Businesses of all shapes and sizes are moving online in search of new customers looking to buy their products. With this surge, more and more sub-par content is being published to the web each and every day. Because of the success of a few, many are just trying to duplicate a process before ever figuring out why they are doing it in the first place. Unfortunately, because of this content overload, many great businesses are getting drowned out. Thankfully, with a little bit of help from personalized marketing, businesses can connect in a more authentic way.
In this episode of the SMA Marketing Minute, we are going to take a look at 3 types of personalized marketing and how they can be used to improve both your brand engagement as well as sales. Personalization is all about creating a unique experience for every customer, no matter where or how they come in contact with us. The key is to create a natural connection which allows for our companies to be more “human” while interacting online.
Table of Contents
The 3 types of personalized marketing we will look at are:
- Emails
- Dynamic Content
- CRO Software
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Video Transcript:
Hey. What’s going on everybody? I’m Ryan Shelley and you’re watching the SMA Marketing Minute. In this episode, we’re going to be talking about personalization. Now, personalization can actually bridge your marketing and your sales and make them both way more effective.
With more and more people going online and using the same tactics like blogging and social media and email blasts, the internet is just being overloaded with content. The problem is a lot of it’s not very good and even more of it is actually not even customer-centric or buyer-focused. It really has no purpose, other than trying to drag traffic, but it doesn’t really add value.
People want to connect with businesses, want to buy products that actually add value to their lives and personalization helps them to experience that and get more value out of it. No matter how large you’re broadcasting your message, whether you’re putting it on TV or you’re throwing a ton of ads out there, everybody’s going to experience your message personally. They’re not going to experience as a group. Even if they’re inside of a group, they’re still going to have a personal interaction with it.
The more we can personalize our messages, the more we can bring people into what we’re doing and share with them almost in a one-on-one sense, the higher conversion rate we’re going to have, the more human interaction we’re going to have and better long-term customers.
How does personalization work? Well, we’ve had personalization for quite a while. People use it in email all the time. You may be getting an email from somebody you probably don’t know that says, “Hey, Jim,” or “Hey, Lisa. We have this great new thing or this new product to show you.” Then you find your name and it’s a little bit addressed specifically to you.
What they’ve done is they just scraped in information using some sort of technology, or software, or maybe you filled out a form on their website and now they know a little bit about you. They try to use what they know about you to talk to you as if they kind of know you a little bit, which makes it a little bit comfortable when we get those emails because we feel like the person knows a little bit about us.
You can overdo personalization. You can push the envelope a little bit too much and try to add things in there that you probably shouldn’t really add in there and be creepy. Be careful. You probably shouldn’t use last names. If you have some other information that maybe you’ve collected or you’ve been able to find in other places, that could be just kind of weird. Don’t add that into your email. Don’t add that into a place where it will make somebody feel uncomfortable. Personalization is all about building that bridge and making people feel comfortable to engage and interact with you.
Another form of personalization is done through dynamic content. There’s a lot of software out there that do dynamic content. We use HubSpot. HubSpot has what’s called smart content. Based on a number of parameters, whether it be customer information, maybe somebody’s on a certain lead list. Maybe they’re coming in from a certain country, or geographic region, or maybe they’re even associated with a certain business and doing a little bit of accounting base marketing unit, we can personalize our content based on who they are and how they’ve interacted with us.
How does this help? Well, if you have a ton of people who are return visitors, you’re going to want to make sure that they can see something different. Something that’s going to continue to add value and nurture them through the process. But maybe you have somebody who’s coming in and they’re looking for specifically one service, but end up on another page. You can use dynamic content to adjust the content to direct that person to where they actually want to go, which is going to provide a higher conversion rate and better interaction with them.
There are a number of ways you can use dynamic content. Like I said, we use HubSpot’s smart content, but you can also code it using JavaScript. There are also WordPress plugins that do it for you as well, but understanding how to use and incorporate personalization can be very powerful.
Now, you can overdo dynamic content and we kind of recommend that you only use it when it’s actually appropriate to do so. One great place to so it is like your slide in. You have some offers that you’re sliding in or you have a pop up and you want to use some dynamic content, you can use A/B Testing or some sort of dynamic rules to show the most appropriate offer to the person coming to your site.
The third most powerful way to use personalization is with the CRO. At Shelley Media Arts, we are actually partners with BrightInfo. They have an awesome platform to really give your users a unique experience. Every time that they come to your site and engage with you, they get content that matters to them.
What these softwares do is they build data based on the users’ interactions, how they’ve come into the site, the things that they’ve looked at, how they’ve interacted with you. Actually, how they’re interacting with you right now to start to deliver the most relevant content to them, so that when they come to your site, they’re not just getting a bunch of content that they don’t need, they’re getting something that actually speaks to them, their pain points, and helps them find the solutions to the problems that they’re experiencing at that time.
BrightInfo has a number ways to deliver a personalized experience for your users. Whether it be entry widgets, or a sidebar slide in, maybe it’s an exit banner. The great thing about this is they’re not just normal popups like you see on so many sites, they’re personalized to the person who’s on your website at that moment.
These are people who are engaging with your content that are looking for solutions. Maybe they’ve searched something even in your site’s search bar, this technology’s actually going to pull in some information, pull in the things that they’re clicking on, the pages they’re looking at, and then try to help them find the best solution to their problem. It’s a really powerful tool because it helps the user connect with you. That’s really the key to personalization.
Personalization is all about connecting. It’s not about just tracking people. It’s not about getting more data and scraping it and using that to sell them a product or service. The internet at its core is all about creating connections. About building relationships and nurturing those relationships into long-term business relationships, partnerships, and sometimes, just helping each other out.
The key to personalization is actually to make marketing more human again. The more we can embrace this and actually start to reach out to people to help them solve their problems with powerful solutions, the better we all will be and the better the internet will be.
If you have any questions on personalization and how that could work in your marketing sales strategy, please comment below or hit us up. You can connect with us at smamarketing.net. Thanks for watching this episode of the SMA Marketing Minute and we’ll see you next time.
