Personalization in marketing has continued to evolve with customer purchasing patterns and demands. From its beginnings in the familiar corner shop that knew your name to 2018 when nearly half of all companies had personalized their web and email experiences, customized marketing has come a long way. In fact, a McKinsey report shows that 71% of consumers expect some level of personalization in their interactions with brands, whether that’s simple name personalization or more effective, targeted engagement. Customers’ expectations continue to change and evolve, so it’s up to organizations to keep pace and meet demands.
For this reason, personalization should influence every aspect of your marketing efforts. Tailoring your messaging to specific customer segments in a standard marketing campaign can provide greater value to the individual, which increases the likelihood of conversion and drives better results. For example, when you personalize push notifications, native advertising, and conversational marketing, you’re mapping the needs of your customers to targeted solutions. Meeting these needs creates a deeper connection with your target audience and fosters better engagement across other marketing channels.
Make Your Marketing Strategy About Customers
It’s important that personalization be customer-centric. You should design your marketing efforts around your target audience’s needs, interests, and expectations. By doing this, you demonstrate to your customers that you understand them and value them as individuals. You see and hear them.
One of the best ways to start building a strategy is to define your personalization goals. Maybe you’d like to see more conversions, so you set a goal of x number of conversions to reach by the end of the quarter. Throughout that quarter, you might also set micro-conversion goals, which help ensure that you’re on the right track. Goals like these might be implementing post-purchase engagement or continued support after purchase. With the right technology, you can leverage AI to identify these key metrics (like the number of conversions) and track them as you implement to keep an eye on your progress.
Lastly, don't underestimate how intentional you should be about finding solutions that complement your company’s workflows and integrate into other valuable systems, such as Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, or Contentsquare. Whether you’re a small team with limited resources or a big firm, internal teams focus on the company’s wider goals and how AI-driven personalization will help advance those goals. CX is so much bigger than just personalization, and your teams should all be on the same page about where strategy and technology come together to align company goals.
As you progress, don’t forget to monitor customer responses and feedback to learn how you can improve your one-to-one personalization efforts. Remember, the goal of a customer-centric strategy is to build strong, long-lasting relationships with customers by putting their needs at the forefront of all marketing efforts. Those needs are certain to change. Having the data, sticking to the best practices, and conducting the research don’t mean you’ll succeed right away, but fully understanding your target audience does make succeeding much more attainable.
How to Leverage CX Personalization Insights in Every Marketing Effort
There is no denying the importance of personalization at scale in the current market. But today’s consumers expect more than just their name showing up in an email; they expect a customized experience at every touchpoint along their journey with your brand. Manually, it’s a gargantuan task, but Evolv AI makes this painless by seamlessly integrating it into your technology stack.
The following are just a few areas to explore:
1. Onboarding
Evolv’s fully managed service provides the expertise of a team of CX specialists to help lead your experimentation process, which allows your team to focus on strategy and implementation. With more time given back to your human team members, AI-optimized (and Evolv-assisted) personalization can gather data and share the right education with the right customer at the right time. If the goal is to deliver value to new prospects as early as possible, full-service support and AI-driven experimentation are the fastest way to get there.
2. Product Development
One of the objectives of product development is to meet the needs of customers. For that reason, you’ll want to use the insights you’ve drawn from personalized customer experiences to inform product decisions. This information will enable you to create products and services that meet the needs and preferences of your target audience. You can even use those same insights to improve the unboxing experience. Suppose your data analysis shows customers reporting that a product is damaged when it arrives at their home. If it’s a significant variation in the data, it might be worth looking into how to optimize your packaging for safe handling. If it’s just in one region, you might look into issues with local vendors or transport. AI can point you in the right direction during current product development and new ideas down the line.
3. Events
While it may sound difficult to personalize something like an event, there’s a lot of potential in the tactic. Do your research and determine what you can do to create a personalized experience for an in-event customer journey. Start with segmentation; targeting your event to a more specific group makes them feel like it was designed just for them. Additionally, you could augment in-person events by using AI to proactively collect data and build excitement with targeted polls, allowing your customer to share in the planning. If you’re hosting a conference online, AI could use behavioral data and predictive analytics to help guide your customers toward sessions that match up with their interests.
4. Community Building
People naturally seek out communities to join. Frequently, these will form around products and services. Take advantage of this phenomenon by cultivating a sense of togetherness and shared experience among your customers. Give them access to a platform that allows them to connect with each other. Social media, events, and customer forums are just a few of the options.
By using each of these tactics, you’ll start to build optimized CX personalization across your entire North Star strategy. By incorporating traditional customer touchpoints and AI-driven predictive analytics into every marketing effort, you maximize the strength of your relationship with your customers. In the hyper-personalized present, AI implementation is a necessity, and Evolv AI can make your integration seamless.
Don’t wait; connect with us today to start optimizing!
