The Beginner's Guide to Personalized Marketing: Introduction
Table of Contents:
The Beginner’s Guide to Personalized Marketing
- Introduction to personalized marketing
- Defining your audience
- Creating personalized content
- Converting visitors into leads
- Personalization best practices
Unfortunately, many companies take a one-size-fits-all approach to their sites and create content that will resonate with as many people as possible. This would work if all of their customers were the same, but that simply isn’t the case.
This results in vague content and calls to action (CTAs) that don’t really resonate with anyone. And even worse, 74% of consumers say that they get frustrated when they go to a site for information, but it has nothing to do with their interests.
With personalized marketing, you can avoid this issue. Instead of giving all of your potential customers the exact same site experience, you can provide relevant and highly-targeted content for each of them.
What can you personalize?
One of the biggest challenges for marketers is figuring out which elements to personalize. This is because you can alter virtually every aspect of an online campaign to suit a specific audience.
Site content
As you develop your website personalization strategy, we recommend that you begin with the content on your site. Considering that marketers see an average increase of 20% in sales when using personalized web content, you have a huge opportunity to improve your marketing ROI right off the bat.
That being said, site content is still a relatively broad category. So as you create your personalization strategy, keep the following personalization elements in mind:
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- Links to article pages
- Offers and products
- Landing pages
- Calls to action
When you use a personalization on a combination of these parts of your site, you can create an experience that is unique to each visitor.
Email marketing
Beyond your site, personalization is also extremely beneficial for email marketing. Many companies have one giant email list and send the same content to each person on it. This is far from ideal.
Email marketing allows you to reach potential customers directly in their inboxes, meaning you can write and deliver information even more precisely than you can on your website.
When you deliver the right message at the right time, you increase the chances that a recipient will return to your site and take action. And even if they don’t – at least not right away – you’re still able to keep the conversation going.
How does personalization work?
The way that you personalize your site for different visitors depends on the marketing automation software that you use. At WebFX, we use MarketingCloudFX to create and manage personalized content for our clients.
This software allows companies to deliver web content based on a variety of factors like a visitor’s location, referral source, and past actions on the site.
For example, a visitor who is in a different state from your company, found you through organic search, and has never been to your site before will most likely want to see basic information about who you are and what you have to offer.
A visitor who is only a few miles from your company, navigated directly your site, and visited several times before, however, is probably already familiar with your services. They’re ready to see more in-depth pricing and purchasing information.
Go Back Start Reading: Defining your audience →