Personalisation: Why it’s so important

You can preach about the values of personalised email marketing and personalised marketing until the cows come home, but unless you can see and feel the value, the chances are it’ll be put aside as something to look in to further down the line. This blog post will show you the value.

If you’re running an email marketing campaign, it can be easy to fall into bad habits while your focus drifts into more ‘important’ areas of business.

But the fact is that personalisation is vital, and if you’re not giving it the attention it deserves, you’re missing it on a whole lotta revenue. 

This might seem like something that’s a little too hard, a little too complicated and a little too time consuming, but with a smart marketing automation tool, it’s a breeze.

Personalised email marketing doesn’t need to be a slog

You see, marketing automation software is packed full of tools and features to help you and your business increase and improve your personalisation efforts, all of which will prove to be simple yet effective ways to break through a number of pain points and really drive up your values.

By making your customers feel valued and wanted, they will return the favour when you need it most. 

Personalised marketing works

But don’t just take the word of this blog, here are some examples for you to ruminate on.

We’ve talked mainly about email marketing in relation to personalisation, and that’s because it should be your main focus, but you can also personalise a homepage.

Take Optimizely for example. It created four different homepages for four different segments based on four factors: late-night browsers, browsers from Target, browsers from Microsoft and browsers from the travel industry.

Each different segment was greeted with a different experience, while Optimizely tracked the whole thing and found some really promising results:

• 1.5% increase in engagement.
• 113% increase in conversions to Solutions page.
• 117% increase in conversions on “Test it Out” CTA to start account creation process.

That’s one example of how personalised marketing can really work in your favour, if you’re prepared to invest a little time in it. There’s no reason why it can’t work for you - if you have the data. You may know that people from certain locations want certain experiences, so you could tailor the homepage to meet those demands.

Those increases in conversions could be crucial for the business a little down the line, too. Can you really afford to say no to results like that?

Be hungry for data

There’s huge benefits to be had when you personalise your email content and provide relevant product offers.

• 91% of consumers are more likely to shop with brands who provide relevant offers and recommendations (Accenture).
• 80% of customers are more likely to spend money with a business that provides a personalised experience (Epsilon).
• 90% of consumers don’t mind sharing their behaviour data if it creates an easier or cheaper shopping experience (SmarterHQ).

So we can see that there’s a clear benefit to businesses who go down the personalisation route, but to do that you need to be collecting user data. 

You can do this via sign-up forms, double opt-ins and by tracking user behaviour on your website.

Target your email campaigns

As we’ve seen, sending out highly targeted emails works. Email marketing can be a difficult beast to tame, but when you combine it with intelligence data and analytics you can be on to a winner.

The tool can be used to personalise and customise your emails to ensure your marketing strategy goes that extra mile in making your customers feel valued.

A really basic example of this would be a discount or freebie. You could offer this to someone who had been signed up to your mailing list for a set amount of time, say six months, but hasn’t downloaded that whitepaper or booked a demo. 

When people sign-up to your mailing list (using a double opt-in, hopefully), you’ll be able to see the date they did so. Now you’ve got that information forever, you can make the most of it! Using marketing automation, you can send out a little reminder about your demo, or even an extended free trial, to those who appear interested but haven’t yet made the leap.

Know what makes website browsers tick

You can also track users based on what they get up to on your website. Good insights can tell you where your customers interact with you, on which devices, about what topics and how they respond.

With this data at your fingertips, you’ll be able to customise certain responses so that the startup boss who keeps on clicking on your section about a free trial is sent to a dedicated homepage with a countdown to the end of the next special offer, while the CEO of a substantial enterprise will be shown information about something more specific to their needs.

Understanding and predicting your user’s needs and expectations can really go a long way to building a relationship with everyone - which will only mean more profit in the future.

Don’t forget product recommendations

Product recommendations make up 75% of Netflix’s sales and account for 35% of Amazon’s revenue (Adoric). But how can we translate that success into the B2B world?

Business decision-makers still want to be treated as individuals - or a group of individuals - according to data from Salesforce that says 75% of business buyers expect vendors to personalise their offer.

There’s a really good example of how product recommendations can still work in the B2B world, and it comes from The Expert Institute - a legal services platform. 

It decided to embark on a one-to-one email marketing campaign using personalised emails using first names. The Expert Institute also created segments based on engagement levels, and further personalised their email marketing in this way:

• Those with low levels of engagement got free e-books and whitepapers
• Those with middling engagement got links to blogs with CTAs
• Top tier subscribers got emails that told them how The Expert Institute could address their specific requirements.

And it worked! The campaign saw a 200% increase in conversions, a 60% email open rate and a 20% click-through rate.

Marketing automation flows make life easy

You can program your flows to target your audience based on simple things, like their demographic or location. That means if you sell a wide range of products or services, you can send the 18-25-year-old one recommendation and the 35-50-year-old something completely different. 

People in different stages of their life are going to want different things, which you can account for with marketing automation flows that automate this process based on a number of different factors.

This will help increase reach, improve your deliverability and increase engagement across your email marketing campaign.

People of different ages want different experiences, so there’s no use shouting into the wind trying to get a 50-year-old onto something they’re never going to be interested in.

Personalised email marketing is super important

As we’ve seen, personalised email marketing is incredibly important. Doing it can add heaps of value to your business in a way that feels intuitive and right.

But it doesn’t have to stop there because personalised homepages and landing pages can do the same thing on an even deeper level - you saw the stats.

However, there does need to be a considered process behind it all and that starts with collecting data, knowing your audience and then anticipating what they might want, when they want it.

Once you can provide the answers to questions their data says they’ll ask next, you’ll have really cracked personalisation and the rewards will come.

APSIS One can provide all of that and more. You can collect and view your data, set up smart marketing automation flows, create shiny email templates that impress all your customers and launch clever personalisation campaigns.

Does all that sound good? You’ll need to arrange a demo with the experts then! Click here to book yours today.