If you have purchased products from Amazon or Flipkart, you will be able to see the amazing effects of personalized experience. You will be able to see a list of suggestions based on your search history. Also, most probably you will receive a follow up email which contains similar collection of books based on your recent purchase. We will not be surprised to see if you return to purchase more; it is because they are based upon your likes and interests. This is why most of the marketers believe that personalized marketing campaigns are crucial for the success for their business. If you wish that your customers want to come back for more purchases, you need to provide them with personalized experience that matches their wants and needs. This means that more visits equal to more leads and more leads equal to more happy customers. Let’s take a look at how to implement a personalized marketing strategy:

1. Review your strategy

Before you execute your marketing strategy, think about the following questions to perceive how your organization can handle the strategy implementation:

• What brand value I would like to offer my customers?
• What kind of customer trends should I enable for e.g., repeated customer visits, increased trust, lot of purchases etc.?
• What are the marketing resources that we have/can create which may change one strategy over another?
• How much time does the plan need - whether short term/long term requirement?
• Do I actually have enough resources such as people, tools, time etc. to achieve success?

2. Research and Analyze your audience

When you are done with planning your strategy, it’s time to gather some information about your audience and you will be able to use that for your marketing program. These are the ways you can research about your audience:

• Surveys
• Questionnaires
• Discussion groups
• Feedback via website or email
• Social media platforms

Try to collect maximum amount of information from your potential prospects or customers. One or two queries might be enough rather than a drawn-out survey.

3. Choose right marketing tactics

Choosing the right marketing tactics is very crucial in the process of personalizing marketing strategy. Here are some of the marketing strategies to choose from:

• Send emails from humans, don’t sound like a brand

Email is one among the simplest ways to create a personalized experience for your prospects. Rather than having the sender name as company’s name, create it from the name of an actual agent working on your promoting or marketing team. Also, think about adding that agent’s photograph and his/her’s email signature to the body of the email to indicate that actually that agent took their time and energy to craft the message and can get some responses. Even if you employ email templates, guarantee that they don’t appear as if they have been designed by a promoting/marketing machine. It is because you want to sound credible in your emails.

• Use recipient’s name for emails

Writing “Dear Customer,” “Hi Customer,” “To [First Name]” etc. are all not at all preferred for your email communication with your prospects. A lead’s real name is one among the best items of lead intelligence to assemble. If a prospect has filled out a form at any point of time, you can easily get their first name and email address. If not, most likely you should not be emailing them. Most of the email service providers give you the opportunity to customize the email messages with recipient’s forename; so what’s more to think? Take advantage of it!

• Make use of marketing automation tools

Based on content interest, automation tools will be able to trigger lead nurturing campaigns. While you will address completely different business problems and topics inside your content, that does not mean that each one of the prospects have an interest in all told topics. If a prospect downloads an e-book targeted on specific topic, for instance, program your automation tools to automatically enter them into a lead nurturing campaign which will deliver content relevant to the initial topic and personalizes email messages based on supported data of that original content which was downloaded.

• Segment email database by marketing persona

There are number of ways to segment email database; but the most effective and easiest way is by marketing persona. For example, if you have classified three separate marketing personas that combine your ideal customers, segment your email list into three different blocks. Then, personalize the messaging used in independent emails sent to each blocks using the language that individual persona always uses and responds to.

• Focus on creating persona driven content

Persona driven content is a key factor to consider when you begin with the process of personalization. Produce new content or modify the existing one to handle the exact needs and problems of your varied marketing personas. Contemplate the very fact that one persona might have issues that the other persona doesn’t have. When you prepare a non personalized campaign, your one-size-fits-all content policy won’t fit with the particular problem of persona, which will be a drawback. However, with a personalized approach that is targeted at a selected group of prospects, you will be able to address that drawback and make more customized and valuable content for those potential prospects.

• Respond personally to customers on social media

Nowadays customers depend upon social media such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Google + to research about the products and to make buying decisions. It may appear to be an easy task to assign a real person to respond to customer queries on social media; however, several companies choose to automate it. You need to check your social media activity on a daily basis and respond to them in a personal manner which provides suitable and rightful content that can address each persona’s needs.

• Generate targeted landing pages

If you lack the bandwith to create content targeted for each of your personas, you have an option to create targeted landing pages for your different offers. Make sure to customize the messaging and language on your targeted landing pages to handle the precise needs of particular segment, and do that for every phase.

• Build targeted company’s product page variations on LinkedIn

LinkedIn company pages provides amazing targeting tool that permits you to personalize the products or services that a visitor sees on your product page in LinkedIn. You will be able to target based on demographic info such as trade, job function and geographic area.

• Use Google + topic circles to target content

Google + topic circles is another way of using social media platforms to supply a lot of personalized content distribution. By using Google + Circles, you will be able to create many totally different topic circles depending upon the different interests of your targeted page followers. The next step is to poll your followers, raise that Circles they would wish to be side to, and simply distribute only targeted content to those Circles. This offers an individuality and personalization.

• Lead intelligence to help in personalizing sales follow up

Lead intelligence or knowledge you gather concerning your leads/prospects consists of demographic data, customer behaviour on your website etc. which can be very useful as you outline segments of your business’ client personas. However, it may also function as a robust lever to assist your sales team to personalize their sales pitches and perceive the wants of a lead before they even pick up the phone to dial the prospect. A well prepared sales agent can close the deal in no time.

4. Regularly update and refine personalization process

Like all other methods, personalized marketing process needs constants review and improvement to make sure of 100% effectiveness. The best way is that let the campaigns run for some weeks and then evaluate the results. By this way, your team will be able to get a correct impression of exact progress over time, instead of getting a quick picture of how your personalization process is advancing. It is also crucial to re-check all of your technological integrations to make sure that you have got access to holistic image of information. During the refinement phase, marketers may take a step back and judge certain strategies or aspects of their personalized marketing campaign. Let’s see how incorporating personalized marketing campaigns can be beneficial for your business: 1.A large compilation of client data: Personalization methods track the habits and activities of potential prospects; which in turn provides marketers with valuable knowledge that may not be available with conventional marketing campaigns. If you are passing your leads to sales team, they will get a better clarity of whom they are merchandising and how the products/services matches with the client’s needs. 2.Loyal brand followers: Once customers feel that their needs are fulfilled and a company actually takes care of them, it is doubtless that they will definitely come back to the company in future to shop additional services or products. 3.Valuable business insights: Data gained from trailing customers will assist you in confirming what works and what doesn’t work in regard to marketing tactics and messages.

Takeaway

It is evident that customers prefer to buy more from retailers who can personalize their shopping experience across various channels. Don’t be too late if you haven’t started implementing personalization strategies listed above. Companies who can successfully implement personalized marketing experiences will be able to witness an increase in sales and customer loyalty.