Personalized Marketing to Cultivate Relationships With Your Customers

It’s time to get personal — personal with your marketing. According to Accenture, 91% of consumers are more likely to support brands and companies that tailor their offers and recommendations to them. The Accenture data further notes that 83% of consumers are not opposed to sharing personal data if providing this information creates a more personalized shopping experience for them. Indeed, personalized marketing is significant so that your customers feel as though you’re treating them as individuals, not as a group. Discover ways you can apply a personal touch to your business’s marketing efforts.

Take a Conversational Approach to Your Personalized Marketing Strategy

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Traditionally, marketing strategies have focused on a one-to-many approach. By introducing elements of conversation into marketing, however, you can personalize your business to prospective and current customers. And customers are taking notice of companies that are making efforts to connect with customers in a personalized way.

For example, according to a Business 2 Community report, 82% of consumers say they want an immediate response from companies when they have a question about a product or service. Chatbots and virtual customer service teams have increasingly become a part of customer relationship management. They foster the type of one-on-one conversation that engages with people, making them feel important.

Social media also provides an ideal medium for engaging customers in conversation on platforms where they are likely to be in the first place. For example, one of your customers comments on a post you’ve shared about an upcoming special sale. Someone on your social media team sees the comment and directly responds to the individual. This conversation is a natural way for your company to create a positive relationship with customers by demonstrating that you value them.

Put Interactive Elements in Your Marketing  Activities

Incorporating interactive elements into your communications efforts can help your business connect with customers in a personalized way that makes people feel like you are paying attention to them as individuals. The following examples can offer you some inspiration for interactive content you can use to enhance your marketing personalization efforts:

• Live streaming video: If the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic of 2020 taught marketers anything it’s that live streaming video continues to resonate with consumers. Social media platforms such as Facebook and YouTube provide live streaming video. By using live-stream video, companies can connect with customers in real-time and respond to comments or questions. Live-stream videos offer a highly personalized way to directly connect with and engage customers.
• Polls and quizzes: Besides providing an element of fun, polls and quizzes offer valuable information you can obtain about your customers based on the answers they provide.
• Virtual reality (VR): Facebook 360 created opportunities for companies to create engaging content. This technology enables companies to create lifelike scenes of their stores and products and share immersive experiences, places, and stories directly with their customers.

Discover How to Personalize Your Content Marketing Efforts

How to personalize your content is likely on your mind when you’re thinking about your marketing efforts.  With a content strategy in place, you can make sure that the material you deliver to your customers is information they specifically ask for or need, highly personal and tailored to their interests. Below are some examples of ways you can personalize your content marketing with the communications platforms you’re already using for your business:

• Your business website is the cornerstone for your content marketing efforts. By regularly updating your website, you give members of your customer audience something new to read and learn about when they visit your website. For example, a blog on your website offers an excellent opportunity to discuss topics that are on the minds of your customers. If you find that customers are asking the same types of questions, then create a blog post that presents the answers for them.
• Social media can also be used to personalize your communications to customers. For example, you could plan and execute a Q&A campaign where you invite customers to ask questions and you answer them via Facebook Live once a week. In your responses, you could call out customers by their first names and send a note, a gift card, or another expression of appreciation to customers whose questions you answer.

Throughout your content marketing efforts, keep the focus on the value of the information you provide rather than long-form sales pitches. The information you deliver from you, the expert, is just as valuable as your products and services. Just make sure your content presentation aligns with their wants and needs but addresses them in a personalized way.

Use Direct Mail to Reach Customers With Personalized Messages

One can’t argue with the power of digital platforms for personalized marketing purposes, but direct mail continues to be a viable and highly effective way to connect with your customers. Why? Again, it’s all about personalization. When people see their names on an envelope addressed to them in particular, their curiosity is aroused and they’re more apt to open the envelope.

Handwritten cards or letters forge these connections on a deeper level. Wesley Baines, a graduate student at Regent University’s School of Divinity, says, “The value of the handwritten letter lies within this language of time and care. … A letter, before the content is even read, has already said, ‘I care about you. You’re someone special.’ And that is a message that all enjoy.”

Businesses can take a cue from this sentiment by uniting the feeling of handwritten communications with personalized marketing for their direct mail activities. For example, you own a landscaping company and want to thank all of your customers at the end of your fiscal year for doing business with you. You could create a letter template that you can personalize for each customer to reflect the type of work you and your team performed.

You may think you don’t have time to write cards or letters by hand. Handwrytten makes this task as easy as sending an email. Handwrytten uses technology that creates handwritten notes to scale thanks to the work of state-of-the-art handwriting robots that hold real pens and write out the notes in one of many handwriting styles.

Now that you know more about what is personalization in marketing and how it can benefit your business growth and promotional strategy, you can make more strategic choices about the ways you connect with your customers. Try implementing some of the suggestions presented in this article to make your communications with your customers more personal.