Personalized marketing messages add value. According to McKinsey, marketing’s holy grail is digital personalization at scale because “personalization can reduce acquisition costs by as much as 50%, lift revenues by 5-15%, and increase the efficiency of marketing spend by 10-30%.”

In their annual report, Salesforce states that 79% of consumers are willing to share data in exchange for contextualized engagement, and 88% will do so for personalized offers. Once someone has shared their information about who they are and what they are looking for, they expect more personalization in return. To meet customers’ expectations, marketers must focus on improving personalization and engagement strategies across company channels.

However, we find that marketers sometimes struggle to implement this as best practice. If targeted content can convert more, better qualified leads, why wouldn't you do it? 

Overcome a Major Personalization Barrier: Getting the Data

Segmented messaging first requires clean, complete data. At least biannually, your team should focus on a data update and 'purge.' Form submissions can help you ask the important questions you need to create properties in your tool to be used for segmentation. However, anyone in marketing knows it's not always that simple. 

• Manual entry contacts cause issues because people don't always enter all of the information they should. If there are key details, like job title, that you need for your messaging, consider requiring certain fields upon creation or at least customizing the "create a contact" view in your CRM. 
• List imports can be great to expand the reach of your database, and generally, you will have all the basic information you need. However, it's easy to skip an extra step in filling in custom details that are important to your business, such as an industry, product interest, persona, or buying role. It takes some extra time, but this data will help you in the long run.
• When using multiple systems, you'll also find your data can be incomplete or even mismatched between tools. If this is causing major issues in tracking customers, purchases, and activity, you may want to start exploring an integration. 

Companies find success when they have a clear vision of who their customers are, what their pain points are, and the types of messages that really matter. If your team hasn't taken the time to conduct market research, interview customers, or build personas—this may be your first step! You can download the persona worksheet or contact us if you'd like additional support and insight on this process.

Utilize Marketing Technology to Personalize Campaigns

Segmented campaigns require technology to make them achievable on a regular basis. You can't (and shouldn't) spend hours every week crafting 6 different emails and lists. This often creates "off-the-wall" campaigns that lose track of your strategy. With smart content, automation, personalization tokens, and other marketing automation tools, you can spend setup time implementing the idea and then letting it run. Investing money and time to set up the right technology allows you to spend more time on marketing experiments down the road, instead of building lists. 

• Email automation campaigns: Using tools like HubSpot workflows, create a series of emails that are sent automatically, triggered by the actions of the subscriber. This is found to be among the top three tactics used by email marketers to improve conversion performance. But only 23% of marketers use this tactic. 

• Retargeting campaigns: Reach people who either are in your CRM database or who have visited your website. These campaigns allow you to deliver specific ads to people based on their past online behavior. There are different types of retargeting campaigns:

  • Site (or pixel-based) retargeting: delivers ads to people who previously visited your site but did not convert
  • List or CRM retargeting: markets to customers who exist in your database
  • Search retargeting: delivers ads based on previous search history
    
    

• Personalized Website Content: Personalized content performs 178% better. HubSpot looked at the data for more than 93,000 calls to action created using HubSpot over a 12-month period. What did they find? Calls to action targeted to the user performed 178% better than calls to action that were the same for all visitors.

• Artificial Intelligence: Today, 62% of consumers expect companies to anticipate their needs. AI can enhance almost any aspect of your marketing, from chatbots to digital advertising to customer journeys. AI can also help you find new audiences to target that share commonalities with your current customer base.

Prioritize 

Implementing these campaigns will take some time to get up and running. Prioritize where or with whom (which persona) you will start. Here are a few ways to help you determine your first campaign focus:

• Look at your database today. Focus campaigns on segments that are already well-defined and account for a large percentage of your database. 
• Pay attention to sales cycle. Does one persona typically take longer to close or result in smaller deals? Start with the persona with the highest promise, but make a commitment to get to the others when you're ready.
• Make it timely. If your company works in multiple markets, identify which one has the most urgent need. For example, say you provide components or systems for medical and industrial markets. Maybe your trends are showing that medical device companies are on hold because of FDA approval back-ups, but manufacturing has an immediate need to push automated systems sooner. You'd prioritize that campaign first. 

Completing your data, utilizing marketing technology, and prioritizing your outreach will ultimately create efficiencies in your sales and marketing process. By implementing best practices, you will generate more qualified leads and see an increased conversion rate. Request a consult if you need help implementing these strategies into your process.