Made readily available thanks to technological advancements, marketing personalization is an increasingly trending concept in digital media. Until now, mass marketing was the norm where everyone has been seeing the same message but things are about to get shaken.
Seen as the future of business by leading marketing professionals, personalized marketing consists of tailoring one-to-one messaging, where each visitor to your marketing touchpoints gets their own individualized message. Most often it will give your business enhanced customer satisfaction, digital sales conversion, marketing results, positive branding, as well as improved website and advertising metrics. Albeit a somewhat time consuming implementation in some cases, you should probably keep taking on the deployment of a personalization project until time is more available within the organization. Hence better keep this enterprise for after the Holiday Shopping Season rush. Nonetheless, you might want to know about the considerations required to prepare your personalization infrastructure ahead of time in order to plan your journey ahead.
What comes ahead will help you know what to consider in your personalization infrastructure, and most importantly, how to create a strong program for identifying and prioritizing personalization opportunities that are specific for your business.
Indeed, today’s mass digital personalization technologies will promise to take your business a step further, not only by calling someone by their name in an email, but by offering them specific products and services targeted to their past purchasing history or online behaviour, often in attempts to cross-sell or upsell. Amazon uses this method frequently, and they actually make about 35 per cent of their total revenue from product recommendations.[1] Possibilities seem infinite, and you will have to determine first whether personalization is the right tactic for your company right at the moment.
Primarily, you should look at three basic questions that will help you figure out your personalization maturity and fit:
- Do I have an experienced integration and optimization team that can run and experiment with a personalization program?
You need to gage the abilities of your team in order to determine how to manage your strategy, maintain your segments and messaging, and manage your personalization tool. Personalization programs may require some specialized skills and might not always be a one man job. But it is very doable with the right personalization tools.
- Do I have specific milestones I want to hit in order to reach my customers at the right time?
By now it should come to you as obvious that you should develop a personalization strategy centered on your audience and customers. Take note that the companies that are succeeding at personalization are using personalization as a tactic to solve customers’ conversion barriers. For a successful deployment, you will need to reach your customers at the right place and right time. To get started with personalization, you should have at least your fundamental segments figured out; knowing which channels or platforms you will want to use to reach them. Depending on which of these you chose, you might not be able to go live at the same time as you expect, so you will also need to be ready to consider alternatives to either. Your level of readiness might also impact at which stages in your buyer’s journey you’ll be able to offer a fully personalized package.
- Do I have a process for validating my personalization ideas?
The success of personalization is a hypothesis until it’s tested. Despite being confident about your communications, your assumptions about your audience segments or your clientele are indeed assumptions until they’ve been validated. A great personalization strategy is about having a rigorous process that allows for, one, gathering insights about your customers, and then, two, validating those insights. You need a structured process to understand the feedback you are getting from your target audience and clients, which will assure quick reactiveness and adaptiveness, which in turn will assure growth for your business.
Fortunately, once you have these elements figured out, you’ll find a process leading to even greater customer insights from your personalization experiments, which then improves your team’s expertise, knowledge, and effectiveness.
Nonetheless, a lot of companies miss out on personalization opportunities because they somehow fail to grasp the potential, and because they never move past their assumptions about their shoppers. Personalization has the potential to add value to your customer at every step of their journey. Different tools will offer different user experiences. In any case, you will need to synthesize the existing knowledge insights, research insights, and gather new data or run different personalization focused experiments to generate new personalization insights. Always remember that if personalization doesn’t add value to your shopper or remove their purchase barriers, it’s will simply be wasted cost.
You will find that opportunities for personalization exist from the start of your offering, and even passed their purchasing decision. Opportunities for even more personalization are obviously found in your upselling and cross-selling. And again, opportunities exist at seamlessly personalizing and the in-cart experience. These are some major examples that are not just prised by millennials, who are definitely the biggest personalizers, but also from a growing all-age crowd that will more likely complete the journey if it’s at their image. You must by now understand that each of these opportunities is also an opportunity for your business to increase earnings, so you will want to do it right.
To take the marketing personalization even further, you might want to consider offering product personalization. Where the first tailors one-to-one messaging, where each visitor to your marketing touchpoints gets their own individualized message, the second allows for product altering according to the customer’s need or desire using online product personalization software. With a focus on helping organizations differentiate themselves from the competition, Mediaclip offers infinite possibilities for online product personalization, being the most flexible platform on the market.
For every personalization opportunity, Mediaclip sports means to answer to your customer’s requests. Mediaclip offers you the possibility to sell any type of single or multi-surfaced printable offerings with conception tools that allow for the creation of unique content for your product selection. Its free-form design tools allow your customers to easily customize products exactly to their liking. The personalization platform comes with a comprehensive offering library including products, designs and product images, as well as the possibility for end-points for manufacturer integrations. It also incorporates powerful marketing personalization capabilities we’ve covered previously, such as to enhance your upselling and cross-selling, and comes with photorealisitc previews that allow consumers to view their product in-context prior to purchase. In all, it is a white-label front-end product creation tool that allows user interface customization to promote your brand.
Undoubtedly, it is necessary to maximise capabilities on both the business and technology sides to put the personalization model into practice. Mediaclip would gladly help you take your marketing personalization to this next step of offering product personalization. It is dedicated to democratize this concept and can easily integrate into any eCommerce platform, but more importantly removes the need for any technical skills with its Shopify App, or for an open source form with its Magento Extension. If you are interested to learn more about how to offer product personalization to optimize your earnings, you can reach Mediaclip here.
[1] https://www.miamiherald.com/news/business/biz-monday/article112676198.html
