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Why Value-Based Marketing Personalization is the Future

Online shoppers expect seamless, personalized experiences from the businesses they interact with. And if a business doesn’t meet this expectation, 76% of customers get frustrated, most switching to a different brand.

Value-based marketing personalization is the strategy that helps businesses meet customers’ expectations. It aims to tailor messaging, campaigns and omnichannel interactions to each customer’s needs. 

So, if you don’t want to lose customers to mediocre marketing strategies and content, keep reading and learn about how value-based marketing personalization is promising a brighter future.

The Current State of Marketing Personalization

Marketers and sales teams are well aware of the importance of marketing personalization. 89% of digital businesses have already started using value-based marketing personalization, and 51% of marketers consider improving marketing personalization to be their top priority. 

However, the marketing personalization we’re talking about today isn’t about the simple, traditional methods. You can’t solely rely on the old methods consisting of customer demographics and on-site behavior. That’s because consumers don’t want suggestions that just agree with them. They want to see offers that make them feel as if businesses really know them as people and understand their unique needs.

Many companies (85%) believe that they’re offering this kind of hyper-personalized interaction, but only 60% of customers agree that that’s the case. This is because customers’ understanding of personalization is more nuanced than businesses’.
Prospects want businesses to know what they’re looking for by interpreting their context.

Here’s an example to illustrate this expectation: you logged into a shop’s site, looking to find a gift for your friend’s newborn. You scrol on various baby shops but fail to find something you like. 

Naturally, at this point in your research, you would respond to ads that show baby clothes. So, your personalized marketing campaigns should interpret the context based on your previous touchpoints and offer suggestions accordingly. If they only look at your demographic information, they will fail to understand this unique need of yours (and by looking at your age, show you adult clothes that fit the season.)

Simplistic SaaS marketing personalization methods miss out on such selling opportunities as they offer surface-level insights. Advanced AI technology and analytics tools, on the other hand, show you previous customer touchpoints and behaviour that would create better ads.

Value-based personalization is the standard of marketing today as it helps businesses find and use selling opportunities. By doing so, this strategy increases revenue by up to 15 percent

If you’re looking for a place to start, there’s a big source of information that’ll help you.

The Role of Data in Delivering Value

Your business has access to a big pool of customer data. Creating hyper-personalized interactions and marketing campaigns, ones that fulfill customers’ expectations, is possible due to the different sources of customer data. By integrating and analyzing customer data, you can:

  • Interpret the context of customers’ searches and make appropriate suggestions,
  • Run marketing campaigns at the right time to the right customer segment,
  • Better understand your ideal customer profile’s behaviour, wants and needs,

And more. 

In order to do all this, you’ll have to make sense of the fragmented data that comes from multiple channels. Consumers interact with your brand on various platforms and devices. Each of their touchpoints impacts their perception of your brand, likeliness to convert and repurchase.

By connecting customer data, you ensure that you’re up-to-date on all marketing channels. This enables businesses to find and leverage selling opportunities. For instance, by integrating customer data, a retailer can see that a customer has added a new sneaker to his cart, and send an email about the discounts on different kinds of shoes, increasing the likeliness of a sale.

Data-driven personalization isn’t only good for sales though. 78% of consumers say that personalized content makes them more likely to repurchase from a brand. This is expected since customers come back to businesses that make them feel valued.

So, collecting, integrating and analyzing consumer data is imperative in delivering personalized content and creating tailored interactions. It improves businesses’ sales performance and retention.

Challenges of Value-based Personalization

Value-based personalization is doable for all businesses, no matter the industry. That said, there are still challenges that you may face. Below are two of the most common challenges and their solutions.

Consolidating Fragmented Customer Data

Companies that don’t use CDPs often fail to centralize their data, which results in the formation of data silos. Silos keep your teams from consolidating and drawing connections between different types of data. As a result, marketers have a difficult time creating personalized interactions, since they can’t see the bigger picture.

This problem can be easily solved with the help of CDP and analytics software. By using a solution that integrates with all your different platforms, you can give your marketing and sales teams easy access to all customer data. This helps them leverage selling opportunities, contact leads at the right times, and increase chances of conversion. 

Similarly, by using software like HockeyStack, your teams can create dashboards that show them all the connections between different types of data. 

Using these types of solutions paves the way for data-backed, accurately targeted marketing content and campaigns that customers love. 

Making Sense of Customer Data

Even when you have access to different types of data, you may struggle to make sense of the highs and lows in the numbers and to relate them to customers’ wants and needs. That’s why one of the main challenges with marketing personalization is understanding buyer intent. 

When you can’t make sense of the data in front of you, you’ll fail to use it to your advantage. 

For instance, if you can’t see how different blog posts affect revenue, you won’t understand the subjects and areas that your ideal customer profile is interested in. When this is the case, it’s much harder for your team to create marketing content that users are looking for. 

Similarly, when you don’t understand how different customer touchpoints affect conversion, you can’t send them emails or push notifications at the right point of their journey.

There’s an easy fix to this problem too. Visualizing customer data lets you see the connections that are hard to derive from quantitative values. Analyzing customer journeys and touchpoints from customer journey profiles ensure that you catch every selling opportunity, and using visual funnels helps you retain customers by seeing where they’re likely to drop off. 

Just like data integrations, visualizations can be done with the help of analytics software like HockeyStack. Such tools come with charts, graphs, funnels and journey profiles and show you the story behind numbers.

Once you’ve collected, integrated and understood your data, it’s time to put your knowledge into practice.

Best Practices of Marketing Personalization

In order to make the most of marketing personalization, you have to keep the following key points in mind:

1. Use Data Analytics to Find Opportunities

Prospects expect different interactions at each stage of their customer journey. It would be inefficient to send out the same type of personalized content to a customer at the consideration stage and one at the repurchasing stage. 

So, you need to account for these various stages of the customer life cycle for your marketing efforts to be effective.

The stage that a customer is in can be deduced from their behaviors and previous touchpoints. Once you know that they’re at the consideration stage or at the retention stage, you can create personalized interactions that lead them to a final decision or a repeat purchase. 

Similarly, you should use engagement trends and KPIs to find the customer segments that will respond well to your personalized marketing efforts. 

2. Invest in Advanced Analytics Software

When you start doing value-based marketing personalization, you have to use tools that help you create, schedule and deliver content. Content Management Systems (CMS) are your best friend when it comes to this need.

AI-driven software can also help your business respond to customer needs in real-time so that you reach customers right when there’s an opportunity. Additionally, such software can be used for predictive analytics and models to understand which segment would respond to what kind of content. 

Lastly, you should use analytics software to measure the performance of your marketing strategies. Analytics tools like HockeyStack measure key SaaS marketing metrics in real-time, so you don’t have to manually track your performance.

3. Build Your Team Around a Data-Driven Approach

While structuring your marketing team, you should keep in mind that personalization is needed in all areas of marketing (product, content, customer, performance, etc.) When you start hiring, training and upskilling, your business needs to focus on people with the skills that are needed to power personalization on a large scale.

Key Takeaways

Value-based marketing personalization can help you reduce acquisition costs by up to 50 percent while increasing your marketing strategies’ effectiveness by 10 to 30 percent. After reading this article, you should have the points below in mind, so that you can reap these benefits of marketing personalization.

  • In today’s market, personalization isn’t optional: it’s one of the main expectations of customers when they interact with a business online.
  • Value-based marketing personalization relies on customer data. You have to interpret customers’ circumstances and needs based on context clues so that you can fulfill their expectations.
  • Using data analytic solutions and AI-powered software can help your business personalize at scale.
  • Marketing personalization should be combined with behavioral segmentation and customer journey analytics so that all sale, retention and upselling opportunities are used. 

With the rise of eCommerce comes an increase in competition, so companies risk losing customers more than ever. You can’t afford to miss out on value-based marketing personalization and its benefits when customers see it as a basic necessity.

FAQ

What is meant by personalization in marketing?

Personalization is the practice of using customer data to craft targeted marketing content for individual customers.

How do you use marketing personalization?

Marketing personalization can be used to increase customer engagement, acquisition and retention by delivering tailored digital interactions.

What are the different types of personalization?

One-to-one personalization, email personalization, personalized web pages and product suggestions are all different types of personalization.

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