Personalization Marketing: Why it Matters for Your Business? 

Written By: Sudeshna Ghosh  

Key Takeaways for Personalization Marketing

• Quantzig’s Integrated Customized Marketing Platform helped a major US retail manufacturer to achieve the RoI from the personalized campaigns increased by 15% as compared to the earlier campaigns. 
• Personalized marketing allows brands to create stronger bonds with customers. This leads to higher engagement, loyalty, and business expansion by customizing marketing initiatives to match each person’s tastes and actions. 
• Data privacy worries, ensuring data is correct, moral issues, shifting customer wants, and being able to grow the solution to scale are some of the major difficulties with putting in place a personalization system.  
• In general, personalized marketing assists in generating a higher return on investment from any marketing initiatives by enabling a deeper understanding of the customer.  
• It leads to increased conversion rates, higher engagement with campaigns, improved conversion ratios, and overall greater customer acquisition at a lower cost compared to an impersonal campaign. 

Introduction

Nowadays, most customers crave personalized experiences, whether in the form of personalized automation rules customized for specific workflows or abandoned cart emails depending on past purchasing histories. The more personalized experience you offer to your customers, the more value your customers will receive. Marketers skillfully utilize data to craft timely and highly relevant messages for each prospect, focusing to catch their exact interests. In this case study, we’ll cover what exactly personalized marketing is, examples of personalized marketing, and how Quantzig can help you with personalized marketing to increase your conversations with customers.    

Quantzig’s Personalization Marketing Solution for a Retail Brand

Client Details	A leading US-based retail manufacturer with a diverse product portfolio.
Challenges Faced by The Client	The client lacked a tailored marketing strategy, which resulted in lower returns on their marketing investments in terms of customer conversions, the amount of money spent to acquire each customer, and inconsistent outcomes across marketing campaigns.
Solutions Offered by Quantzig	Quantzig developed an Integrated Customized Marketing Platform and evaluated past campaign feedback, conducted surveys to understand consumers more fully, and leveraged those insights to build a tailored marketing system.
Impact Delivered	The ROI from the personalized campaigns increased by 15% as compared to the earlier campaigns. It also provided insights on the right channels to target and budget re-allocation based on performance data.

Client Details

A leading US-based retail manufacturer with a diverse product portfolio.  

Challenges in Personalization Marketing Faced by the Client

The client lacked a tailored marketing strategy, which resulted in lower returns on their marketing investments in terms of customer conversions, the amount of money spent to acquire each customer, and inconsistent outcomes across marketing campaigns. 

Personalization Marketing Offered by Quantzig for the Client:

Quantzig developed an Integrated Customized Marketing Platform for a major US retail manufacturer. We gathered information on customers including product inclinations, psychographic and demographic data, purchasing patterns and behaviors, approaches to connect with diverse customer types, and other details that offered insights into customer actions and better ways to contact them through our customized content marketing efforts.  

We also evaluated past campaign feedback, conducted surveys to understand consumers more fully, and leveraged those insights to build a tailored marketing system that facilitated crafting messages based on user profiles, and provided guidance on optimal timing and channels to reach customers. The platform enabled effectively connecting with consumers in a more personalized manner. 

Impact Delivered using Quantzig’s Expertise:

The ROI from the personalized campaigns increased by 15% as compared to the earlier campaigns. It also provided insights on the right channels to target and budget re-allocation based on performance data.   

Also Read: Maximizing Marketing Budgets with Campaign ROI Analysis 

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What is Personalized Marketing and How is it Used Today? 

Personalized marketing or marketing personalization is a strategy that uses segmentation data to target and retarget potential customers with tailored ads and landing pages. The aim is to create a more focused and relevant experience for each individual, increasing the likelihood of engagement and purchase. This customized approach utilizes information about each customer to deliver content that is more likely to resonate with their specific interests and needs. By tailoring messaging and offers, marketers hope to forge stronger connections, increase revenues, and boost response rates. The overall goal of personalized marketing is to make every interaction feel unique to the recipient through customization and reduce customer acquisition costs. 

How can Marketers use Personalization Strategies? 

Determining what your customers desire at a particular time can be difficult. Although data provides insight into the form your marketing personalization approach should eventually adopt, there are three prevalent tactics that any brand can leverage as a foundation to guarantee they always construct a robust personalized marketing strategy: 

1. Identify customer needs: 

Every customer has expectations that you will understand their needs. When a customer types a specific, detailed query into your search bar, they anticipate finding content that provides the information they are looking for. If a customer is shopping in your physical store location, they likely desire details about a particular product. At each interaction throughout the sales funnel, consider “What is the customer seeking here? What information are they trying to find?” Better yet, ask the customers directly. Surveys and user testing are straightforward ways to uncover these answers. 

2. Recognize the potential customers: 

Brand communication occurring in separate, disconnected channels frustrates customers. 

For example, if a customer coordinates a product demo date and time over the phone, but then receives an email the next day asking them to sign up for a demo, this is a poor user experience. Not only is it annoying, but it can potentially confuse prospects. They may think: “Did something go wrong? Was my demo canceled? Are they trying to reschedule?” 

Your advertising personalization approach should span all devices and channels, and your customer relationship management system should reflect everything learned about the prospect along the way. Avoid situations like the one described above. Instead, aim to know exactly what your prospects have done, the types of messaging they’ve responded to, the content they like, their communication preferences, and more. 

3. Understand customers’ future needs: 

Accessing data about customer behavior and browsing habits allows you to forecast upcoming trends and needs. It’s like when you book a flight – airlines don’t stop after selling you a ticket. They offer additional products and services related to your trip, like travel insurance, hotel rooms, and rental cars. They understand that traveling involves more than just the flight itself. This same principle applies to your own products and services. Consider what supplementary items or upgraded versions your customers might want. This approach is relevant before and after the point of purchase as well. 

If you know your target audience consumes a lot of content from you about social media marketing, provide them with more of that material. Send them blog posts, podcasts, ebooks, and tip sheets on the topic. For customers who have already bought from you, make them aware of new releases, fixes, and use cases to help maximize what your product can do for them. A successful hyper personalization strategy is like a chess game – you have to anticipate multiple steps ahead and predict behavior. 

Examples of Personalization Marketing

 

Sephora stands out as an excellent real-life brand that has mastered personalization. The cosmetics retailer has implemented personalized positive experiences seamlessly across all channels, prompting shoppers to schedule in-store makeovers and fashion consultations through its online platforms, especially its mobile application. The app enables makeup artists to document each product used in makeovers in every customer’s profile and allows customers to digitally test products and get tailored recommendations. 

Sephora’s customization program shows how focusing on the most devoted customers can be very successful. Sephora’s loyalty program gives its top-tier members special benefits like early access to new products, invitations to exclusive events, free personalized beauty services, marketing services, and more. And all of Sephora’s communications with customers, no matter the platform, display the customer’s loyalty points. 

In 2018, program members accounted for 80 percent of Sephora’s total sales. As of 2020, the loyalty program had about 25 million members. And in 2022, for the fifth consecutive year, Sephora was ranked first in Sailthru’s Retail Personalization Index. 

 Also Read: Track Business Progress with Marketing Analytics Dashboard

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Personalized Marketing Challenges and the Tools to Overcome Them 

The main difficulty with personalization is doing it for many people. You can’t write a unique email for each customer by hand. You can’t make a custom ad for every potential buyer yourself. But you must keep that personalized look, so you need the proper software and systems. To begin with, you’ll require the following:  

1. Analytics platforms:   

Analytics platforms help gather data, which all marketers depend on to make customized campaigns. In contrast to self-reported data such as name and email address – the “who you are” information – the data gathered by most marketing analytics platforms is about behavior. The “what you do” information can be even more useful than the former. Platforms such as Heap Analytics, Google Analytics, and Crazy Egg are well-known in this category.  

2. Data management platform:   

Data management platforms (DMP) hold audience and campaign data from sources involved in programmatic ad buying. For marketers, it’s a one-stop location where they can manage user data to create targeted user segments for digital advertising campaigns. The data you collect That user data could be, for example, age, household income, browsing habits, purchasing behavior, demographics, location, device, and more. Then, the DMP can analyze those segments’ performance and assist in optimizing future campaigns.  

3. The customer relationship management (CRM) software   

It acts as the central repository for all customer information. Any details gathered about a potential customer – whether from lead capture forms, sales calls, or third-party data sources – should be recorded in the CRM. When integrated with other marketing technologies, the CRM allows those tools (such as landing page platforms) to feed its prospect data. In return, the CRM can supply that information to email marketing platforms to further personalize messaging. The CRM facilitates the flow and utilization of customer insights across the marketing technology stack.  

4. Landing page platform  

The most critical element is the optimized landing page which serves as the final destination for prospects. Without an effective landing page, personalization and capturing prospect data is nearly impossible. Landing pages are your best tool to move customers further down the sales funnel by prompting them to take desired actions like signing up, downloading content, or making a purchase. Unlike regular web pages, landing pages have a singular conversion focus and message match between ads and landing page content.   

They also utilize lead capture forms and personalization to maximize conversion rates. Since each landing page needs to align closely with its corresponding ad for optimal personalization, manually coding numerous customized landing pages is resource-intensive and challenging to scale. Landing page platforms streamline the process of creating and managing customized landing pages at a fraction of the time and cost of manual coding. This enables effective personalization and optimization at scale.  

5. Email marketing platform:  

Today, email marketing has become an integral part of most marketing technology stacks, as it is the most profitable channel for businesses. This is unsurprising, given that email addresses are personal information that prospects readily provide. For most people, email is their preferred method of contact. Research shows that the key to getting emails opened is personalization.  

Consumers are more likely to respond positively to an email that appears tailored to them. Dynamic content and segmentation based on behavioral triggers (e.g. downloading an ebook or viewing pricing) can accomplish this personalization. It doesn’t even need to be that complex. You can send a basic birthday email to prospects using just their name and birthday. While such an email may seem ineffective without a call-to-action, more and more customers appreciate brands that treat them as individuals rather than just potential revenue.  

6. Tag management platform:    

Marketing tags are snippets of code that help collect data about website visitors when they land on your site. Tags like the Meta Pixel get inserted into the backend code of your web pages. When a visitor takes a particular action, the corresponding tag sends data. The problem is these tags can be tedious to manage over time, easy to forget about removing when no longer needed and slow down page load speed significantly. Using a tag management platform like Google Tag Manager provides a centralized place to add, update, or delete tags. With GTM, you only need to add its code to the backend of pages once rather than each tag. This avoids bogging down page load times. So GTM makes managing tags easier and faster for your site.  

7. Demand-side platform:    

Demand-side platforms collaborate with supply-side platforms and exchanges to deliver your advertisements to potential customers who are most likely to click on them. This process is called programmatic advertising and primarily takes place in real time. You specify the target audience and budget for your ads. Then, there is a bidding competition between you and other advertisers trying to reach the same audience. When a potential customer visits a webpage, algorithms decide which ad to display before the page fully loads. The algorithms consider factors like browsing history, time of day, and IP address. Whoever bids the highest based on the collected data wins the ad placement. Their ad appears when the visitor’s page fully loads. 

How might brands use personalization to achieve their goals?

Most marketers understand that customizing content for individual customers is crucial. However, we foresee that in the next few years, personalization will completely change how brands approach marketing. To get ready for this shift, companies should prioritize the following: 

• Invest in building strong data and analytics capabilities for understanding customers. This includes having systems to gather and examine data, algorithms to detect behavior patterns and customer tendencies, and analytical skills to present that information in simple dashboards. With this foundation, marketers can continually understand what high-value customers want. A recent survey shows that about one-fifth of companies are already putting resources into customer service analytics and AI for segmenting customers. 
• Identify and develop translators and advanced technology talent. This technological advancement necessitates close collaboration between marketing and information technology departments. Besides data scientists and engineers, product management teams will require analytics translators who can convey business objectives to technology stakeholders and data-driven results to the business side. The capacity to enlist and cultivate this kind of translator will give organizations a considerable competitive edge. 
• Construct adaptable skills. An effective personalization initiative needs cross-functional project groups—and thus, a dedication to flexible management. Groups ought to be structured around particular customer categories or experiences and should stand out in imaginative, cooperative troubleshooting. 
• Safeguard customer confidentiality. Data privacy is highly valued by consumers: per a 2022 poll, 85 percent of buyers say understanding a firm’s data privacy guidelines is key before purchasing. Companies pursuing personalization will probably raise privacy worries, so proactively addressing those will be vital. That entails demonstrating to users that they take data privacy very seriously. 

How can brands scale personalization? 

According to Quantzig’s research, there are four main factors, referred to as the four “Ds”, that enable personalization on a large scale. These four driving factors can be further divided into eight key components. 

1. Data Foundation 

• The data should be brought together in one place and accessible so that actions in one communication channel can promptly assist engagement in another channel – either in real time or very close to it. 
• Brands need to create a complex, comprehensive understanding of the customer to form the basis of analytics. The quality of the data is more important than the amount; having the right data is more critical than having a lot of it. 

2. Decision-making 

Marketers need to build a unified system for decision making that utilizes machine learning and AI to calculate different likelihoods for each customer. 

• Divide customers into groups and analyze them, figure out what makes them valuable, and give them appropriate scores. 
• Make a collection of marketing campaigns and content that can be paired with different customers. 
• Construct a cross-channel decision-making system to avoid contradictory messaging and maximize the impact of each interaction. 

3. Design 

• Marketing experts recommend dividing content into smaller, modular components that can be recombined in different ways for greater adaptability. 
• To accelerate outcomes through ongoing testing and iteration, bring together a diverse team of cross-departmental members to oversee weekly rollouts. They should be co-located to enable close collaboration. 
• First, leadership must establish the right aspirations. Then, acquire the appropriate skills and abilities to fulfill those ambitions. Often, securing the right talent and capabilities starts with leaders setting the proper goals. 

4. Distribution  

• Coordination of Communication Channels: Integrate communication channels to align messaging and respond to customer behaviors. 
• Leveraging Existing Technologies: An advanced technology system can be complicated; build on current technologies and maximize their capabilities. 
• Experimentation Over Perfection: Don’t let the perfect stand in the way of the good; begin testing and refine over time. 

How can brands avoid being perceived as creepy? 

Customers evaluate value by comparing what benefits they receive from a message to the costs they must pay to obtain it—specifically, how much personal information they must disclose. To properly balance delivering value and maintaining trust, it is useful to ask: 

Are you bringing empathy into your customer data analysis and communications? Make customer groups based on their attitudes and prioritize customer satisfaction looking at the whole experience rather than individual interactions. 

Are you listening closely for feedback on whether customers like your product/service? Constantly test and learn to improve engagement. Do this by examining upstream metrics (likes, clicks, opens) and downstream metrics (conversions, unsubscribes, ROI). Use qualitative listening tools, like an ongoing customer panel and ethnographic research and observation, to understand customers. 

Conclusion

Personalization marketing emerges as a pivotal strategy, allowing brands to tailor their efforts to individual preferences and behaviors of consumers. By delivering positive experiences through personalized interactions, businesses can not only enhance customer acquisition costs but also drive higher revenues and Marketing ROI. Through a focus on performance metrics such as ROAS (Return on Ad Spend), companies can optimize customer outcomes and bolster overall business performance. Leveraging tools like abandoned cart emails and automation rules, brands can craft targeted brand messages that resonate with prospects, ultimately leading to increased revenue and loyalty. In an era where customer-centricity reigns supreme, investing in personalized marketing is not just advantageous—it’s imperative for sustaining competitiveness and fostering long-term success in the marketplace.