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Three Steps To Using Automation To Keep Personalized Digital Marketing Alive

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By Anna Luo

Covid-19 has not only drastically changed the way we communicate with each other, but the economic impact of the pandemic has forced many brand marketing teams into a corner — charged with increasing revenue contribution while facing budget cuts. In fact, according to a recent Gartner Inc. survey, 76% of marketing leaders expected budget cuts as a result of Covid-19. These teams are being asked to improve business outcomes with fewer resources.

Bringing Life To Personalization

Brands executing a digital-first or direct-to-consumer strategy must move beyond a one-size-fits-all approach to digital marketing and create messages that are relevant to a consumer’s moment and context. To move the needle in sales, it is important to message more granularly. For example, creating messaging for individual consumers’ interests in specific products (like models or colors) and locations (like open locations vs. curbside pickup).

It is equally important to design specific content relevant to individual consumers regardless of where they may be — like Facebook, Instagram, streaming media or email. This means brands are in need of creating many variations of the content to fit new advertising formats and deliver personalized experiences that appeal to consumers. According to a report by IAB, “50% of digital device consumers will make a purchase and become brand loyal if they receive personalized brand content.”

Right now, many brands are leaning on production teams or agencies to manually design and build creative variations, which can be costly due to the hours it takes to do so by hand. While this method of creative production used to be a brand’s only option, it also meant that the creative outputs were not built in a way that could be easily modified and customized with language and product changes for local brand teams. Automation, however, paves a way for brands to quickly and efficiently spin up new creative variations that add an extra layer of personalization to marketing campaigns.

It Isn’t Just About Spending Less; It’s About Doing More

Automation isn’t just about spending less on production costs. It’s about creating endless possibilities with ad and content variations. It’s a powerful tool that lets us achieve tasks that weren’t humanly possible 20, 10 or even five years ago.

For example, at my company, Jivox, advancements in automation have allowed us to scale personalization for our clients while dramatically reducing production costs. This is done by automating creative versioning across all digital marketing channels (paid and owned) and enabling real-time dynamic assembly, re-sizing and delivery of creative assets. We optimize the best performing creative and the highest performing audience segments to increase the return on investment.

When it comes to personalized digital marketing and advertising, automation through dynamic creative optimization (DCO) technology allows brands to create millions of creative options — versus the hundreds possible through manual creation — that better speak to their audiences on an individual level. This means individuals will receive hyperpersonalized recommendations on products based on context, such as time of the day, weather, location, interests, real-time behavior and many more factors that make them the unique person they are. This increases brands’ chances of converting, selling and creating brand loyalty with those individuals.

How To Get Started With Automation For Personalized Digital Marketing

For marketers stepping into the world of automation for the first time, to those who are comfortable using creative management platforms to automate versions, and possibly using one or two data triggers to personalize creative, there are a few things to consider before taking a leap of faith:

1. Do a self-assessment.

No matter where a brand starts its creative journey, the goal should be to consistently achieve omnichannel personalization using automation. To figure out your maturity level, start with an assessment like the following:

• Are you A/B testing creative without using much data? Are you optimizing a few variations of the ads in the rotation?

• Are you personalizing the creative based on genders, age groups, geographical regions? Do you also mostly use behavior data from your website for retargeting?

• Are you using the creative management platform (CMP) for creative versioning, and data management platform (DMP) for prospecting? Do you run your campaign using more than one channel?

2. Home in on three key ingredients: data, channel and optimization.

There are three key ingredients to effective DCO: in-depth data, a broad array of channels and artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled optimization. True personalization should rely on more than just basic demographic information like age and gender. Establishing in-depth data points, like first-party data and data from your customer relationship management (CRM) software, or contextual data, is key.

When it comes to distributing those personalized messages, it’s also important to create a consistent experience across a broad array of channels — like display, social, video, website, email and more — versus taking a siloed approach to reaching potential buyers. Once you have the right data and channels in place, the last key ingredient is AI-enabled optimization that allows you to evolve your campaigns based on in-the-moment performance, not just when the campaign is over.

3. Choose a partner that’s focused on the future.

The demise of third-party cookies has been a hot topic for what seems like years now. As this change evolves, it’s critical for marketers to choose an automation partner focused on what happens after third-party cookies are phased out. One way to determine if a potential partner has these future changes top of mind is to ask how they’re currently using first-party data to replace third-party cookies, such as data from first-party-based identity.

We can’t expect things to return to the way they used to be, but automation creates a beacon of hope for brands, allowing them to increase output while decreasing the budget needed to get them there to adapt to this new age of business. The way I see it, automation is the key to keeping personalized digital marketing alive.

Feature Image Credit: GETTY

By Anna Luo

Anna Luo is VP of Customer Innovation & Marketing at Jivox, telling global brands’ stories with data, metrics, and business impact. Read Anna Luo’s full executive profile here.

Sourced from Forbes

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How To Improve Marketing Personalization, Even With Crappy Data

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By Bruce McMeekin

When marketing teams are forced to use “crappy” data, they risk sending inaccurate or ineffective messages to customers and prospects. When you consider that personalization is a vital technique for businesses looking to draw customers’ attention, this is especially problematic. In fact, customers tend to respond more favorably to emails tailored to their preferences, and brands with mature personalization strategies see increases in revenue.

After all, most customers appreciate when Amazon emails a useful purchase suggestion or when Netflix understands their viewing preferences better than a spouse. These companies — and other personalization-first brands — use behavioral analytics to scrutinize customer behavior, develop personas and present offers with a high probability of converting into sales or improved user experience.

In working with clients across the board at my marketing agency, I’ve found that the art of personalization isn’t as easy to master. According to Experian, the majority of businesses say inaccurate data will impact their ability to provide a great customer experience.

5 Ways To Improve Personalization

Lacking insightful data is tough for any business trying to keep up in the digital age. According to Salesforce’s “State of the Connected Customer,” 73% of customers “expect companies to understand their needs and expectations,” and 62% “expect companies to adapt based on their actions and behavior.” However, you don’t need stellar data resources to practice personalization.

Personalized marketing is nothing new (after all, it’s nice when your favorite restaurant’s sommelier knows you enjoy Super Tuscans and suggests one to try). However, automated personalization now occurs much earlier in the sales process than it used to. If you have crappy data, there are still valuable best practices you can adopt to personalize your communications:

1. Place your non-crappy data sources in an inventory. 

The best place to find trustworthy contact and behavioral data is perhaps your transactional database (think QuickBooks or another accounting platform). Here, you can likely find email or postal addresses, customer or business names, and products or services purchased.

Make sure you focus on recent transactions, as data from the last year is more likely to be accurate. Besides this, focus on records with complete contact information and see if you can obtain any proxy for profitability (if so, consider also assigning a profitability decile). After all, there’s no point in spending marketing time or dollars to acquire low-profit business.

Look for data fields that show how much you know about customers’ needs. For example, if you run a computer servicing business, note which customers use Macs and which use PCs. If you have email addresses, you can get more information from FullContact, FreshAddress, Datanyze or Clearbit. Google Analytics also offers behavioral data, such as how frequently customers visit your site, webpages of interest and more.

2. Use your intuition to build personas. 

If you still can’t summon much confidence in your data, don’t worry. Create your own data by shaping personas from disparate pieces of accurate information and your intuition. Form a narrative around these scraps by answering some simple questions:

• What is this person’s pain point?

• What makes this person happy?

• What makes this person feel successful?

• How can our company help?

Creative teams love this type of information — it helps them craft offers to persuade and engage audiences. You also don’t need clean data to do this (though it helps).

3. Say ‘thank you.’

You’ll know this right away: Every transaction in your sales database represents a customer. With that simple fact, personalize your communication using an appreciative tone. You can also send communication from the manager of the store that customer visited or the employee whom the customer spoke with. Likewise, you can probably find out where customers like to do business, where they live and which website pages interest them most. All of these factors can help personalize your messaging.

Tie in the benefits of your product in a personal way. This could mean appealing to emotions (perhaps helping your audience feel or look better). And when customers visit your website, use cookies to trigger dynamic content based on the pages they visit. From these seemingly dull instruments, you can scratch out a convincing image of who your customers might be and which offers could interest them.

4. Remember that all you need is a single piece of personal information.

The quest for data wealth can be overwhelming — you want to know everything about your customers all at once. But even a single piece of information can be illuminating.

We recently helped a bank identify which of its personal banking customers owned a business. To do this, we scoured LinkedIn and company websites, verified contact information and assessed suitability for a business banking offer. Because this extra step individualized customer messages, it added much more credibility to the marketing campaign: “You trust us with your personal banking. We can help (insert business name) succeed, too.”

Is this tactic too intrusive? Not necessarily: Salesforce’s study also suggests that 62% of millennials and Generation Zers are okay with companies using relevant personal data in a “transparent and beneficial” way.

5. Don’t be afraid to take risks. 

People are understandably nervous around data. Remember that you can afford to take calculated risks in the quest for better personalization. Simply make sure you act ethically and comply with privacy laws.

For example, if you have more than 50% confidence in the personalized content you use, go with it. Perfection is impossible when dealing with marketing data, so it’s okay to be wrong with a minority of prospects in order to move your revenue and market share needles forward.

With customers increasingly expecting personalized communication, you can’t afford to stay frozen in fear. According to the Salesforce study above, half of millennials and Gen Zers usually ignore messages from brands unless they’re personalized — that’s 50% of connected young people shut out of your business before they get a chance to learn more. Don’t let your data insecurities stand in the way.

Feature Image Credit: Getty

By Bruce McMeekin

Bruce McMeekin is CEO and Founder of BKM Marketing, an integrated marketing agency based in the Boston area.

Sourced from Forbes

 

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Companies are made of people: The importance of personalization in the B2B inbound marketing tactics

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Sourced from doxee.

In a previous series of posts, we have taken an extensive look at the characteristics of Inbound marketing, distinguishing it from Outbound, recounting its history, and identifying the latest developments. The goal was to describe the evolution of a concept, from theory to practice.

In this post, we will look at inbound marketing from the point of view of B2B, looking at why it’s effective, and focusing on the features that make it stand out: the production, management, and strategic distribution of high quality content (content marketing).

What is B2B marketing?

“Business-to-business marketing refers to the marketing of products or services to other businesses and organizations. It holds several key distinctions from B2C marketing, which is oriented toward consumers.” This definition is taken from the Marketing Solutions Blog from, LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional networking site with over 550 million members.

In a broad sense, B2B marketing content tends to be more informative and direct than B2C content. This is because the purchasing decisions of businesses, compared to those of consumers, are based on the impact on profits. The return on investment (ROI) is rarely a consideration of the average consumer, at least in the sense of a purely “material” investment (the ratio between expenditure and immediate economically quantifiable benefit), but it is an absolutely primary objective for business decision-makers.

B2B marketers find themselves managing a complex sales process, where they are called upon to identify the real decision-makers and the main stakeholders of the target company within a corporate landscape that is unique and characterized by specific organizational charts and decision-making flows. It becomes absolutely necessary to acquire a solid and precise knowledge of the company so as to be able to map the people really involved in the decisions by reaching them with relevant and personalized information.

Who is B2B marketing aimed at?

B2B marketing campaigns are aimed at any individual who has the ability to influence purchasing decisions. This can include a wide variety of professional titles, up to the C-level.

B2B marketing in context 

To start getting an idea of the context, let’s take a look at the Sagefrog Marketing Group’s 2020 Marketing Mix Report B2B (download here), which contains data on B2B marketing strategies, competitive trends and emerging tactics:

  • Between 2017 and 2018, at least 40% of B2B companies invested a tenth of their budget in marketing. Since then, that number has risen to almost 50%
  • The total expenditure is distributed across the following: 56% on Digital Marketing, 52% on Website Development and 36% on tradeshows and events
  • Content Marketing (27%) is an area in constant growth

In the 2018 B2B Content Marketing report focusing on Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends by CMI and MarketingProfs, 91% of companies employ Inbound Marketing  as “a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”

Of the remaining 9%, 54% said they plan to invest in content marketing within 12 months; 43% have no immediate plans to use content marketing; and 4% have used content marketing in the past.

Quality content: a strong return on investment

The Sagefrog Report highlights that quality content can offer a strong ROI when properly optimised for search engines so that it can be easily found and shared over and over again.  This means that quality content combined with clear and graphically pleasing landing pages and contact forms can help provide qualified leads. To achieve this goal, each piece of content must be designed in such a way that it is informative, relevant, searchable, shareable, not overly promotional, and above all, distinctive from that proposed by competitors.

Where the objectives of marketing and sales meet

Among marketers’ main objectives for 2020, in the first place is the need to convert leads into customers, followed by increasing sales, growth in brand awareness, the creation of “Thought Leadership,” and finally, increased website traffic.

What’s important to point out here is that the two main objectives are in fact priorities that marketing and sales teams share, which suggests the need to harmonize operations between the two departments.

Sales and marketing leads get personal

Referrals are the main source of qualified marketing and sales leads (63%). This is by no means surprising: B2B draws useful knowledge and contacts from the interpersonal networks of professionals, who are more likely to invest their time and money working with a company if they can rely on an existing connection.

In any case, if referrals are the main source of sales and marketing leads, inbound marketing is also gaining traction (33%). In both cases, we can read the strong signal of increasing attention to the personalization of communications.

In fact, the marketing experts interviewed by Sagefrog say that in 2020 they will explore personalization strategies (47%) through Account-based marketing (42%), video marketing, (41%) and inbound marketing (39%), AI and automation (36%), conversational marketing in the form of chatbots (33%) and influencer marketing (27%).

How do I create a B2B marketing strategy? The best B2B inbound marketing tactics

The competition to win the attention of customers gets tougher every day. Building a B2B strategy that delivers results requires considered planning, execution, and management. In the aforementioned LinkedIn article, the steps for planning a B2B marketing strategy are outlined. The steps for getting there, as the aforementioned LinkedIn article describes, are part of any inbound plan because they incorporate two fundamental assumptions:

  • Personalized, useful, and relevant content that authentically conveys the brand’s vision and value system through relevant channels
  • Continuous listening to the feedback of the reference target, previously profiled
  1. Develop a global vision and select specific and measurable business objectives
  2. Define the market, never forgetting that you’re talking to a person. While B2C goods often have a wider and more general audience, B2B products and services are marketed to a set of customers with specific needs related to their sector, department, and the business function. However, potential customers are also individuals with precise demographic data, urgencies, and priorities.
  3. Identify B2B inbound marketing tactics and channels. Once solid information about the target audience has been defined, determine how and where to reach them. The knowledge gained through the previous step should help. In any case, it is good practice to prepare a list of questions to establish time and place, both physical and virtual, in which to try to intercept those who will be the recipients of targeted marketing actions.
  4. Create content, distribute it and organize campaigns. After deciding which channels to use, plan and implement best practices for each one. Each action should, in any case, be built around some critical elements: a message, expressively translated with a creative approach, a series of useful insights, the most accurate targeting possible and some understandable, transparent and persuasive call to action.
  5. Measure and improve. Consult analysis and metrics reports in order to activate review and fine-tuning processes in real time: even with a well-studied basis, the creation of content and campaigns is intrinsically based on hypotheses and forecasts and must be optimized until you have substantial involvement and conversion data to rely on. Observe the channels, topics and media that resonate the most and then enhance them.

Essential elements of B2B inbound marketing tactics  

Truly effective B2B marketing is conversational, focused, and contextually relevant, and a B2B marketing strategy must include a variety of content, most of which is typically inbound: blogs, white papers, social media, email, videos.

Blogs: Regularly updated blogs provide organic visibility and direct inbound traffic to the website, whether institutional or product based. The blog can contain different types of content: copy, infographics, videos, case studies and much more.

Search: SEO best practices must be updated in conjunction with Google’s algorithm, which is changing more and more often, making it difficult to keep up. Lately, the focus has shifted from keywords and metadata to the interpretation of the user’s signals of intent.

Social media: Both organic and paid traffic should always be part of the mix. Social networks allow you to reach and attract potential customers where they are active. B2B customers increasingly use these channels to search for potential suppliers and to inform their purchasing decisions.

White papers and ebooks: Resources containing valuable information can be gated (requiring users to provide contact information or perform another action to download the content) or freely available. Often used as B2B lead generation tools.

Email: Although its effectiveness in recent years has been impacted by the proliferation of spam filters, email is still widely used today.

Video: Content that can be used within many of areas listed above (blogs, social media, e-mail) is becoming increasingly important for B2B strategies

In conclusion: Be human

When it comes to B2B marketing, the biggest mistake we could make is thinking that you are addressing an abstract and impersonal entity. In fact, as it should be clear by now, any marketing action will be aimed at recipients who are first and foremost real people who are driven by emotional and cognitive motivations. Although corporate decisions tend to be more rational and logical in nature, this does not mean that the content communicated must be formal or “robotic” in tone.

For the same reason, campaigns that are too broad will not be able to connect with (or influence) the audience in the same way that those aimed at specific segments can. Defining and segmenting the audience is an absolutely fundamental preliminary step in creating a message that speaks directly to individuals driven by a real need.

Personalization and relevance are essential: “speaking the language” of customers is a valid precondition because it allows us to cross an initial barrier, that of understanding. But it’s not enough: it’s necessary to publish content and ads that thematically adapt to the place where they are displayed. For example, shorter videos with simpler and more immediate narrative hooks work better on social media feeds, while a longer video is probably better suited to YouTube. Put yourself in the end user’s shoes and humanize your relationship with him or her right away. As in any Inbound strategy, even in the case of B2B marketing the starting point—each person’s needs and desires—is unique.

Sourced from doxee

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Pandora puts its personalization powers to work in a revamped app

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By Sarah Perez

Pandora is doubling down on personalization and revamping its app in order to better compete with rivals like Spotify and Apple Music. Today, the company is introducing a new mobile experience that includes a dedicated “For You” tab where a continually updated feed of content is presented to users, including both music and podcast recommendations (and more). This content is personalized to the individual, based on factors like the day of the week, the time of day and Pandora’s predictions about your mood, among other things.

The new personalized feed will also help the company to better showcase more of its exclusive content — like its music-and-podcast combos, called “Pandora Stories,” for example. Or the dozens of SiriusXM talk shows that became Pandora podcasts following its acquisition.

“Our listeners have told us that they love the utility of Pandora — it’s drop-dead easy, it works, it knows me, it’s really simple,” explains Pandora’s Chief Product Officer Chris Phillips. “But what they haven’t been able to understand and have easy enough access to is all the content and programming that we have available on Pandora — the new content, new programming and the unique content that you can’t get other places,” he says.

The For You tab aims to change that by turning Pandora’s personalization capabilities onto its broader catalog and exclusives, then crafting a scrollable feed with dozens of ways to listen.

Here, you’ll be able to tap into Pandora Modes, for example, which is a new way to listen to Pandora Stations. The feature was previously available on the web, and has now come to mobile for the first time with today’s launch.

Pandora Modes let you toggle between ways to customize your stations. You can opt for modes that will tweak the station to play things like the most popular songs (“crowd faves”), the deep cuts, new releases, artist-only tracks and more. You also can opt for a “discovery” mode to have Pandora introduce you to new artists you may like, as related to the station in question.

Another section in the For You tab lets you browse by categories, including genre, new music, podcasts, moods, playlists, decades and trending.

The “Moods & Activities” section, meanwhile, will present collections of music based on current trends — for example, one of the available “moods” is “fall,” and another could be “rainy day,” matched up with the day’s weather. You also can dig into this section for moods to match your activity, like workout, gaming, studying, family time and more.

As you scroll down the For You page, you’ll come across your podcast recommendations and personalized playlists. And Pandora can create some 80 different versions of the latter, which include playlists by moods, activities, genres and more, all powered by its Music Genome.

Plus, the combined Pandora and SiriusXM editorial team of around 25 creates hundreds of human-curated playlists, too.

In total, there are some 35 different modules in Pandora’s new For You feed, some of which are shown to every user while others appear dynamically based on time of day and day of week. Its suggestions will also be tailored to your own likes and interests, thanks to your own listening behavior and explicit signals, like thumbs up and thumbs down.

That means your For You tab will be unique to you, and you can later be targeted with specific promotions — like the content to emerge from that deal between SiriusXM/Pandora and Drake, for example, if relevant to your interests. (Hey, it’s better than that time when Spotify put Drake’s face on every playlist.)

Despite the personalization, the feed will still include some insights powered by the larger Pandora population, so you can see what’s popular and trending more broadly across the service.

In time, Pandora plans to roll out even more modules to build out the experience further.

“100 billion thumbs are what’s powering all this,” adds Phillips, speaking of Pandora’s recent milestone, which measured the number of thumbs up and down clicks from users. Until now, he says, Pandora “hadn’t really brought together the community…and the power of our personalization, but not just for stations — for all the playlists, albums, songs and artists,” Phillips continues. “And then the idea that we lay on top of all of this…the idea of what time of day it is, and what might be interesting based on what we predict your mood is right now,” he says.

The “For You” tab and other features are arriving today on Pandora for iOS and Android.

By Sarah Perez

Sourced from TechCrunch

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How to Balance Marketing Automation and Personalization

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Brands have embraced automation to help them carry out a spectrum of everyday tasks. According to a recent survey published by Social Media Today, 75 percent of marketing teams use some form of an automation tool. However, with growing popularity, there are growing concerns. The same survey reports that 61 percent of marketers are concerned about the lack of personalization due to automation. Likewise, a global study by PWC found that as technology advances, most consumers want brands to use technology as a tool for increasing personalized support. Put simply, customers want more human interaction, not less.

That’s why it’s vital that today’s businesses find the right balance between automation and personalization. Companies that go overboard on automation can come across as detached and generic. On the other hand, those that get too personal with customers can come off as intrusive and creepy. Brands need to get it right to maintain a trusting relationship with their customers.

Here are ways marketers can successfully balance automation and personalization.

Offer Timely, Valuable Content

Email campaigns are an effective, low-cost way to leverage automation and personalization, but marketers need to be careful not to clog consumer inboxes. Instead, they should focus on offering relevant and valuable content that doesn’t involve using intrusive data.

Most consumers are familiar with receiving personalized content based on an action, such as an online purchase, that features a related product or service. Using transactional data to send automated, personalized emails can be less intrusive since it’s a natural, and at this point expected, component of the relationship.

Marketers can also use geographical data, such as a customer’s zip code or address, to deliver personalized content, like creating a segmented list of customers and offering them discounts to nearby events. Although consumers dislike when brands bombard them with irrelevant, generic messaging, they also don’t like overly personal messages that infringe on their privacy.

Respect Consumer Privacy

Research shows that 81 percent of consumers want brands to get to know them and understand when to approach them, but not at the expense of their privacy. There is a fine line between highly relevant content and tactics that take marketing personalization too far.

For example, sending mass emails to consumers with the same promotions or offers isn’t an effective strategy. Consumer interests vary significantly. Marketers should pay attention to their target audience and consider whether the interaction will make them feel special or unsettled. Customer data can be used effectively, but content that’s too personalized can disturb customers, thus putting them off the brand.

Enhance the Customer Experience

It’s crucial that marketers use technology to improve the consumer experience, rather than eliminate the human touch. For instance, British grocery chain Sainsbury’s delivered an exceptional customer experience with its “This Time It’s Ultra Personalized!” campaign. The store used smartphone location data to provide personalized offers to customers through their mobile devices as they walked around the store. Not only did the campaign promote in-store offers, but it helped the company gain insights about how people navigated the aisles. As a result, Sainsbury’s was able to make better merchandising decisions and improve its in-store customer experience. Marketers must remember that relationships are crucial in business and that automation tools provide additional support.

Combine Automation and Human Touch

There are many ways marketers can mix automation and personalization, such as inserting tags to add customers’s names in emails to make them feel like the message addresses them individually. Going a step further, marketers can encourage team members to interact with potential customers by making calls, sending emails or requesting a connection on social media.

For example, if a visitor downloads content from the brand’s website, it’s a good idea to have someone on the team reach out personally, immediately. According to an oft-cited Lead Response Management Study, waiting more than 10 minutes to follow up decreased the odds of securing a lead by as much as 400 percent.

If automation and personalization are going to be effective, it’s important to find a way to balance the two. Overdoing automation can make brand messages seem robotic and irrelevant. Likewise, getting too personal can overwhelm consumers. A successful relationship between consumers and brands ultimately relies on the right blend.

Feature Image Credit: Maskot | Getty Images 

By

Co-Founder and CEO of Gain

Sourced from Entrepreneur Europe

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5 Outstanding Ways To Use Personalization In Your Email Campaigns

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By Steven Bowen

Email marketing is being utilized for targeting large audiences for a long time. It has been a fruitful way to create new customers and extend the brand reach. The organizations use email marketing tactics to promote their brands and services and persuade customers through it. The design and elements of an email is paramount to achieve the goals of successful email marketing campaigns. The content you put in emails can make or break the success of your campaign.

In addition to content, personalization has become a key ingredient in creating top-of-the-class emails these days. This is also known as one-to-one marketing or marketing to individuals tactic for email marketing. Thankfully, you can personalize emails according to the target audience and send specific messages that suit their interests. By doing this, you can build better emails that would have a greater positive impact on your marketing campaign. Following are five effective uses of personalization that boost your email marketing efforts.

 

  1. Customize images

One of the awesome ways to increase click-through rates is by customizing images for the customers. You can personalize the images according to different customer profiles and data. For instance, you can customize the content according to different locations for customers if you have location data. By personalizing images, you can build emails more effective and result-centric.

  1. Personalize content

When creating your email message, you need to be careful with the words you use and the overall tone of the message. The message you create for email should be compelling. You can personalize the subject lines of your emails to ensure better click-through rates. The better the content you write the greater response you will receive. By personalizing the content, you can make the content more attractive.

  1. Custom product recommendations

Your target audience might be interested in products recommended in the emails. However, product recommendations should be based on personal preferences or be relevant to their past purchases. You can incorporate the recent browsing or purchasing history of your customer in email marketing in collaboration with the email service provider.

  1. Customize cart abandonment messages

No business wants to have increasing cart abandonment rate. However, the marketers can strive to reduce the cart abandonment rate by creating personalized cart abandonment emails. By creating and sending these emails may increase the conversion rate and  allow the marketers to re-capture the customers that left earlier. These tailored emails work as an effective reminder for the customers.

  1. Provide personalized offers

By personalizing the offers and deals on your products or services, you can improve the click-through rate of your emails. It increases conversion rate. The customers like offers & deals and when they want to buy a product, it might be useful to show the right offers and deals based on every individual customer. It will make them to buy products from you. There are endless possibilities for personalizing the offers.

Best practices for email personalization

There are lots of benefits of personalization that can be reaped by following the best practices. Following are some of the best practices for personalizing email marketing.

Collect relevant details

In order to personalize the emails in the right way, you must first understand more about your customers. Obtain the relevant information about your customers and understand their preferences. Know who your customer are and how you can serve them effectively. You can conduct survey and ask questions from people to understand them. However, you must not overwhelm audience with tons of questions, simply ask specific questions.

Segment the audience

You can divide your audience into different subgroups based on the location, demographics, customer type, etc. Like if you have a clothing retail shop, you can segment your audience based on gender and add images of people wearing clothes into the email.

Add more elements

When it comes to personalization, marketers often think it of including the recipient’s name. While it is a good aspect and a great start, it is only one element of personalization. So, you need to tailor it further by adding custom content into the email as per the preferences and tastes of your recipients.

Understand the behavior

By looking at the behavior of your recipients, you can understand what factors to include and not include to create effective emails. When you send emails, some customers may not show interest, others show interest and some find your emails engaging. Ascertain the behavior of recipients and then send emails accordingly.

Mind the quantity

You must be careful when dividing your audience into different segments as too many of them can be difficult to manage. Make a broad segmentation and also decide what type of emails you will be sending to specific audience. You won’t like to overwhelm your recipients with too many emails which you could send if there are unmanageable number of segments. On different stages of email marketing, you can try to ascertain what emails and segments your recipients best respond to and then send emails accordingly.

Don’t create negativity

Often recipients get promotional emails immediately after viewing products with subject lines like “We saw you are looking…”, it creates a negativity in recipients’ mind who feel it like their privacy is invaded. There must be some time between product viewing and the receiving the email with a positive subject line.

Wrapping up!

Though email marketing is an effective way for creating new customers and reaching a large audience. Now, personalization make emails more attractive and compelling by letting marketers add a personal touch for every recipient. By creating custom content, adding custom images and do other customization, marketers can make emails more persuasive and improve their click-through rates. With the power of personalization, marketers can design emails that are tailored to the needs and requirements of every individual recipient that provide them a great experience and delight. The marketers can include offers and deals tailored to the requirements of individual customers through personalization.

By Steven Bowen

Steven Bowen is associated with No-Refresh, which is a prominent company providing custom designer tools. The company offers different off-the-self web-to-print designer software for several products. Steven has a good flair for writing and he loves to compose informational and quality articles and blogs for his audience. He writes well-reached and quality content on this area of interests.

Sourced from Promotion World

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11 Trends That Will Shape Marketing In 2019

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Sourced from Forbes

Building brand awareness and successfully interacting with consumers is a crucial part of doing business today. Customers enjoy and expect a personalized experience, and delivering just that will set you apart from your competition.

Voice search and live videos were just two of the methods marketers explored to improve consumer interactions and brand awareness in 2018. As innovations in technology and ideas come forward, 2019 is also sure to see its share of trends having an impact on marketing. Below, 11 Forbes Agency Council members shared their predictions for the year ahead.

Members of Forbes Agency Council offer insights on what marketing trends to expect in 2019.Photos courtesy of the individual members.

1. A Bigger Role For AI In Personalization And Automation

We are all watching the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) in marketing and how it affects our clients’ relationships with consumers. As a company that focuses on bringing out emotional connections through physical environments, we’ll see AI play an even bigger role for brands as they look to personalize and automate more digital and traditional communications. – Jessica Reznick, We’re Magnetic

2. Smart Speaker Advertising Opportunities

Smart speakers and voice assistant devices are more affordable than ever before, making them a huge potential marketing tool in the upcoming year. As the relationship between big tech and the consumer grows deeper, marketers can more effectively reach their target audiences with personalized messaging and content. Expect to see more ad opportunities surrounding smart speakers in 2019. – Timothy Nichols, ExactDrive, Inc.

3. Growth In Content Marketing

Content marketing will always have a strong impact because of the exposure and backlinks you can receive for your brand. Writing interesting content and marketing it to influencers is a win-win. You are helping people with solution-oriented content, and the influencers help your exposure and outreach so it’s widely seen by the right audience and shared with their peers. – Peter Boyd, PaperStreet Web Design

4. A Turn To The Human Side Of Marketing

We are fortunate to live in an age of advancing technology, but we run a risk of oversaturating our market with off-the-shelf tools that gather faceless data and create ineffective content. Marketing has a remarkable power to inspire audiences. Instead of an influx of new tech to adopt, I predict we’ll embrace a deeper understanding of human behavior that will foster more meaningful relationships. – Hamid Ghanadan, LINUS

5. Integrated Online, Social And Mobile Marketing

2019 will be all about the integration of online, social and mobile marketing. Many businesses have dabbled in one or all of these marketing strategies, but true success in the year ahead will be marked by a fully integrated marketing program that incorporates all three. This will eliminate redundancies, increase efficiency and fully leverage content across these three major players. – Laura Cole, Vivial

6. The Growth Of Micro-Influencers

As influencer-tracking technologies continue to improve, brands are becoming better equipped at fielding and managing large networks of high-engagement, low-following micro influencers for their campaigns. This largely untapped market will soon allow for more brands to avoid the significant costs of mid- to high-level influencers and invest in more down-to-earth and relatable influencer marketing. – Jordan Edelson, Appetizer Mobile LLC

7. Audiences Made Part Of Brand Stories

The ability to engage with audiences (that is, making audiences part of the brand story) will have a huge impact. The less friction there is to engagement, the more connected people feel. Brands that are more willing to interact with customers publicly will have a strong impact—and brands that can show how this engagement influences their products and services will make an even bigger impact. – Bernard May, National Positions

8. Thought Leadership

Audiences seek expertise, critical insight and ways to be better at all points of interest. Experiential and interactive engagement with a brand is the future of consumer-brand connectivity. From live video, to recorded advice, to content with real-time responses, to contests and beyond, it’s about offering information and encouraging feedback from stakeholders in a way that establishes trust. – Scott Kellner, GPJ Experience Marketing

9. Transparency As Key To Winning Customers

Technology is giving us so many new tools and platforms that sometimes we forget that communication always happens between human beings. Brands are groups of people who try to communicate with other persons: their customers. In 2019, I expect transparency to be the key to winning the hearts of consumers, who will reward those brands that share their values in an authentic and transparent way. – Daniela Pavan, The Ad Store New York

10. Quality Trumping Quantity In Marketing

Content marketing has been preached to death by most marketers. Content marketing is important, but oftentimes companies are capitalizing on this strategy with over-optimized and bland content that is largely regurgitated from other companies doing the same thing. In 2019, I believe we will get more discerning and choose low-volume, high-quality content instead of high-volume, low-quality. – Brandon Stapper, Nonstop Signs

11. Customers Empowered As Brand Ambassadors

By utilizing tools like YotPo and BazaarVoice, we can now chalk up a percentage of a marketing campaign to leveraging our customers as brand ambassadors by asking them to share info on a product to their own networks. This helps bypass “influencer marketing” to an extent and lets us empower our customers to do the talking. – Loren Baker, Foundation Digital

Forbes Agency Council is an invitation-only, fee-based organization for executives in successful public relations, media strategy, creative and advertising agencies. Find out if you qualify at forbesagencycouncil.com/qualify. Questions about an article? [email protected]

Sourced from Forbes

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Personalization Continues to Provide Uplift in Conversion Rates for Online and Offline Channels

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Sourced from marketing charts.

In-house marketers continue to see the most bang for their personalization buck in the area of search engine marketing, but those implementing personalization in offline channels are reporting more success this year. That’s according to the latest annual Conversion Rate Optimization Report [download page] from Econsultancy and RedEye.

Some 39% of company marketers report a major uplift in search engine marketing conversion rates as a result of implementing personalization. While that’s down from last year’s 46%, the proportion experience an uplift of some degree increased marginally to 93%.

The biggest improvement in personalization’s perceived impact this year, though, is for offline channels. While only 15% of company respondents report personalizing their offline channels, fully 37% of those report a major uplift in conversion rates as a result of doing so. That’s more than 3 times the share (11%) from last year’s report.

Anecdotally, respondents shared that they’re personalizing experiences by joining up online and offline in ways such as: syncing direct mail with relevant social and email activity; offering items to upsell in-store based on click-and-collect orders; and using in-store loyalty cards to provide insights to digital communications such as email and SMS.

Personalization Efforts Mainly Limited to Email, Websites

Overall, some 62% of company marketers surveyed report undertaking some form of personalization in their marketing activity, down from 66% last year.

Email (90%) is by far the most common area of personalization for these marketers, though a majority (53%) this year are also personalizing their websites. That aligns with separate research from Evergage, in which email and websites were the only channels in which a majority of marketers reported using personalization. Previous data had found that while email personalization is considered effective, website personalization is far more difficult to execute.

This year’s report from Econsultancy and RedEye does show an uptick in the use of personalization in a couple of areas. Indeed, more than one-quarter of company marketers now say they personalize social media and search engine marketing (each at 27%), up from 17% and 18%, respectively.

The report separately found that more marketers are conducting paid search testing to improve conversion rates – suggesting that search is becoming more of a priority in personalization and conversion rate optimization.

Marketers Paying More Attention to Personalizing Website Journeys

In terms of websites, landing pages (62%) and home pages (61%) are the most likely to be personalized by marketers, much as they were last year.

This year shows a big increase in the use of personalization for customer journeys: 40% are personalizing specific journeys (up from 31% last year); and 33% are personalizing the post-purchase journey (up from 20% last year).

The full report is available for download here [download page].

About the Data: The results are based on a survey of more than 800 respondents, two-thirds of whom work for client-side organizations and the remaining third on the supply side (vendors, agencies or consultants). Some 76% of client-side respondents are based in the UK (60%) or Europe (non-UK; 16%), and 64% come from companies with at least £10 million in annual revenues.

Sourced from marketing charts.

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