Personalization remains one of the most important means to connect with audiences of all types through marketing and sales efforts. However, you might not know exactly how to approach your personalization strategy. To guide you in the right direction, here we've listed some of the most effective personalization strategies that can revitalize your marketing campaigns.
The importance of incorporating personalization strategies into your brand
With millions of brands out there dying for people's attention, people want to find the brands that stand apart. Specifically, most consumers would prefer to buy from companies that speak more directly to them through personalized content.
Recent stats show the necessity of personalization. 80% of consumers are more likely to make a purchase from a business that creates personalized experiences. Additionally, 72% of consumers have stated that they only engage with messaging that's personalized.
In short, if you're not using personalization strategies to build a relationship with audiences, you're missing out on a huge opportunity to establish a strong connection.
11 winning personalization strategies to try in 2024
Not sure how to approach personalization strategies with your marketing campaigns? The following personalization strategies should give you some ideas:
- Personalize your email marketing efforts
- Segment your audience
- Rely on zero-party data
- Deliver a personalized online shopping experience
- Provide more relevant product recommendations
- Onboard new users with a personalized flow
- Make live chat more personal
- Focus on A/B testing
- Leverage artificial intelligence
- Use customer journey mapping
Personalize your email marketing efforts
Email is just as relevant as it's ever been, with 4.37 billion people using it as of 2023. This is over half of the world's population, and the number of email users keeps growing every year. You can also personalize emails in many ways to stand out in people's inboxes using the right strategy.
One of the best ways to get the most from email personalization is to use Inbox Stories. Inbox Stories bring the dynamic and highly engaging Story format to your emails without any development effort.
Stories are full-screen immersive images and videos that engage audiences and transform generic marketing content into something fun and memorable. These Stories can evolve your emails using a simple HTML snippet that delivers personalized Inbox Stories to recipients. As a result, not only can your emails address recipients by their name, they can also provide personalized product recommendations. Moreover, they offer relevant news, and more using tailored content.
Segment your audience
Another effective means of personalizing your marketing efforts is to segment your audience. Most businesses serve more than a main core audience, with many types of people likely interested in the offerings. You can pinpoint all audiences and speak more directly to them in your marketing through audience segmentation.
Segmenting an audience entails dividing your main audience into subgroups. Each group will have its own unique demographics, psychographics, and other attributes that make them different from other audiences. You can begin segmenting your audience by conducting surveys of your customers.. Through this, you can learn more about them. Also, you can engage with audiences on social media, and see what audiences your competitors are targeting.
With some audience segments in mind, you can develop buyer personas around them. This serves as fictional representatives for each audience. You would then be able to use these personas to guide your marketing campaigns. It also includes the messaging and visuals you use to connect with each segment.
Rely on zero-party data
While you can still use first-party data to gain some actionable insights into your audiences, third-party data is going away soon. Google and other platforms will be blocking third-party cookies to appeal to people's desire for more privacy online. As a result, brands will need to get a bit more creative when trying to learn about their audiences.
How will effective personalization be possible in this cookieless world? One of the best solutions zero-party data. Zero-party data is the information that people willingly provide. Collecting zero-party data will allow you to effectively deliver personalized experiences without appearing to know more about your customers than they want you to know. In other words, it can eliminate that "creep factor" which can come with using third-party data alone for personalization without the audience's knowledge.
Zero-party data can include personal details like names and contact information, buyer preferences, and more. You can collect it via surveys, polls, and other tools that encourage people to give relevant information.
Using the interactive features of Storyly Stories, you can collect zero-party data more effectively. Storyly Stories offer highly engaging, dynamic, and interactive experiences for any app and website. While streaming Stories on your mobile app or website, you can utilize interactive features like question stickers, polls, quizzes and emoji sliders to gather zero-party data. In turn, you can gain insights into your customers’ preferences, needs, likes and dislikes as they voluntarily share information about themselves. After collecting zero-party data with interactives, you can use Storyly’s Audience Builder to create new segments and provide personalized messaging tailored to these segments.
Deliver a personalized online shopping experience
Consider incorporating personalization across the entire online shopping experience. Doing so will help increase purchases, retention, and loyalty. You'll be able to stand apart from brands that are more impersonal and don't build a strong connection with shoppers.
Want to get the most from your personalization strategy? Storyly Stories can help you deliver personalized journeys for customers shopping online. Using Stories on your eCommerce platform, you can:
- Show customers how much money they've saved by using promo codes or taking advantage of sales
- Reduce cart abandonment by reminding customers of their abandoned items in cart
- Send emails featuring relevant offers using Inbox Stories
- Highlight certain purchases
Provide more relevant product recommendations
Take people directly to the products they really want with personalized product recommendations. You can utilize zero-party data and first-party data to understand your consumers’ preferences. Moreover, deliver personalized suggestions based on preferences or purchase history. You can then make these recommendations via email or on your platform in the form of engaging Stories with calls-to-actions (CTAs).
Onboard new users with a personalized flow
User onboarding personalization can be a key element in creating a memorable and tailored experience for your users right from the start. By customizing the onboarding process based on individual user preferences, behavior, and demographics, you can make them feel valued, understood, and motivated to explore your app further. To achieve this, leverage user data, conduct surveys, and analyze user feedback to gain insights into their needs and expectations. Then, craft personalized onboarding journeys with relevant content, interactive tutorials, and intuitive prompts that guide users through key features. Remember, personalized onboarding not only boosts user satisfaction but also drives higher user retention and long-term success for your app.
You can use Storyly Stories in many creative ways to transform your onboarding experience. By this, it will keep new users moving along toward a purchase. For example, Stories could intuitively introduce new users to various features and functionalities, educating users about how to navigate your app or website. You can also personalize it according to your users' journey, starting from the user acquisition phase. Track the specific call-to-action that convinced them to download your app and highlight those aspects in your onboarding story content!
IMAGE - Onboarding use case
Make live chat more personal
Another way to connect with audiences using personalization is to take your live chat program to the next level. Specifically, you can make live chat more personal by addressing users by their names and using language that speaks to each audience segment.
You can begin shaping the personalized live chat experience with a pre-chat survey that asks customers for unique input, including identifying customer details and any questions the customer has. You can also personalize the experience on your end by including a photo of each chat representative, ensuring that customers feel like they're talking to real people.
Focus on A/B testing
A/B split testing is still one of the best ways to see how well your marketing efforts will perform before officially launching a campaign. This form of testing entails using two versions of the same content to gauge their performance, often by switching out one element such as visuals, messaging, or CTAs. You would run each version for a limited audience and see which drives the most engagement. Over time, you'll be able to perfect your efforts as you continue testing.
Implement location-based personalization
When relevant, you can also use location-based personalization to connect with audiences. For instance, an app could indicate where a brand's physical locations are in the customer's area. eCommerce apps could also detail which other retail stores in the area carry their products, enabling people to find them both online and in person.
Many types of apps can personalize experiences based on the user's location. Even a fitness app could include a weather widget that indicates when it's best to exercise indoors or outdoors, depending on the user's specific regimen. On a stormy day, for example, the app might recommend ways to replicate the experience of running outside within an indoor environment as an alternative.
Leverage artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) remains a great tool to use to drive personalized campaigns. You can essentially use AI to streamline your personalization efforts through a combination of technology, including deep learning, machine learning, and natural language processing (NLP). AI can then help craft fully personalized messaging and other types of content to connect with users.
AI works by making use of collected audience data to shape personalization campaigns. You'll gain deeper insights into customer behavior and preferences, giving you the ability to fully personalize all brand experiences as you work to attract new customers while keeping your existing ones loyal. You can use AI to push relevant product recommendations, touchpoints, and more that ensure more people move along the buyer's journey.
Use customer journey mapping
One final way to perfect personalization is to use customer journey mapping. This entails looking at all touchpoints that your users interact with along the buyer's journey from start to finish. You can then see if there are any locations along the journey where people tend to drop off.
As an example, you might discover that people are disconnecting from the customer journey toward the beginning at the top of the sales funnel, which could indicate that your initial marketing efforts aren't connecting enough. Meanwhile, others might be failing to convert into customers toward the bottom of the funnel due to impersonal sales efforts.
You can take a look at your entire journey and identify any weak areas that require improvement. You'll then have the chance to optimize the journey with better experiences that create a smoother flow. Keep in mind that AI is an invaluable asset here that can help you track behavioral data, which you can then use to create more tailored personal experiences that streamline the customer journey.
Conclusion
All of the above personalization strategies can take your marketing and sales campaigns up a notch, enabling you to build better connections with audiences and encourage more sales as well as more retention in the long term. Knowing which strategies to use can take you a long way, but you must also ensure your business is using the right tools to facilitate personalization across all experiences.
Storyly Stories can help you better engage and communicate with your customers using highly visual, dynamic and personalized content. Personalized in-app and web Stories will make sure your efforts don't go to waste, fueling more engagement, sales, and retention among your audience. If you want to learn more, book a call or register for free today.
