When it comes to interacting with customers, personalization is the way to go. A study published in the Journal of Interactive Advertising found that you could trigger positive thoughts in your customer by simply mentioning their name in a marketing message. It gives them the impression that you care about their patronage of your products and services.
Another study by experience intelligence platform InMoment found that customers love it when personalized ads make them feel they’re getting the VIP treatment, such as exclusive deals or content.
This article provides some of the best practices for personalizing your customer communications. If you want to attract your customers with customized marketing messages, you need to have a good idea of their preferences and needs without being intrusive.
Gather Data Properly — and Update Them Regularly
Personalized customer communications rely on data. You can never have too much information on your audience.
Use online feedback forms to find out what customers like or dislike about your product or service. You can also use these forms to gather data about your audience’s common age, location, gender, and other demographic data.
Use your company’s social media analytics to learn more about your customers’ demographics and interests.
Make sure to update the data you have. You never know when you will get a new group of buyers with a different set of data. Keeping yourself updated on your feedback data also helps you determine if something went wrong with your products and services.
Interpret Data by Creating Personas
Now that you’ve gathered all the customer data you need, it’s time to use that data for your communication efforts. You can make sense of the information you’ve gathered by creating audience personas.
According to Econsultancy, customer personas are a summary of a group of people’s needs, interests, motivation, environment, and behavior. It gives you an idea of what kind of communication strategies your customers will positively respond to.
For example, if your customers are primarily young adults, they may respond better to advertisements on social media platforms. If they frequent video streaming platforms like YouTube, it may be beneficial to place display ads on the videos they watch to get their attention as often as possible.
You can choose a variety of buyer persona templates online. HubSpot provides a buyer persona generator. Using your data as personas, you can form more educated assumptions of your customers’ jobs, pain points, goals, motivations, challenges in life, and more.
Then, you can position your products and services as the solutions to their problems or tools to achieve their goals.
Get Personal with Email and Social Media
If you’re still dipping your toes into personalization, social media and email are a good way to start. Almost half of the world’s population is active on social media. Plus, there are about 3.5 billion email users worldwide.
CRM and e-commerce platforms offer personalized email tools. Their capabilities go beyond your customers’ names in their newsletters. You can provide exclusive deals or bundles based on the items they recently bought or viewed. If you noticed that they spend a lot of time reading your blogs or watching your videos, you could recommend content they haven’t watched yet.
As for social media, use the demographic and psychographic data you gained to target certain groups of customers with your ads and promoted posts. Since Facebook and other sites offer a pay-per-click model for ads and boosted posts, you get to save money by showing your posts and ads to people already interested in buying your products and services.
Personalization Isn’t Stalking
One last note on personalization: While personalized marketing is an excellent way to form strong bonds with your customers, you don’t want to overdo it. Being too personal with your ads and customer service can become creepy at times.
Some of the second study’s respondents claimed personalized ads also made them feel they were being stalked. This is especially true for advertisements that follow your customers across platforms.
Conclusion
Personalizing your communication plan requires a delicate balance. You want to know your customers without being creepy or intrusive. The best practices involve using accurate and timely data to learn your audience’s behaviors, attitudes, and even most-used communication platforms. With the right information and platforms, you’ll be able to treat every customer like a VIP.
Personalize Your Customer Service Efforts, Too!
Personalization is beneficial not only for your marketing message but also for your customer service department. Always Answer helps you learn your customers’ challenges with your products and services. This way, you can solve their issues before they even start calling.
We’ll also work with you to create custom scripts to serve your callers best and make each interaction a satisfying personal experience.
