How to increase your revenue with personalized marketing

Personalized marketing is a marketing strategy that involves gathering data about potential or current customers and delivering personalized, targeted messages to those customers to encourage sales.

This strategy can range from sophisticated artificial intelligence-driven campaigns to leveraging free tools for customizing content. All businesses can see benefits from personalizing their marketing messages to customers on some level, including an average 19% increase in sales. Personalized marketing works because it delivers more targeted messaging to your target audience. This kind of focused messaging drives revenue growth – 78% of U.S. internet users say personally relevant content from a business increases their purchasing intent.

This guide will break down how to segment your customers, gather data, personalize the customer’s experience with your business and grow your revenue.

Identify your targets

Identifying which customers you will target with personalized messaging is the first step. You can target prospects or current customers but knowing where they are in their buyer’s journey will affect how you implement your personalized marketing. If you are targeting prospects, will you target prospects that are just gathering information or prospects that are ready to make a buying decision? Will you target frequent or recent customers or customers that haven’t bought from you in years?

Once you know who you’re aiming to reach, you can start the next phase of your personalized marketing plan.

Gather data

The next step in personalized marketing is to gather data about the prospects or customers you want to reach. There are many ways to do this, including:

1. Google analytics: If you aren’t using this free tool, you are missing out on the biggest source of data for your website traffic. There is so much information to be found in Google analytics including how many web visitors you have each day, where they’re coming from, what they’re looking at for how long and which traffic channels drive the most revenue. You can also see basic demographic data about your web users. To learn how to use Google analytics more effectively, Google offers free classes in their Analytics Academy.
2. Your customer relationship management (CRM) system: Looking through the contact and purchasing behavior of your current clients will give you insights into how they made purchasing decisions. These insights can be used for reaching current customers or similar prospects. Some important stats to analyze are:
   1. the lead source
   2. how long it took to make contact
   3. the platform or method you used to contact them (phone, in-person, email, etc.)
   4. how many days it took to close the sale
3. Data software: If you want to take a deep dive into customer data, there are services and platforms that allows businesses to gather vast amounts of data. However, unless you have the budget to analyze, prioritize and segment that data, it won’t be very useful to you.

The main information you want to gather is where and when you can reach the target audience you’ve identified. Also, you will need to determine whether email, web or both will be the most effective platform.

Start personalizing

Now that you know who you’re targeting and how to reach them, it’s time to start creating personalized content to reach your targets. There are two main ways to do this: via email or via your website.

Email personalization is the process of sending emails with content customized to your target audience. This customization can range from including a content tag with the recipient’s name and title, personalizing the subject line or creating emails with entirely customized content.

For example, email customization works great for e-commerce companies. These businesses can gather data about what products customers are buying and send a personalized email with suggestions for products they might like. Another example: if your business has a newsletter, you can create customizable content depending on where a customer lives, what content they’ve clicked on in previous emails or how much contact your sales team has had with them.

Research shows that personalized emails have transaction rates six times higher than standard emails.

Web personalization involves showing content on your website that is targeted specifically to the viewer. Some examples of web content personalization are:

• a customized contact form depending on their traffic source (Facebook vs. a Google search)
• personalized suggested products based on the contents of their shopping cart, browsing history, recent purchases or location
• variable suggested blog content depending on their location, occupation and other demographic data

If you aren’t personalizing your messaging at all, you may run into problems. Almost 75% of U.S. online consumers get frustrated with websites that show them irrelevant content.

Creating personalized content requires tools. While some basis personalization features may be available in software you’re already using, like your email platform, more advanced personalization features can only be found through paid services. Make sure to do you research before buying and consider consulting one of our marketing members to see if you’re on the right track with your marketing strategy.

To boost all your marketing efforts and increase your visibility in Nashville, engage with the Chamber. We offer exclusive advertising options to our members. If you’d like to learn more about the benefits of membership, download our free membership guide below.