The online landscape is more competitive than ever before. Each day, millions of companies are fighting for attention online. How do you stand out in such a noisy environment and impress online visitors?
The answer is personalization.
Why? It works. New data from Evergage shows that one-fourth of marketers experienced an increase of 11-20% by using personalization. Plus, simply adding personalization to an email subject line can increase open rates by as much as 26%.
Curious about how you can “wow” your visitors with different types of personalization? Here are five tactics you can deploy and test right away.
1. Anticipate the journey
One of the signature elements of stellar personalization is a proactive anticipation of your online visitors’ wants and needs. So, how do you anticipate their journey?
With the help of automation, anticipating where a customer is in their journey is easier than ever before. Customer journeys are a simple way to impress visitors with relevant messages that deliver value at the right time.
Reminder emails, for example, help you regularly stay in touch with customers who are approaching an important milestone in their customer journey. Nissan sends a reminder email to customers approaching their six-month post-purchase date to keep them in the loop about regular maintenance providing value to the customer and an ongoing revenue stream for the company.
2. Leverage data from visitors
In order to properly personalize, it’s important to gather the right customer data so you can leverage it down the road for more targeted, relevant interactions.
Data shows these efforts pay off, as targeted emails generate 58% of all revenue. Consider collecting the following types of data about your online visitors:
- Geographic data. Know where your visitors are from. With this data, you can share local or regional offers that may be of interest.
- Demographic data. Knowing demographic data like the age, income level, gender, and occupation of your visitors helps you better personalize based on individual attributes.
- Behavioral data. Once a visitor has converted into a customer, you’ll want to study their behaviors. Group customers based on how they interact with your brand so you can better anticipate their actions. Keep track of data points like user status, buyer readiness, and time of last purchase or interaction so you can capitalize on what you know about specific moments within the customer journey.
With this data, you can better segment your audience so that you’re effectively personalizing for each and every individual.
3. Think about the experience as a whole
It’s also important to think beyond your product or service and about the customer experience (CX) as a whole.
Walker data shows that customer experience will overtake price and product as the primary brand differentiator for sales by as soon as 2020, and 86% of marketing executives say creating a cohesive customer journey is an important marketing approach for landing sales.
Ask yourself: What can you better personalize the customer experience to improve customer interactions with your brand? Think about:
- How you can integrate data across systems for richer customer profiles
- What metrics and analytics you can study to spot trends and patterns from your visitors
- Where you can build greater consistency across touchpoints
- What templates you can create to increase the efficiency of personalization efforts
Taking these steps can improve your bottom line: As you build out a personalization strategy that positively impacts customer experience across the board, you increase your chances of building customer loyalty and reducing churn.
4. Make your messages dynamic
To improve your personalization efforts, it’s a good idea to create dynamic content that’s tailored to demographic and/or geographic user data.
For example: If you’re a clothing company sending out an email campaign, you could use dynamic content to display either men’s or women’s product suggestions based on subscriber data. Adidas does this well:
This adds greater relevance to the material–and it saves you from having to build out an entirely separate campaign. Two tasks, one tool.
5. Regularly gather feedback (and use it)
One of the easiest ways to impress online visitors is to ask them exactly what they want from you–and then deliver on it.
Gathering feedback means building a stronger relationship with your online visitors–and it can drive sales, too. By pairing surveys with a special offer, you get the rich data you need and your visitors get a little something for their time.
With the help of regular, ongoing survey efforts, you can ask questions about product interests, buying behaviors, satisfaction–and always work on improving the customer experience. Bonus: They’ll help you deliver highly relevant and personalized messages time and time again that are spot on for your visitors.
Wrap up
You have five different ways to impress your online visitors via personalization–now it’s time to get to work. Start testing out these tactics with a renewed focus on your customer experience. Your online visitors and customers will thank you for it.
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