What is Digital Personalization?

You’ve been there, sifting through your inbox, deleting irrelevant emails, asking yourself why you get so much junk. Or landing on a company’s homepage only to be overwhelmed with options and left wondering why you came. Consumers decide quickly, often in a matter of seconds, whether or not they like a marketing message. Marketers must take a personal approach to reach their potential customers for a better chance at capturing their attention and approval.

Enter digital personalization. Imagine getting a customized offer for a product you’d been researching for weeks? Or visiting a landing page that showcased testimonials from customers in the same industry as you? Creating a customized user experience is not only an opportunity to earn higher conversion rates, but it also builds trust with your users. According to AddThis Academy, using personalized audience targeting results in 40% higher conversion rates.

Examples of Personalized Content

  • Website personalization

    Use custom homepages, location, and device-based content, or suggested content. Personalize your website by your users’ locations, interests, industries, or even the stage of their buyer’s journey. The more personalized the user experience, the more likely the user is to stick around.

  • Custom landing pages

    Using the same landing page for every ad is a surefire way to encourage buyer-boredom-induced bounces. Customize landing pages for different audiences and traffic sources to keep your prospects engaged. Bonus: Google likes that, too.

  • Automated customer journeys

    Send specific emails based on important milestones (e.g. customer anniversaries) or customer behavior (content downloads or previous email opens) to ensure you provide the right (and relevant) content at the right time.

  • Dynamic email content

    Use website tokens or dynamic content blocks to personalize content in real-time. Addressing someone personally in an email rather than “To whom it may concern,” shows the subscriber that she is more than an entry on a marketing list and builds trust.

  • New vs. returning web visitors

    Treat first-time visitors differently than you would a returning visitor. Provide newbies with educational content and customized offers for returning visitors. You know, woo them

Where to start?

The first step in creating a digital personalization strategy should be developing buyer personas. After all, what good is personalization if you don’t know anything about your customers? Start by researching and capturing data about your ideal buyers to develop 3-5 personas based on what you’ve learned.

Personas will help you act on behavioral data and know where your leads fit into the buying cycle. This way, your content can be tailored based not only on which phase they are in, but also on their unique interests and buying habits. To draw broader insights into groups of people, segmentation is also used in conjunction with buyer personas to develop targeted and refined messaging.

Get Results

It’s easy for businesses to get caught up in showing off how great their offerings are. After all, the sale of those offerings leads to revenue. However, shifting focus to learn more about your customers and treating them like humans, instead of just potential revenue streams, can (and often does) result in bigger payoffs. Effective digital personalization is the result of a well-crafted strategy, a defined process, and the right technology to implement it. As marketing tech evolves, we should all do our due diligence to provide this type of relevant, relatable content and messaging across all of our campaigns.