Personalized marketing messages are a very powerful tool to keep customers engaged and increase loyalty. Here are our top 5 personalization tips for retailers to help them achieve marketing success.
Tip 1: Build Trust with Your Customers
The first step to creating a personalization project is to build trust with customers. This way they will offer up more personal information about themselves that will allow true personalization to occur. The more data a retailer is able to gather about its customers, the more refined and targeted marketing messages become. According to a recently released Accenture study, consumers were willing to share personal data with retailers including, ‘demographic information such as gender (65 percent), age (53 percent) and contact information (52 percent), although a significantly smaller percentage (24 percent) would share their contact information on social media.’
Tip 2: Don’t Track People who Don’t Want to be Tracked
Building a relationship with customers includes not tracking those people who don’t want to be tracked. Retailers have to have explicit permission to collect certain information about customers. A retailer can ask for as much information they want to but this has to be weighed up with turning off some customers who will not be happy about a retailer collecting certain information about them. The same Accenture study found that ‘only 20% of customers wanted retailers to know their current location and only 14% wanted to share their browsing history.’
Tip 3: Create Segments of One
Marketers have been used to creating segments of their customers based on common traits they share. Now with greater amounts of data being collected about customers, we are seeing segments of one being developed. These are segments of individual customers with unique preferences and demographic information that can be used to offer them individually personalized marketing messages. When someone sees highly personalized offers and messages targeted specifically to them, they are more likely to respond to this type of marketing.
Tip 4: Offer Real-Time Personalized Promotions and Offers
Customers are much more likely to respond to an offer or promotion if it is personalized and sent to them while they are actually shopping for a product or purchasing a service. Out of all the respondents that were asked what sort of personalization they would prefer, nearly 60% of them wanted real-time promotions and offers*. This shows that people are receptive to promotions and offers and if these are personalized it will help to push customers to purchase more and help to increase the marketing ROI for retailers.
Tip 5: Offer Personalized Cross Generational Marketing Messages
Another way that a retailer can really personalize their marketing messages to their customers is finding out the different age groups their customers belong to and offering them content based on this demographic factor. Younger customers were more willing to share their personal information than older customers in certain areas. Millennials were more receptive to the idea of personal shopping and getting advice on in-store purchases. Baby Boomers, on the other hand, wanted to receive more benefits in return for giving up their personal information.*
The tips shared above show that personalization is a vital aspect of marketing these days and customers are expecting higher levels of personalized content and are not at all tolerant of impersonal or generic marketing messages.
To find out more about how SmartFocus can help you create a true personalization strategy to your marketing get in touch now. Speak to a marketing strategist today.
[Webinar] 5 Tips for Powerful Contextual Messaging:
On Tuesday 19th May SmartFocus, in partnership with 1to1 Media are hosting a webinar on 'Powering Contextual Messaging' - focusing on how marketers can leverage real-time and historical data, to deliver contextual messages that are personalized, relevant and timely.
Marketing leaders across the globe should attend this event for a deeper dive into:
- Relying on the full context of customers’ journeys to optimize their website experience
- Using a contextual marketing engine to galvanize the full scope of customers' interactions to create profiles that can be used for highly personalized and relevant messaging
- Customizing context-aware messages to include time, location, and environment, along with the factors that can impact customer influence
- Using virtual beacons to provide customers with location-based push notifications when they are entering or leaving an in-store zone to capture prime sales opportunities
Save your seat at the webinar here!
*http://newsroom.accenture.com/news/us-consumers-want-more-personalized-r...