How to Use Personalisation as Part of Your Inbound Marketing Strategy

Learn how to improve personalisation as part of your inbound marketing strategy, boosting success rates in the process.

The need to distinguish your marketing campaign from your competitors’ continues to grow as the sheer volume of messaging your prospects are bombarded with increases year on year. One of the best ways to create this distinction is through enhanced personalisation, increasing the relevance of your message to the customer.

If relevance increases conversion success, personalised content is a powerful tool in increasing relevance.

“52% of digital marketers from around the globe agree that the ability to personalize content is fundamental to their online strategy.” – Quarterly Digital Intelligence Briefing: Personalisation, Trust and Return on Investment, Econsultancy.

Get relevant

As well their basic details (name, email address, telephone number), your business can learn a lot by watching how prospects and leads interact with your marketing campaigns. Try collecting information on:

• Which email they open.
• Which links they click.
• What sorts of content they access or download.
• The specific subjects that pique their curiosity. 

Armed with this information, your team can then create additional marketing collateral that focuses on these preferences. The more accurately you can personalise your content to your prospects’ interests, the more successful it should be. Similarly marketing emails can be better targeted to improve response rates. 

“Personalized emails improve click-through rates by 14%, and conversion rates by 10%” – B2B Social Media Marketing: Are We There Yet?, Aberdeen 

Getting smarter with Smart Content

Advances in technology also make it possible to customise content in real time. Smart cookie technology allows you to adjust the content displayed on your website according to the prospect’s previous behaviour on your site. 

Initially your site will serve generic content that is designed to encourage visitors to provide contact details in return for access to interesting and useful content. Using standard tracking cookie technology, your business can then serve personalised information on future visits including:

• Customised web pages that use the customer’s personal details, such as name, to increase relevance.
• Optimised calls to action (CTAs) that reflect the customer’s specific interests based on previous browsing history and the content they have accessed.

This smart approach can be very effective – CTAs which target the user perform 42% better than generic CTAs. This is exactly why in a survey of in-house marketers, 94% said that personalisation of the web experience is critical to current and future success.

You be personal

As well as trying to personalise marketing campaigns, your business can also do more to be personal. People buy from people. Something as simple as sending an email from a “name”, helps to personalise your business – you begin the process of establishing a personal connection with the email recipient. 

How to get started with personalised inbound marketing

Successful personalisation is achieved by providing your customers with exactly the information they want:

• Capture basic information at an early stage of the prospect engagement process.
• Observe how prospects interact with your content.
• Use your observations to create more materials that meet your customer’s needs and interests.
• Consider implementing Smart Content to improve website relevance for your prospects.
• Encourage your brand to become personal, too – a team of people rather than a faceless corporation.

The Author
	Alistair Norman | Marketing Director Alistair is responsible for the strategy, design and implementation of our Inbound and Content Marketing, with a focus on developing B2B and B2C markets.