By Pete Winter

Marketing Leader’s Guide to Marketing Automation Personalisation

Unlock the power of the intelligent and personal

Personalisation is more than just a marketing buzzword. It’s a must-do in the world of marketing automation. When harnessed properly, it can help you improve performance and ROI.

In this blog post you’ll learn how to use personalisation to build intelligent personas, segment audiences, boost lead generation and increase conversions.

We’ll also look at how real-life marketing teams are using marketing automation software to deliver personalised and tailored experiences to their customers.

The Evidence: Why should you CARE about personalisation?

Personalisation in marketing isn’t just done for that warm, fuzzy feeling (though that can’t hurt!); there is solid evidence that it improves the bottom line.

Businesses that are currently personalising web experiences are seeing an increase in sales of 19% on average.

Econsultancy

Prospects and customers are simply more prepared to engage with personalised content. Marketing emails get 29% higher open rates and 41% higher click-through rates when they are personalised (Experian).

No wonder then, that a whopping 94% of businesses rate personalisation as ‘critical to current and future success.’ The penny has well and truly dropped.

The Problem: Why do you NEED personalisation?

Marketers face real challenges when it comes to moving unknown prospects along the funnel into high-quality leads and (eventually) customers.

Lead capture experiences are so ubiquitous throughout the web that they have become almost comically cookie-cutter and formulaic, no matter how much creativity marketers try to inject into them.

Ion Interactive

The proliferation of content marketing and inbound efforts has led to an overwhelming array of companies vying for the attention of increasingly jaded prospects. It’s no longer enough to produce generic content, capture leads and send blanket lead nurturing emails.

Customers demand a personal touch – this is how you can cut through all the noise.

The Persona: Who are you personalising FOR?

Before you can truly personalise your marketing, you need to have a clear picture of your personas and segments. Who are you targeting, what characteristics do they share, and what are their needs and frustrations that you can seek to address?

Marketing automation has a central role to play in persona building. You can examine and analyse prospect behaviours and interactions. Then you use this information to group and segment your audience into targeted persona groups, so you can craft and deliver tailored content to resonate with them.

Marketers have noted a 760% increase in revenue from segmented campaigns.

Campaign Monitor

Now we’ll look in more detail at ways to segment and personalise using marketing automation.

LOOKALIKE SEGMENTATION

This involves reviewing the characteristics of your present customers, and building a new audience that shares those same features.

For example, by analysing data you might find that many of your customers work at businesses with 10-50 employees in a particular region. So it would be a good idea to then research and target all businesses in the region with 10-50 employees, as this looks like a fertile market.

DYNAMIC CONTENT

Instead of delivering the same online content in the same way to all prospects, why not use the information you have on them to tailor it to their interests? There is evidence that personalised web experiences can increase sales by an average of 20%.

Tailored homepages and user-specific recommendations are a staple for the big guns like Netflix and Amazon. It’s time all marketers got on the bandwagon.

PURCHASE BEHAVIOUR

Once again this means looking at your existing customers and profiling them, this time based on the most concrete metric of all: purchases. Grouping and targeting customers by the value or frequency of purchases can help you to build an idea of which groups are most responsive to promotions, for example.

TIME ZONE & TIMINGS

A simple one – send your emails when people are ready to interact with them! Marketing automation technology makes it simple to stop sending blanket ‘mailshots’ and tailor the time according to when your prospects are most likely to engage with them.

CUSTOMER-SPECIFIC NEED

You need to know what your customers are after in order to make this one work. So listening exercises, analysing past purchase behaviour and interactions are all crucial.

If you can segment your customers according to the type of products they tend to buy from you, then you can make sure you’re sending relevant messages and not bombarding them with things they have no interest in.

CASE STUDY 1

Coffee retailer Boca Java segmented customers based on past purchase behaviour, dividing them into those who had bought two bags, three bags and four bags.

They then sent a discount offer to all groups and found that those in the two-bag segment were most likely to take up the offer. These customers are now the primary target for upselling as their behaviour marked them out as the most responsive.

CASE STUDY 2

By implementing a simple personalised email campaign based on time zones and past opening behaviours, online clothing retailer BustedTees boosted revenue by 8%. They achieved a 17% growth in email responses and an 11% boost in clickthrough rate.

They also measured post-click site engagement and found that it had increased by nearly 8%. It’s clear that treating customers as individuals pays real dividends for marketers.

The Short Version: 4 reasons you should be ‘doing’ automated personalisation

We know you’re a busy person, so just in case you scrolled and skimmed through this post, here are the key points in the argument for personalisation:

Improved customer experiences
Better lead generation
Improved conversion rates
Better return on investment

The Last Word:

Marketing automation personalisation is useful in gathering essential customer data and helping score leads at every stage of the customer journey.

Show your customer they are much more than a number, increase engagement with them and build real time, omni-channel campaigns that excel.

Takeaways:

Personalisation undeniably improves engagement rates and purchase value
Generic content and lead generation/conversion campaigns are no longer cutting it; personalisation is a way to stand out
Successful personalisation relies on a detailed understanding of different personas and segments
Analysing current customers will identify traits that can be used to target new markets – lookalike segmentation
Customers should be segmented and targeted by purchase behaviours and interests

Now you know personalisation, discover the complete automation manual. Download The CMO’s Definitive Guide to Marketing Automation