Although globalization has become the tendency in business, providing a personal approach to every single individual matters more than ever before. Especially, when this person is your customer.

Personalized marketing makes people feel important in the mass of voices your customer hears every day. For instance, 71% of customers claim they feel frustrated when sellers provide impersonal shopping experience. 59% state that personalization influences their decision to buy a certain product.

In other words, modern customers appreciate  highly tailored offers — the offers that save their precious time by providing the most relevant selection of products or services. Moreover, they expect to receive personalized messages every time they interact with your company, both offline and online.

The good news is that personalized marketing is possible for all channels. You can start with website personalization to provide visitors with the content based on their interests. Then, use personalized direct mail to remind potential customers about your company at just the right moment or conduct mobile app personalization for improved user experience.

Thanks to advanced automation tools and capabilities, personalized marketing is easier than ever before. Still, there are many things to consider.

Read this article to discover what personalized marketing is and how to implement it in mobile apps, websites, and direct mail.

Personalized Marketing

Personalized marketing is also often called one-to-one marketing, which accurately reflects its core idea. Businesses try to offer unique experiences to every customer leveraging digital technology, smart automation, and data analysis.

As a result, customers receive personalized messages and offerings based on their previous actions, behavioral patterns, and selected settings. Usually, a personalized marketing campaign also means that customer data is collected and processed in real time. This gives marketers maximum flexibility and allows them to quickly adapt to the slightest changes.

Benefits of Personalized Marketing

Personalized marketing has a range of obvious advantages compared to mass-market promotion strategies. If you manage to implement personalization techniques for your web, mobile, mail, and other channels, you can:

Increase ROI

Data-driven personalization increases the return on investment by 15-20% and grows sales by at least 10%. Moreover, thanks to continuous information collection and analytics, you receive accurate numbers that allow to evaluate whether the marketing budget is used efficiently. This makes your marketing choices better targeted and more flexible.

Connect with your customers

Personalized marketing is an effective way to get in touch with your customers and increase customer satisfaction. Once you have reliable data on customer preferences, it’s much easier to make them convert.

There is another significant benefit in one-to-one communication with your target audience. The trust these interactions create makes people more loyal to your company and invested in your success. As a result, these customers are more likely to leave reviews or participate in surveys, which can be used to improve products and services.

Build brand loyalty

When customers agree to share their personal information they expect to receive special treatment. Personalize your marketing efforts to offer your customers some privileges, and they will definitely appreciate this.

Your brand will be associated with excellent service and attention to detail. Also, loyal customers are a powerful source of word-of-mouth advertising, which is absolutely free and highly effective.

Align marketing channels

As we have already mentioned, personalized marketing depends heavily on customer data analysis and marketing automation. This brings some related advantages, including the opportunity to implement omni-channel marketing.

How come?

To achieve seamless personalization, your marketing efforts are tied to a single customer database, which is updated in real-time. This gives you the power to synchronize several marketing channels and connect customer actions with marketing activities.

Personalized Marketing Example

When it comes to personalized content, the only limits are your imagination and budget. You can choose from several website personalization opportunities including, personalized emails, mail, social media ads, and more.

Ideally, you should combine several personalized marketing strategies to achieve maximum results. Here is one of the possible options:

• Personalized catalogs based on previous orders. Imagine you run an online store of luxury clothes and have special seasonal offers. You can use the data from your customers’ previous orders or favorites to design a personalized catalog with similar outfits.

• This catalog may include new arrivals or nice combinations that match the taste of a specific target audience. By the way, catalogs have a 57% chance to provoke a positive customer reaction, which is quite high.

If you cannot afford to invest in personalized catalogs, you can introduce personalized mail marketing with variable data printing. Many direct mail automation tools, including Inkit, insert the necessary customer information from a database to deliver personalized mail. These direct mail pieces deliver personalized messages and have higher response rates.

Mobile App Personalization

We know that most mobile apps display customized tips, push-notifications, directions, and other messages based on user requests and settings.

Personalized messages are necessary to provide the core functionality, such as available routes to the closest grocery. Nevertheless, mobile personalization is also highly effective in marketing campaigns.

Mobile app personalization can inspire users to make in-app purchases or switch to paid subscriptions. Also, many businesses develop mobile apps to complement their offline marketing and stay in touch with customers.

For example, you may receive push-notifications about a happy-hour in your favorite coffee shop or messages about loyalty bonuses. Customers perceive these messages as unique experiences. Business owners know it’s effective marketing.

How to personalize mobile apps

Before you start using personalization for mobile applications, make sure to research your target audience and their tastes. To bring this to a professional level, you may want to hire a UX (user experience) specialist who knows which demographic factors to analyze and how to apply them.

When you have a clear picture of your customers, you can use the following mobile app personalization approaches:

• Demographic targeting. Applications display content based on demographic data collected from users or provided by them. Demographic data can include the user’s gender, age group, occupation, preferences, and other relevant details.
  
  Facebook ads are one of the most common examples of demographic targeting. Most ads displayed on Facebook are configured for specific audiences. In other words, a 35 year-old woman may see different content than a man in his 60’s. You can use the same approach for mobile app personalization.
  
• Contextual targeting. Contextual personalization is based on device type, time, and location. Since context changes more often than demographic factors, it opens additional opportunities for personalized marketing. You can show a discount pop-up when a customer approaches your store or offer Android cases for Android app users.
  
• Behavioral targeting. Nothing can tell you more about your customers than the way they travel through and complete their customer journey. Behavioral mobile app personalization relies on specific actions, like clicks, views, scrolls, purchases, shares, and more.
  
  Such information is crucial if you want to adapt your offerings to ever-changing customer preferences and trends. For example, a news app may offer more exhibition reviews after users visit a section dedicated to art.

To maximize the benefits of mobile optimization, you should combine the elements of demographic, contextual, and behavioral targeting. These approaches perfectly complement each other helping to display relevant and interesting content in real time. Customers see that the personal information they provide is used for their advantage and enjoy what you offer.

Website Personalization

Website personalization is about providing unique experiences to every person that visits a web resource. Instead of monotonous navigation, the website offers a tailored path based on the previously recorded customer traits.

Like any other kind of personalized marketing, this one is used to increase ROI, sales, and customer loyalty. Besides, website personalization may become your secret weapon to gain a competitive edge over your online rivals. It will distinguish your user experience from other websites and make people return to the resource again and again.

How does website personalization work?

Advanced web personalization is based on machine learning. Web engines track website events, such as page views, overlays, link clicks, or ad interactions. They record and analyze this data to learn customer behavior and offer unique experiences based on the results.

Website personalization comprises targeted product recommendations, calls to action, offers, promotions, and other tailored content. Simply put, website personalization means that the way a user completes step A influences the next step. Step B defines step C, and so on.

Users are offered the path on which they are most likely to convert. As a result, website owners can generate more conversions with less effort and achieve significantly higher click through rates.

Why website personalization matters

Website personalization helps to engage users and guide them through the customer journey without unnecessary bumps. Modern customers are very picky, and even a minor obstacle may make them leave your website never to return.

Personalized user experience based on their previous actions and browsing history facilitates navigation. Visitors feel like your website anticipates all their needs and tastes.

Thanks to machine learning and personalized marketing, website personalization turns browsing into pure magic. Hence, improved user experience and personalized content generate higher sales, ROI, and conversion.

Personalized Direct Mail

Have you heard that direct mail in omni-channel marketing is a new marketing trend?

Personalized direct mail is as powerful as personalized emails, social network ads, tailored website content, and other marketing channels. Moreover, when you decide to target your existing or potential customers with direct mail you double the positive effect of personalized marketing.

First of all, you get all the listed benefits of personalized marketing. Tailored mail content and customized delivery increase ROI, strengthen customer loyalty, and contribute to your brand’s reputation. Second, you build offline connections, which you wouldn’t achieve with mobile app personalization or website personalization. In this way, personalized direct mail expands your marketing efforts connecting offline and online personalization.

Two Key Ways to Personalize Direct Mail

There are numerous types of direct mail. You can print and deliver anything – from catalogs to hand-written thank you letters. Depending on the mailpiece design, your skills, and resources, there are two ways to personalize direct mail.

• Manually personalized direct mail. If you want to do everything on your own, you can manually design, print, and mail postcards. Make sure such mailings are error-free and take into account the preferences of recipients. Manually designed personalized direct mail requires a lot of time and effort, so you should seriously consider the time and monetary costs before choosing this option.
  
• Direct mail automation tools. For those who want to achieve an advanced level of direct mail personalization, automation is the right option. Direct mail automation tools like Inkit support easy-to-use postcard builders, in which everyone can create customized designs.

For instance, you can design a unique postcard for a particular recipient and deliver it automatically within 3-6 business days. Since Inkit has no batch limitations, you can send as many mail pieces as you need.

This high level of functionality also allows you to  conduct A/B testing to find out which design or call to action is more effective. This way, you will be able to estimate expenses and ROI before printing and sending large direct mail campaigns.

Besides, direct mail automation is necessary to incorporate personalized mail pieces in omni-channel marketing campaigns. In particular, you can integrate Inkit with a CRM platform or another marketing automation tool to align several marketing channels.

Integrating your CRM allows you to run triggered direct mail campaigns based on specific user actions or events. Direct mail automation will make your personalized marketing more effective as all the channels will work like a well-oiled machine.

As you can see, using marketing personalization at every touchpoint is impossible without data analysis and automation. Ideally, such personalization must be based on a quality omni-channel strategy consisting of several aligned marketing campaigns.

In this article, we have described mobile app personalization, website personalization, and personalized direct mail as key pillars of effective marketing. Still, you can incorporate other marketing channels based on your business specifics and needs. Just make sure to plan how to personalize the content and integrate several channels beforehand.