Content personalization is the secret to truly connecting with your customers and building the solid brand you desire. We have all been told that content is king, and that is true, but real content marketers know that to find that sweet spot where customers are willing and excited to pay for services and products, you have to create content that makes your customer feel like the king.
This process includes creating and publishing content tailored to your customers’ interests, personality, and needs. Everybody likes to be treated like their voices are heard, and their opinions matter. Creating content that achieves these without creeping out your customers is the essence of content personalization.
As Jamie Turner said, the only way to win at content marketing is for the audience to say, “Yes, this was made especially for me.”
Your customers want to feel like you truly know them and care enough about them to put in the effort required to give them a seamless customer experience. Content personalization leads to customer satisfaction, which builds customer loyalty. And when a customer is loyal to a brand, they make more purchases and are willing to recommend that brand to the people they know. This chain reaction will ultimately lead to higher revenue generation and a loyal customer base.
Should You Consider Content Personalization Now?
Suppose you have been running your business for some time with considerable returns. In that case, you may be tempted to question why you should consider content personalization and if it would make much difference to your overall marketing goals.
The answer is yes. You should take advantage of content personalization now more than ever. An incredible 89% of digital businesses, including your favorite big brands, are investing in personalization. Your business competition is probably doing the same at the moment.
Why You Should Personalize Your Content
What is in store for you by personalizing content to suit your customers?
Increased Engagement
With content marketing, the first step of customer conversion is engagement. Most people will only engage your content if they find it relevant and feel like it was directed to them personally. Statistics show that 72% of customers only engage with marketing content customized to their interests. When you personalize your content, it means whatever content you create or send to a customer is tailored to their personality or needs, which boosts their chances of engaging. You can also recommend products or services they might be interested in based on your knowledge of them.
Builds Customer Loyalty
If you plan to retain customers and generate continuous revenue, you need loyal customers to your business. You win the loyalty of your customers by earning their trust over time. To do this, you have to show your customers that you value them and are interested in satisfying them. Nobody wants to feel like just another person in a pool of people from which you are only interested in making money. By tailoring the right content to the right customers using content personalization, you give the impression that you consider them necessary to understand them and give them the right solutions to their challenges. Doing this improves the overall perception of your brand by your customers. This way, you build trust and loyalty in your brand. Also, because personalized marketing increases business ease and prevents waste of time, your customers are satisfied and would willingly want to continue doing business with you.
Increased Conversions
There is a reason email blasts don’t yield high conversions and returns on investment. With engagements and loyalty comes conversion, and people won’t engage with irrelevant content from brands they don’t trust. People hate to receive irrelevant content and may mentally register a business that sends such as spammy. With content personalization, you get personal with your customers by giving them exactly what they want. A survey showed that 80% of shoppers are more likely to buy from a company that offers personalized experiences, with 44% being likely to become repeat customers after a personalized shopping experience with a business.
Content personalization also means better recommendations for the customer who would consider purchasing recommended products 40 times out of 100.
How To Get Started With Content Personalization
To reap the full benefits of content personalization, you need to do it right. And it all starts with understanding your customer persona.
There isn’t any such thing as a product for everyone. People have different interests and can’t all be interested in your services. Do a thorough survey into your target audience. Create different buyer personas and try to understand their pain points and purchase triggers. This information will help you in your first stage of personalizing a customer’s content experience. Knowing your customer persona will help you make good lead generation decisions like placing the right lead magnets with the right offers in the right locations. You would also have a rough idea of how much information they are willing to give you about themselves to improve customer experience.
Collect As Much Data As You Need… Legally
Your content personalization is only as effective as your knowledge about your audience. While you may have a rough idea about their personality and behavior based on prior research on your target audience, you still need specific data only they can provide to improve content personalization further. So, what do you need to get started, and how do you get it?
Before going on, you should know that data privacy is a big deal, and you should never collect or use information from your customers without their consent. Your goal is to have them willingly share information with you with a promise of a better customer experience. Learn more about “The do’s and don’t of collecting data.”
Customer Profiles
One of the fastest and most effective ways to get continuous valuable information from your customers is to encourage them to create profiles or accounts on your platform. Creating an account will have given you the necessary information needed and permission to use it to improve their customer experience.
Statistics have shown that customers are willing to give their permission to monitor their shopping behavior if it is guaranteed to provide them with a better shopping experience.
90% of consumers will share behavioral data for additional benefits like a cheaper or easier shopping experience.
70% of millennials will allow businesses to track their shopping behavior if it would improve their shopping experience
57% of consumers are okay with providing professional information on a website as long as it is used in responsible ways to their benefit
To further take advantage of customer profiles, here are a few ways to collect as much information as you need.
Make it Easy
People generally like simple processes and would readily agree to create a profile if it requires only a few fields. When you’re setting up the process, be careful to include only the necessary forms to get started.
Allow Customer Self-Segmentation
Go a step further by building your profile forms so that customers can segment from the onset. For example, you can improve personalization when your customers register based on their career paths, job roles, gender, or areas of interest. This way, from the onset, you can send content already tailored to their niches and areas of expertise.
Put Your Customers in Charge
Your customers will trust you with more information if they know they are in charge of data shared and can withdraw their permission whenever they want. Give them the freedom to change the necessary information easily without going through a long process.
Bonus Tip: Send out personalized birthday messages with special offers and product recommendations based on the customers’ profiles.
Personalize Your Customer’s Website Experience
If you have a website or online store, you should strive to personalize the customer experience for everyone who visits. Your website is usually the first point of contact your customer has with your business, and their experience determines whether they will become repeat customers or not. A few ways to get opt-ins and personalize your customers’ website experiences are:
New Visitors Personalization:
Make your new visitors feel special by personalizing their first time experience. You may not have enough information to give them personalized product recommendations, but you can provide them with first-time offers and discounts on products or services. 4 out of 5 consumers feel encouraged to make a first time offer with a new brand if there is an offer for new visitors.
You can also create a fancy pop-up or banner to help your first-time visitors find their way around your store and know more about the products and services you offer.
Return Visitors Personalization:
Take personalization up a notch by curating your return customers’ experience. Use data based on their past shopping behavior and interests to curate and display your customers’ product options. You can also display recently viewed items and items added to the customer’s wish list when they visit again. This way, your customers see the most relevant products when they visit your store and are more likely to make purchase decisions faster.
Personalized Product Recommendations
You can boost your sales and customer trust by offering accurate product recommendations to your customers. You can recommend products based on their past shopped items, items related to products in their wishlist or carts, or what other customers like them are purchasing.
You can use terms like
- We think you might love this.
- Customers who bought X product also bought this.
- Frequently bought items
Sometimes, customers aren’t sure of all they need to get. With quality product recommendations, you would be making life easier for your customers while increasing your sales. Your customers can also trust you to help them make the best shopping decision, which also improved customer loyalty.
Retarget Your Visitors and Customers with Personalized ads
When customers visit your website and accept cookies, you can choose to retarget your visitors with Personalized ads of items they viewed, liked, or wishlist. This medium is useful in helping customers remember forgotten purchases and buying from you.
However, you should not bombard your customers with ads as they might get irritated and desensitized to your business.
Email Personalization
Emails are one of the most effective forms of marketing communication between brands and their customers. When done right, email marketing can yield 40X ROI. The key to effective email marketing is excellent content personalization, and it starts with the right email segmentation.
Email segmentation is the process of grouping your customers into different categories based on specific information.
You should segment your email list based on your customer’s interests and buying behavior. With effective segmentation, you can send personalized emails to your customers, guaranteed to have high conversions.
Examples of ways you can personalize sent emails include
- Communicate with first names. Addressing your customers with their first names makes them feel familiar with your brand. It also gives your business the “human touch” it needs. Your customers feel closer and important to you.
- Craft your subject lines to sound more personal and seemingly targeted at one person. Emails with personalized subject lines record an 82% increase in open rate with a 75% higher click-through rate.
- Send emails related to their search history. Inform them if there is a discount off products they searched and would love to have.
- Send product recommendations based on their shopping history. If they liked a product, they would love to know if there are similar items in store for them.
Through personalizing emails, your recipients can feel like you are talking directly to them and not just a bunch of people. They feel like they matter to your business because you’re deliberate about giving them what they like. Learn more about how to avoid your email from killing your business.
Personalize By Location
One common and often underrated personalization strategy used by most brands is by geo-location. If your business services different locations or ships to specific areas, you can improve your customer’s experience by showing relevant content to people in that location. For example, if you run a restaurant chain in different cities, your customers should receive information about their cities’ closest restaurant before other places.
In the same light, if you have non-English speaking customers in different countries or cities, it would be advisable to make content available to them in their preferred language as this improves their shopping experience.
Taking advantage of your customers’ location can help you send out relevant, targeted ads to customers in a particular area. This avenue will help you cut down on high ad costs and increase conversion rates.
Listen To Customer Feedback
The essence of content personalization is to create content tailored to your customers’ interests to improve their shopping experience.
While you execute different personalization marketing strategies, you should also be intentional about receiving and listening to your customers’ feedback. A survey showed that 68% of consumers reportedly left a brand because they didn’t feel like the brand cares for them or values their opinions.
You do not want to be that brand.
Create surveys and interviews to receive feedback from your customers about ways to serve them better.
When you receive feedback, analyze them, and if you notice a large percentage of your customers want the same thing, you should work around implementing their suggestions and feedback.
By doing this, you show that you listen to your customers and value their opinions. This will build more customer loyalty and improve your brand’s prescription as a whole.
IN CONCLUSION:
As earlier discussed, content personalization aims to create content that your customers feel was created specifically for them. However, you also don’t want to be creepy or have your customers think you’re stalking them. To prevent this, learn to set limits on how much personalization is too much.
Your customers don’t want to feel like their privacy is being infringed upon or used for unethical purposes.
It’s okay if you can’t handle big personalization strategies yet. Start with the information you have and scale up as you see results.
When done the right way, content personalization can reduce leads acquisition costs by 50%, improve the efficiency of marketing spend by 30%, and boost revenue by 15%
For more information on using content marketing to boost your sales and retain customers, book a consultation with Top Content Marketing Agency.
References:
72% – https://smarterhq.com/privacy-report
90% – https://smarterhq.com/privacy-report
Subject line personalization – https://www.adestra.com/resources/the-state-of-digital-personalisation-in-2016/
68% consumers – https://www.valuewalk.com/2016/12/customers-leaving-win-back/
Personalization boost – https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/mckinsey-digital/our-insights/marketings-holy-grail-digital-personalization-at-scale#