According to 2021 research from McKinsey, 71% of consumers expect companies to deliver personalized interactions based on their behaviors, needs, and preferences, and 76% get frustrated when this doesn’t happen. And it’s now easier than ever for customers to switch to a competitor if their expectations aren’t met, making it crucial to personalize. Personalized marketing involves using data generated from a customer’s previous interactions with the company, browsing and purchasing history, and other activities to tailor marketing initiatives to individual customers or customer segments. Let’s take a deeper look at what organizations are achieving with personalized marketing and the data infrastructure needed to support customized marketing campaigns.
Benefits of Personalization in Marketing
Using personalized marketing, teams can improve their performance and help their organization grow the bottom line. Here are a few ways marketers are benefiting from tailored marketing campaigns.
Elevates the customer experience
Today’s buyers know that modern technology enables personalization, and they expect it to be used to deliver highly relevant offers, messaging, and to streamline their buying experience. Customers want a convenient experience that aligns precisely with their needs and desires.
Strengthens loyalty
Customers who have a good experience with a company will be loyal. When customers know they can count on a company to understand their needs and make their lives easier, they’re less likely to look elsewhere.
Improves conversion rates
Predictive analytics helps marketers better understand the behavior of individuals and more accurately predict which messages are most likely to resonate with which customers, which platforms are best for effectively reaching customers, and when to launch campaigns or send offers. Personalizing marketing based on these insights improves conversion rates.
Increases ROI
When marketing campaigns are highly targeted and personalized appropriately, teams can optimize their ad spend and reduce waste. Personalized marketing can help decrease the cost of gaining new customers and increase the lifetime value of current customers.
Examples of Personalized Marketing
Here are just a few examples of how today’s marketers are using data to create a deeper level of personalization to drive long-term customer engagement and loyalty.
Email marketing
With personalized marketing, teams can upsell and cross-sell more effectively by predicting not only what products customers might be interested in buying, but also how they will use them. This ability enables marketers to connect with buyers on an emotional level as well as on a rational level. Data enables marketers to personalize every aspect of an email, from banners to promotional tiles, and to optimize subscription preferences and trigger-based communication. It also allows teams to effectively track and measure performance.
Website experience
Personalized marketing enables companies to create a completely personalized shopping experience, recalling a customer’s previous purchases (and when they might need to replenish), and recommending products that will likely fit their interests based on previous purchases, search history, and other factors. The closer marketers can get to real-time personalization, the better the experience for website visitors and prospective customers. Real-time personalization results in lower bounce rates, landing pages with higher conversion rates, better calls-to-action, and much more.
Leveraging social and digital channels
The buying journey begins long before a customer visits a company’s website; marketers must target buyers on social and digital channels to connect with them early in the buying process. When their digital marketing strategy is informed by data, marketing teams can personalize social and digital campaigns for more effective results.
In-store events
The ability to personalize isn’t limited just to the online shopping experience. In-store marketing can also be personalized. When marketers host in-store events, they can gather valuable data about their customers, their hobbies and interests, and what services or products they might be looking for. This information can further inform all kinds of marketing efforts.
Next best action
Today’s marketers are using data and advanced analytics to determine the “next best action” to take with a prospect or customer. For example, the best deal to offer, the best product to suggest, or the best way to handle a support escalation. With insights gleaned from data, teams can personalize the customer journey across touchpoints.
Building the Data Infrastructure to Support Personalized Marketing Campaigns
Creating, launching, and monitoring personalized marketing campaigns requires a modern data infrastructure, free from the resource constraints of legacy systems. Today’s marketers need a fast, flexible, and scalable approach to data storage and processing. Here are four essentials for teams who want to experience the benefits of personalized marketing.
Creating a single source of truth for all marketing-related data
Marketing-relevant data is often spread across various departments, sequestered in disparate systems. Each data set tells an important part of the story, but when a holistic view remains out of reach, key insights are missed. A cloud data platform provides a convenient place to bring all relevant data together in one place.
Investing in advanced analytics and AI-powered marketing tools
Delivering relevant, timely, and consistent personalized marketing experiences requires modern marketing tools that leverage advanced segmentation models, recommendation engines, and other AI and ML technologies. Additionally, with third-party cookies going away, teams will need to rely on first-party data and other, non-cookie, privacy-compliant identifiers. Identity resolution technology will soon be indispensable. Teams must make sure they have the capabilities they need for these powerful tools.
Enriching in-house marketing data
In-house data such as purchasing history and customer lifetime value only tell part of the story. Supplementing in-house data with information gathered from social media, third-party data marketplaces, and data partners will provide valuable context.
Customize Your Marketing with Snowflake
Snowflake makes personalized marketing simple. The Snowflake Data Cloud virtually eliminates data silos to create a repository for a single copy of your customer data and third-party data so you can more easily extract insights and deliver timely, relevant, and consistent customer messaging and offers. With Snowflake’s scalability and near-unlimited compute power, you can run advanced analytics and AI at speed. And thanks to Snowflake’s robust governance and security features, marketers can share live customer data with partners while complying with consumer privacy regulations, such as CCPA and GDPR.