You’ll fail if your marketing messages aren’t personalized

Yesterday, it was about personalizing email salutations. Today’s it’s about knowing your customer and personalizing their journey and experience to meet and exceed expectations.
23 March 2018

To survive current competition, brands need to think about personalization in their marketing strategy | Source: Shutterstock

With technology making exciting marketing customizations possible and easy, customers are starting to expect more from your brand.

They expect you to know who they are, what they like buying, and when they like buying it – and prefer it if your message is tailored to fit their tastes and preferences.

As noted by a report from The Next Web, consumers today wish to be viewed as a unique entity, not just a designated identification number.

In a lot of ways, the advent of social media is the catalyst that ultimately brought about this evolution. With platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat, businesses of all sizes are able to reach out and communicate actively with their potential and existing customers.

One-on-one conversations between companies and customers have also become prolific. A 2016 Twilio survey concluded that more than half of consumers prefer to communicate with enterprises through direct online messaging, as noted in a TechCrunch report.

Personalizing the customer experience is a matter of knowing who the target demographic of a business really is.

Take Maybelline, for example. The makeup giant has long been in the industry, and it has experienced and adapted to numerous marketing changes over the past few decades. This time around, the makeup firm is taking advantage of current online trends, such as YouTube makeup tutorials and a dedicated app for potential users.

As noted in a report from The Next Web, Maybelline’s Makeup Genius application might be a relatively simple makeup simulator, but it does allow users to see how the firm’s products would look at them in real life.

Overall, Makeup Genius allows Maybelline to reach out to millions of potential customers.

Maybelline’s makeup simulator is to help customers make better choices. Source: Shutterstock

This particular idea is emphasized by AdGreetz, a firm that tailors its clients’ video marketing campaigns to their target demographic. In a statement to Business Insider, the company admitted that while challenging, making advertisements and marketing initiatives customized for specific customers renders concrete results.

As an example, AdGreetz cited its recent partnership with Flipkart during the firm’s Big Billion Days sales, which resulted in three times the e-commerce retailer’s usual click-through rate. This ultimately doubled Flipkart’s typical sales compared to last year. This initiative, however, required AdGreetz to deploy more than 100,000 unique ads for Flipkart.

The same thing was done by AdGreetz for Forever 21, which utilized the firm’s services for a massive email campaign. Due to the personalized nature of Forever 21’s email marketing initiatives, the fashion giant managed to raise its conversion rates by 50 percent, increasing its click-through rate by as much as 132 percent.

Another example closer to home comes from Toyota. According to Net Imperative, the carmaker worked with agency Saatchi & Saatchi LA to take its digital marketing up a gear by creating 100,000 video adverts for its new RAV4 Hybrid campaign, each personalized to the Facebook viewers taste.

Overall, the current social media age is really all about personalized data and utilizing it to provide a customized experience to target customers. If businesses would like to thrive in the current marketing generation, it would be wise for them to employ initiatives that are ultimately tailor-fit for their target demographic.