchases a service or product, consumes that service or product, then hopefully if you as a business gave them an exceptional experience — the cycle will repeat. This of course has been prevalent since businesses have been around — however, relationship marketing also made a massive step forward during the 1990s, thanks to the rise of the internet and email marketing.

By Justin Racine

Sourced from CMSWIRE

In News

5 Ways to Make Your Marketing Emails More Personal — Without Personalization

March 1, 2023 No Comments

By Jordie van Rijn

Personalization is by no means a guarantee your emails will feel more personal.

I often hear marketers say they want to use more personalization in their marketing. Using profile data to make emails more tailored and user specific. And a lot are doing it. In fact, a recent report from the Data-Driven Marketing Association (DDMA) found that 63% of organizations say that personalized customer contact has already proven its value to them.

But personalization is by no means a guarantee your emails will feel more personal.

Notice the word “feel.” That’s because a personal email isn’t about the amount of data used to personalize, it’s about the email feeling personal. So how to make it feel personal?

A preferred way is to use the content and language to make that personal connection. Let’s look at seven ways to make your email hit harder without using actual personalization or data.

1. For Better Email, Use the Right Ideology Patterns

Your word choice reflects what’s important to you. Brands that write from their own perspective overly use “me,” “myself” and “I” and talk about themselves — a lot. Their brand, their gains, their goals, their interests, their news, etc.

The research “Top Language Tips for Better Email” from Everlytic & BreadCrumbs gives some great insights. They analysed 23,000 words and over 50 emails from the financial industry. Now financials are known for using complex and impersonal text, but the research discovered two very interesting things.

One is the use of ideology patterns. Language reflects what we find important. You can imagine that these themes are the ones they found most frequently in financial industry email marketing. The themes are Incentives, Aspiration, Trust and Support. By setting the ideologies to match the reader, you are setting yourself up for a valued experience.

Switch out your own goals in favour for the readers’ pain (and how you solve it). It is very easy to start writing from a writer’s perspective. But instead, just skip all that. Your message should end with the benefits your reader gets. So not what the writer wants, but what the reader gets. That makes it easier to focus on WIIFM: What’s in it for me. Don’t say, “I hope you will enjoy … ” just skip the whole, “I hope you will.” Even stronger is to motivate those benefits (why should they care?) by focusing on the problem, the pain, first.

2. Get Closer Through Connection-Based Language in Email

What I found even more interesting was the conclusion from the same research by Everlytic:

“Brands that use connection-based language create a better reader experience that results in boosted levels of engagement. And the trend for top mailers is that they all used connection-based language.”

The four most used connection words from the study are “your,” “you,” “we,” and “our.”

Subjective, objective, possessive and reflective. Here is a table that shows the various options in addressing people.

When using words like “your,” “you,” “we,” and “our,” it helps build a stronger relationship with the person on the other side.

An example to show the difference:

thank you for subscribing — *essence of email*

This is an interesting example of a welcome email we can learn from — it is a great illustration of what goes into connection based language.

For quick and casual readers the email seems to have great copy. It involves the audience in a personal way, and shows personality, so that is already great. But depending on how you read it, it can feel very self-centred (and trying a bit too hard). Now why is that?

The text is self-centred, because the writer uses “I,” “me,” “mine” very often: 12 times. Almost every sentence starts with an action or feeling of the writer.

3. Do the Email We-We Test

It’s pretty easy to spot a selfishly written message, once you know how. Use the We-We test: Count how many times you use “I, me, our, us, our product, company name etc.” vs. “You, your, ours, etc.”, then see how you can reduce the mentions of yourself in favour of connection-based language.

A few small tweaks and an email can feel way less about yourself and more about the reader feeling appreciated and engaged. So when we add more connection-based language, focus on the connection, the reader and the relationship. So yes, the example is a personal letter, and has merits. But as a rule — there has to be value in it for the reader, in contrast with 100% conversion focused emails.

By Jordie van Rijn

Jordie van Rijn is an independent email and eCRM marketing consultant. Entrepreneur Magazine titled him “One of 50 Online Marketing Influencers to Watch”.

Sourced from CMSWIRE

In News

6 Creative Ways To Make Your Products More Unique

February 15, 2023 No Comments

Sourced from The Clinton Courier

Making your products stand out from the competition is essential if you want to succeed in business. But how can you make sure that your products are truly unique? When it comes to product uniqueness, creativity is key! Here are six creative ways to make your products more unique and help them stand out.

1. Find Your Niche

Finding your niche is a great way to make your products stand out. Finding your business niche allows you to be creative and offer something unique that no one else can. It also helps customers easily identify what you’re selling and why they should choose it over similar products.

When looking for a niche to focus on, consider the market size and competition to determine whether or not it is worth pursuing. You will also want to research any potential customer needs in the space so that you can create an offering tailored specifically to them. Take the time to figure out how exactly you will differentiate your product or service from others on the market and tailor this to your target audience.

Finding your niche also allows you to create more personal connections with customers, as you can tailor your marketing and sales approach based on the needs of a specific niche market. You can build relationships with potential customers by showing them that you understand their wants and needs and offering an offering that meets those requirements.

The key to making your niche search work is focusing on one thing and doing it well instead of trying to be everything for everyone. It’s better to focus on a smaller number of products or services but do them exceptionally well rather than spreading yourself too thin across different sectors or markets.

2. Offer Personalization Options

Personalization options have become increasingly popular in recent years, and for a good reason. By offering personalization options to customers, you can make your products stand out from the competition by giving them something unique. Personalized products help make your offerings more creative and memorable, as each item is just for that customer.

In addition to making your products truly unique, excellent prints are a great option to add a touch of quality and sophistication to any product. Adding quality prints gives items like metals, mugs, or t-shirts an extra level of quality and detail while ensuring they’re completely customized with whatever text or image the customer chooses. These prints will last longer than other printing methods and create a special item that customers won’t find anywhere else.

3. Use Unusual Materials

Unconventional materials are an effective way to make your products stand out from the competition. By using unexpected materials, you can create innovative products that will set you apart from the rest. Unconventional materials often come with unique properties, such as textures, patterns, and colors that cannot be found in traditional materials. This makes them perfect for creating aesthetically pleasing items that capture consumers’ attention.

Furthermore, unconventional materials can be used to create products with higher durability than those made with traditional materials. For example, bamboo is a highly durable material resistant to water and mould, making it ideal for outdoor applications. Similarly, cork is known for its strong soundproofing properties and can be used to create items that are highly effective at muffling sound. Using unconventional materials, you can craft products that will last for years and offer superior performance.

4. Create Limited Edition Products

Creating limited-edition products is a great way to make them stand out from others on the market. You can do this by offering special discounts or bundle deals for certain time periods, or you can create custom packaging for certain items that will be released in limited numbers. This will help your product become exclusive and give customers an incentive to purchase it before it’s gone forever!

5. Re-brand Your Product

Another creative way to make your product more unique is by re-branding it with a new name, logo, design, or colour scheme. This can help it stand apart from other products in its category and give customers an extra reason to buy. Additionally, re-branding can help you attract a new audience and update your product to appeal to current trends and preferences.

6. Collaborate with Others

Finally, collaborating with other businesses or influencers in your industry is another great way to make your product stand out from the competition. This could involve sharing products, offering discounts for customers who purchase from both companies, or even creating joint marketing campaigns that feature both brands. Collaborating will not only help boost the visibility of both companies’ products but also create more interest and trust among customers.

Regardless of your business type, finding creative ways to make your products unique is essential if you want them to stand out from the competition. By following these six tips, you can ensure that your products will be one-of-a-kind and attract more customers.

Sourced from The Clinton Courier

In News

Personalization and Segmentation: How They’re Different and Why It Matters

January 12, 2023 No Comments

By Anastasia Emberger

You can use personalization and segmentation simultaneously, and you probably should.

Segmentation. Personalization. Customization. One-to-one marketing. Some people use these terms interchangeably, but the two underlying concepts — personalization and segmentation — are actually quite different from each other. They are, however, not mutually exclusive. You can use both simultaneously, and to optimize your email strategy, you probably should use both.

The Difference Between Personalization, Segmentation

Segmentation involves defining a cohort or segment of your customer database and sending a message (an email, push notification, or text message, for example) that is tailored to that specific audience. You can create segments based on demographic data (e.g., age and gender), behavioral data (e.g., clicks and purchases), or deeper analysis (e.g., customer lifetime value or following the recency frequency monetary model).

On the other hand, personalization is about changing each message to suit the interests of the unique individual. While your basic message outline is predefined — for example, with a hero image, header, call to action and product tile — personalization changes the specific content within your message outline to match each user’s profile. For instance, personalization logic might add your customer’s first name to the header or leverage recommendation technology to find and render products a user is likely interested in based on their browsing history.

Why the Definitions Matter

Understanding the difference between personalization and segmentation matters for a couple reasons. The first is cross-functional collaboration.

Your engineering team will need to understand the exact data you need, where to integrate it and by when. If you intend to personalize a message, your email developer also needs to understand the specific personalization you’re looking for so that they can write and test the email script correctly. Finally, your copywriter will want to know whether the message should be tailored to a specific audience (in the case of segmentation) or if the message should remain more general with key variables inserted based on the user (in the case of personalization).

Effective collaboration across teams is key to email marketing, and it requires getting your terms and requirements right in order to avoid confusion.

The second reason the difference matters is for testing and tracking results. One tactic may be more effective than another depending on the data and tools at your disposal. For instance, when the amount of customer data at the individual level is very limited, dynamic content (personalization) based on a user’s lifecycle stage may not render accurate results. In cases like these, it may be wise to segment based on broader data like purchaser versus non-purchaser or active email opener versus inactive email subscriber. Both tactics in tandem may outperform either tactic on its own.

You won’t know if one or both tactics is truly worth the lift, though, until you differentiate between the two and track their results. Then you’ll really have a business case for continued investment.

Common Challenges With Personalization, Segmentation

One of the main problems with segmentation is that, as you create more segments, your ability to effectively manage each one shrinks. In his book Strategic Database Marketing, Arthur Hughes argues that an ideal customer segment is large enough in potential sales to justify its own marketing strategy and that companies should not create more segments than they can manage.

In a highly collaborative environment, all departments track and think about the same set of segments that are predefined by leadership as having large significance to the business. Examples of such segments are first time purchasers, high CLV users, and customers at risk of churn. Following such an approach naturally limits the number of segments an email marketer has to track.

One of the main challenges to personalization is that it requires mature data strategies and integrations, and many companies lack alignment between their engineering and marketing teams. More specifically, poor data centralization, legacy technology, and inadequate measurement abilities are all barriers, as explained by BCG. Additionally, a lack of dedicated personnel, insufficient cross-functional coordination and project management, and a lack of a clear roadmap were also cited as top barriers to realizing the full potential of personalization.

Getting There: Personalizing Digital Experience Matters

Although the cross-functional lift to segment and personalize may seem seismic, it’s generally worth the effort. Personalization leaders will see higher profits — potentially two to three times faster than those businesses that don’t personalize their digital experiences. Moreover, in addition to producing revenue, segmentation also reduces spam complaints and unsubscribes and increases opens and clicks.

If the primary challenge behind your segmentation and personalization strategies is cross-functional alignment, it may be time for a talk — first with the team you’re struggling with and then potentially with leadership to confirm priorities and find win-win solutions.

Effective personalization may also require design thinking, as recommended by BCG, and the same goes for segmentation. Design thinking is non-linear and iterative in nature and empathizes with the user, focuses on the root problem, proposes new solutions, and continually tests.

Ultimately, it’s about putting the customer experience first. No one said your personalization and segmentation had to be perfect the first time, but these tactics certainly deserve some time and effort — and lots of iteration.

By Anastasia Emberger

Anastasia is a CRM consultant and customer success practitioner with a great interest in technology and project management excellence. She specializes in email, SMS, and push marketing and has managed over 40 clients in a variety of industries, from CPG and grocery to healthcare and telecom.

Sourced from CMSWire

In News

Report: The state of personalization in email marketing in 2022

April 21, 2022 No Comments

By Jeeng

Given its privacy-oriented, opt-in nature, email is entering the spotlight as a tool for publishers to directly communicate with their readers and own more of the traffic that goes to their sites. As with all channels in the marketing mix, however, customers have expectations when it comes to personalization, context and relevance

However, given the increasing availability of utilizable, first-party data combined with advancements in machine learning and natural language processing, publishers are empowered to deliver personalization beyond a simple salutation to better serve their readers, drive loyalty and optimize the email newsletter as prime real estate for monetization.

To highlight the ways in which publishers are currently using personalization in email and how they plan to evolve their strategies, Digiday and Jeeng surveyed nearly 90 publisher representatives. This report delves into the results, and in conjunction with expert insights, provides an overview of the changing role of email personalization for publishers and how companies are adapting accordingly.

Download this new report to learn:

How personalization is evolving for publishers
How publishers are approaching personalization challenges
What outcomes are achieved with an optimized personalization strategy
Where personalization is heading in 2022 and beyond

Download Here

By Jeeng

Sourced from DIGIDAY

In News

Recommendations to personalize your value proposition

May 7, 2021 No Comments

By Andrés Silva Arancibia

How do I know if I am on the right track of personalization? These are some of the key elements that you should consider.

I still remember on television in the 90’s when the commercials interrupted the best moment of “our” movie, but worse still, it was what in that commercial they tried to sell us, because it often corresponded to a product that did not quite fit with our interest. Those were the times of publicity that “shot” the flock. How far were we from a Netflix? How distant were we from personalization?

In 30 years the world changed to place personalization at the epicentre of strategy. These days, new consumers demand unique content and experiences. Thus, the most valuable companies on the planet are focused on product personalization, marketing and the customer’s shopping experience.

In a hyper-connected world like the one we are in, if the company fails to establish a personalized and fast bond with the client, it has no chance of surviving in this new decade 2020-2030 “governed” mainly by new generations such as millennials , genZ and gene alpha, which do not respond positively to analogous strategies and tactics typical of the 80s and 90s.

You may be interested: Why the ‘Save Ralph’ short went viral

Commercial management now seeks to connect the brand with its customers in a much more individualized way and in real time, which imposes great challenges of creativity and innovation, which allow us to design fast, convenient and unique shopping experiences for each client that us. visit. However, the stark reality is still far from approaching these standards. A recent McKinsey (2019) survey of senior marketing leaders found that only 15% of CMOs believe their company is on the right track with personalization.

All of the above said, here are three key recommendations to personalize your value proposition:

1.- Personalize your value proposition at all online and offline contact points with the customer

Each contact with the client translates into an experience, and as such, the client will always be evaluating it based on their expectations.

2- If you really want to personalize your value offer, you must ask yourself and answer questions that allow you to know your customers deeply:

What are your customers’ favourite products and what other products would they love to buy? What type of offers and what type of message do your customers respond best to? How much have they bought in the past and when should they buy again? How do your customers buy? and What are your favourite channels?

If you can answer these fundamental questions, then for each person who comes to your website or point of sale, you could create a shopping experience completely tailored to the needs, wishes and demands of your customers, with each step carefully planned to nudge them gently toward that important purchase.

3.- Place your attention on brands that are leading the creation of personalized experiences for their customers

The Sephora case that received the perfect rating for its experience on its website and its email. Walmart which has also earned perfect ratings for its mobile experience and high ratings for its email marketing experience. Nike is always looking to hyper-personalize its marketing by intelligently using the aggregated data of its customers. Netflix that has customization and speed in its DNA. Their service not only shows you recommendations for movies and series based on the content you’ve seen, but it even customizes the covers of the movies, giving prominence to the actors or actresses with whom you are most familiar. And when it comes to customer behaviour targeting, predictive analytics, and personalization, Amazon is the number one company. Its personalized and contextualized advertising is the great commercial value of this e-commerce giant. From individualized website content to personalized emails and offers, Amazon offers dynamic messaging tailored to the customer, based on real-time data.

In conclusion

We can then think that companies are leaders in their industries, when they manage to personalize the relationship with their customers in a valuable way. And this is not mere speculation. In a 2019 study, Monetate described the ROI of personalized marketing very well. In this study, they found that personalized marketing drives growth, as 93% of companies with an “advanced personalization strategy” experienced significant revenue growth.

As Arthur Conan Doyle said “You get good results by always putting yourself in the other’s shoes and thinking about what one would do if it had been the other.” We are on the verge of a new era and His Majesty personalization is entering through the front door.

Feature Image Credit: Depositphotos.com

By Andrés Silva Arancibia

Sourced from Entrepreneur Europe