Personalization in Digital Marketing: What It Is and How to Inject It Into Your Marketing Strategy

Personalizing your marketing to the consumer is essential in attracting them. Different from targeting a specific market, personalization is significantly more focused. The process functions similarly to a flow chart from each specification to the next. Connecting to your customer is the most crucial step in sales. We’ll teach you about personalization so you can make that sale easier.

What Is Personalization in Digital Marketing?

Personalization refers to the process of catering to an individual’s needs and desires. In marketing, this means catering to your customer in particular. For example, iGaming customers want to learn about casinos that offer their favorite games and the best deals. Scanteam, an iGaming marketing project, would add features that understand a customer’s preferences and direct them.

Personalization tactics sound similar to Target Market; however, marketing experts such as our author, Alex Lysak, will tell you a different story. Target market refers to focusing your marketing efforts on a specific group of individuals. Personalization is, therefore, the next logical step to attract your target market.

When you personalize, you remove one more layer of the boundary between consumer and company. Personalizing your website lets you build a bond between your users, add a face to your company, and further your efforts. A friendly, digital handshake that gives you a good start to a sale.

Consumer personalization relies heavily on data given by visitors and customers. Each person’s experience must be unique to them with personalization. If an individual can’t find the product or service they desire, you’ll likely lose that sale. It may not sound easy to perform at first, but there’s plenty of ways to go about it.

How Do You Personalize Your Digital Marketing?

Consumer personalization data is the first step. This process involves taking analytic marketing data and using it to learn the habits of your consumers.

Programs such as google analytics can be used to gather information. Other programs and services offer in-house analytics while personalizing. This information is collected from hundreds, up to thousands, of individuals looking at your website. To apply this information, you can use several techniques such as Adaptive Content.

Adaptive Content

Sometimes referred to as Smart or Dynamic content, Adaptive content changes based on a user’s habits. This affects aspects of an email, ad, landing page, or website based on the user. Think of it as if you’re tailoring the experience directly to the person looking at it.

It’s essential to keep this simple but highly effective, as too much detail can overwhelm consumers. Watch, learn, and offer a helping hand to keep them buying from you. The most important aspect of adaptive content, and personalization overall, is being helpful to your users.

To achieve this end, you’ll need to use programs such as Hubspot. Hubspot provides options for how to personalize your content. It does so based on personalization data such as a user’s country, language, or device, amongst other criteria.

AI Chatbots

Speaking or texting with a company representative helps guide consumers to the purchase they’re looking to seal. Many companies are doing this through the use of special software that generates responses to questions and queries. AI chatbots help with online consumer personalization.

These chatbots can be put into various formats such as Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, or embedded in a webpage. By programming the chatbot to answer questions you expect your consumer to ask, you add a level of familiarity to the experience. You can accomplish this through a variety of platforms, such as Spectrum.

Digital Experience Platform

A digital experience platform is a software suite that observes your website’s activity to assist in personalization. Digital experience platforms provide you with a complete view of your consumers’ preferences, and then the platform learns from them to give a better experience.

Machine learning software like this is available at several select providers. Sitecore’s experience platform claims to save months of development time through its sheer scale. Sitecore also informs the user of what to do and what not to do with personalization.

Exit Intent Pop-ups

According to Hubspot, 99% of first-time visitors to your website have no intention of making a purchase. The goal of these visitors is to learn more and then leave with their information.

The question then becomes, how to capitalize on the 99% the same way you can the 1%. The answer is Exit Intent Pop-ups.

These pop-ups appear when a user is about to exit the webpage. The purpose is to offer the user a personalized advertisement the moment they try to leave. Capitalize on this through sites such as OptinMonster that provide services, including exit-intent pop-ups.

Interactive Content

One of the more straightforward methods that are no less useful, interactive content, is used to engage and interest the visitor. These can be anything from a survey to a personalized video for the user.

Personalized videos are a beneficial form of interactive content, as videos are among the most popular digital information sources. Personalized videos are the products of personalized data, while surveys are both the same and opposite.

Surveys draw in information in a study. Using surveys as interactive content can make personalization significantly faster and easier.

Ease of Access

Ease of access is a broad term describing the overall accessibility of your website. In general, you’ll wish to make your website accessible to your target market, but you can take another step through personalization.

By personalizing your website to each user, you can make it significantly easier for them to browse your website and purchase from it. For example, Amazon offers similar products you may like to your home page alongside recently viewed products.

Other forms of ease of access can include quick access to categories that the user frequently visits. By combining these with surveys and digital experience platforms, you can fully personalize a user’s web experience.

How Do You Gather Data for Personalization?

When looking to gather data for personalization, there are several factors you should look at:

  • Journey – Look at how the customer found you and what keywords led them there. Tools such as google analytics will come in particularly handy.
  • Purpose – Look at the user’s frequent searches and discern why they’re on your website. Your website should always keep a small log of your clients’ inquiries to tailor the experience better.
  • Bounce – Look at what pages interested the user to click but then deterred them quickly. Bounce rates can be found on google analytics as well and have a dedicated statistic.

These three targets provide you with concise information on what the consumer is searching for. More than this, these should be considered some of the most relevant to your website itself. Others can include the device logging in on and the location that they logged on from.

Why Should You Personalize?

With all of this being thrown at you so suddenly, you may be overwhelmed. You may also wonder why you even need to personalize. Even with a targeted advertisement directed at desired consumers, not personalizing can be a downfall.

The importance of personalization in marketing stems from the likelihood of purchase. Personalized digital marketing caters to the needs of the target market and the individual. In fact, according to Forbes, personalized call-to-actions result in a 42% higher conversion rate.

Personalization also helps your customers narrow down their options to the same choices they want to make. A large number of users will leave a website if they feel like there are too many options. Over 30% of shoppers, with their shopping experience, was more personalized than it currently is.

What Not to Do When Personalizing

So far, we’ve only told you what to do when personalizing. Personalization can be taken too far, to an overbearing level. To avoid pitfalls that many others have fallen into, we’ll let you know what not to do with personalization data.

Use out-of-date information

The biggest pitfall that digital personalization brings with it is outdated information. Consumers don’t always return to sites regularly. There are often days, weeks, or even years between visits.

In this time, a lot can change for a person. If you’re using outdated information on a consumer, they may turn away from your ads or other personalizations in the future. Obsolete information can cause you to lose customers forever.

Unfortunately, this pitfall is not easy to fix; outdated information cannot be replaced until the consumer reappears. The best way to mitigate this is by allowing new data to replace old data after a certain period.

Overstep boundaries

The importance of limiting yourself is especially present in consumer personalization. If you send a constant stream of personalized messages to consumers, it will backfire.

Sending messages of ads to an individual, especially ones based on gathered information rather than user activity, can scare the consumer. These messages should be infrequent enough to not be misconstrued and often enough to build familiarity.

To visualize this:

  1. Picture what you as a consumer would find overwhelming or even frightening.
  2. Do your best to avoid things that would turn you off to a website—for example, large quantities of emails or displaying information that’s too personal to the user.
  3. Always stick to whatever information can be found on your website, nowhere else.

Make too many assumptions

Another of the biggest pitfalls in personalized digital marketing is the assumption. Extrapolating from data is important, but you have to be careful not to over-assume without enough data.

An example of this would be basing an entire personalization around a single purchase or interaction. A consumer’s browsing habits can vary greatly, meaning that singular interactions will very rarely reflect the consumer.

Overcoming this is about drawing information from other sources when one is lacking. Don’t make big assumptions on little details. For example, if a consumer joins your website and looks at accessories for their car, it does not necessarily mean that they intend to purchase parts or other accessories.

Beware the gift purchases, which may cause issues with your algorithms if not accounted for. Purchasing gifts for friends and family can cause extreme outlier compared to a user’s typical search, browsing, and purchase history.

Over-Personalize

Personalization isn’t just about pinpointing the individual either, it can be about something as simple as marketing to the tastes of an extremely small number of individuals. Depersonalizing is a newer trend of personalization in marketing that seeks to reduce the number of customers feeling alienated due to over-personalization. This over personalized marketing climate can alienate your customers worse.

According to Neil Patel, there’s more to personalization than simply using your customer’s name and an algorithm to attract them. You need to be genuine with them in a way that the majority of marketing teams fail at. Automated emails pretending to be a real person isn’t the way to go about it.

The best way to attract more customers is to keep your personalization simple, honest, and upfront. You’re doing this for them and you, there’s no reason to pretend you’re going out of your way. Simplicity is significantly more attractive to the human mind than immense detail, at least with marketing.

How Do You Learn More?

There’s a lot of information to discuss and this has only just scratched the service here. Therefore the next logical step is where should you go to learn even more? Speak with industry professionals and learn from the best.

Industry professionals like the author of this article are more than willing to provide you with insight. Along with this, you can perform your own research with qualified professionals that can help you along every step of the way.

Don’t be afraid to ask for help when you want to expand your business. There’s no shortage of studies, professionals, and knowledgeable experts to help you along the way.

Conclusion

Personalization is the driver’s seat of the modern era of marketing. We’ve handed you the keys, so take it and ride.