Your Personalization Guide to Better Brand Development

Personalization technology allows us to treat the people we’re marketing more like individuals. The goal of personalization and brand development strategy isn’t to engage with one audience of many, but to engage with infinite audiences of one. Whether they’re visiting your website or receiving one of your emails, people want to see information that is relevant to them. According to a study from Janrain, nearly three-fourths (74%) of online consumers get frustrated with websites when the content has nothing to do with their interests.

Attracting Anonymous Visitors

You can personalize what these anonymous visitors see on your website based on:

• Location – for example you can show visitors from different countries the appropriate currency on your pricing range. Personalizing by location also allows you to give your marketing campaigns a specific geographic focus.
• Device – According to Google, 57% of users won’t recommend a business if it has a poorly designed mobile site. To ensure you’re always delivering a stellar viewing and browsing experience to your mobile audience, definitely invest in responsive design.
• Referral Source – In addition to personalizing your marketing around where a visitor is located geographically, and what device that visitor is using, you can personalize based on where that visitor came from before landing on your website.

Converting Visitors into Leads

To convert visitors into leads, you need two things:

Calls-to-action – showed that dynamic, personalized CTAs perform 42% better than standard, static CTAs in terms of viewto-submission rate. What does this mean? It means that if you aren’t taking the time to personalize your CTAs, you’re missing out on some serious conversion opportunities.  To achieve this promote different content offers:

• to different personas
• to people in different lifecycle stages
• based on pages visitors have seen
• to people who have already downloaded/signed up for an offer
• based on what people have already shown interest in
• customize the messaging of the same content to appeal to different audiences

Landing pages – some best practices to personalize landing pages:

• ask the most critical questions first
• start broad and then get more detailed
• align questions with leads’ likely stage in the sales cycle
• tailor form fields to various buyer personas

Nurturing Leads into Customers

Lead nurturing is the process of building relationships with your business’s leads through sharing valuable resources and advice. The goal here is to move those leads further and further down your sales funnel until they’re ready to buy. And, of course, personalization can help you do just that. According to a study from Monetate and eConsultancy, marketers who use personalization — and are able to quantify its impact — typically see a 19% increase in sales.

• Personalize Lead Nurturing Emails – To be clear, email is by no means the only marketing channel you can use for nurturing leads. That being said, it is definitely one of the most effective and one of the easiest to personalize. In fact, there’s a good chance you’ve received personalized emails before. Ever open an email that starts with “Hi [your name]”? That’s personalization in action. For example, you could include the recipient’s first name, the name of the recipient’s company, and even the title of a piece of content that the recipient downloaded recently. You could also personalize who the email is coming from, so that a lead or customer always receives emails from the same person in your organization.
• List Segmentation – List segmentation is the process of dividing the contacts in your database into different groups based on similar characteristics. Defining these different groups will allow you establish which email topics, tones (Humorous? Serious?), and content types resonate best with each. You can then refine your future lead nurturing emails accordingly, and deliver an even higher degree of personalization.

Delighting Your Customers

According to the White House Office of Consumer Affairs, it costs businesses 6 to 7 times more to attract a new customer than it does to retain an existing customer. The beauty of personalization is that you can use the exact same playbook you used for generating leads and nurturing them into customers for delighting those customers into promoters of your business. It can start with personalized website pages. When a customer lands on your site, you could greet them by name in the header. Or, you could include a personalized message thanking them for their business.

Think about implementing customer delight campaigns. Just like with lead nurturing campaigns, you can share relevant content based on a customer’s interests and actions taken on your site. The only difference is you’re not trying to sell them anything — your only goal is to make them happy. Here are some suggestions for building trust with – and delighting – customers:

• Delight Employees –  Delight your employees, and they will delight your customers. Build trust with your employees, and they will build trust with your customers. The bottom line: Happy employees = happy customers.
• Educate Employees – Develop team principles that all employees follow. These principles should reinforce the notion that the most important thing is solving for the customer.
• Empower Employees –  Make sure every employee can identify a customer at the buyer persona level. This will help you understand who you’re trying to delight.
• Listen –  Listen pre-sale and post-sale. It’s all about collecting data — both qualitative and quantitative — about the inbound experience. It’s going to help you improve, innovate, and better educate your employees.
• Ask Questions –  Go exploring with customers. Ask questions to learn more about their problems. (Open-ended questions are the best.) Be sure to collect all of the responses.
• Help & Educate –  The businesses that are the best educators will be the most successful. It’s a presale and post-sale activity. Employees should create content just for customers.
• Follow-up –  Always make sure you follow up with customers to ensure you’ve solved their problems. Every interaction warrants some type of follow-up.