9 Effective Ways your Business can Practice Personalization

Today’s advancements have enabled brands and businesses to provide extensive personalization, ensuring a better customer experience and increasing revenue generation. 72% of customers say that they engage with personalized messages alone, 71% feel frustrated with impersonal experiences, and 63% stop purchasing from brands with poor personalization strategies.

Personalization is the key to a positive customer reaction. However, many businesses do not use personalization, and most marketers struggle to scale their personalization efforts. This blog discusses nine effective personalization strategies- three each for your marketing, support, and sales teams to practice.

Personalization practices for your marketing team

Your marketing team plays a pivotal role in your business’ success. It needs to personalize its interactions with customers through messaging, content, and software. This way, customers would realize that their preferences and interests are taken into consideration. Here are three useful personalization strategies for your marketing team to employ.

1. Use data to enhance experiences

Your marketing team’s actions should be based on data. However, the tough thing is determining which data to use for personalization as your visitor and customer data keeps increasing. Such inability to implement decisions due to information overload is referred to as infobesity. Your marketing team will suffer from this condition if the data is too much to keep track of.

To tackle this, you need to gather only the actionable data.

These includes…

• Demographic data includes all the data about a person, including his or her name, location, email, etc.
• Firmographic data includes all the data about a business, including firm name, industry, annual revenue, stage in the sales cycle, and the number of employees.
• Behavioral data – This includes all the data about a visitor’s actions in your website or app, including the number of visits, average time on site, pages visited, and links clicked.
• Contextual data – This includes all the data about a visitor’s unique properties related to their behavior on your website or app. Info like browser type, device type, time of the day, location, etc., will fall under this category.

For gathering firmographic and demographic data, you would have to get your visitors to fill up and submit a form. This can take different shapes like a lead magnet download, a live chat transaction, a demo registration, or a newsletter subscription. Once they submit their information, you can automatically derive lead source insights, date and time, and lead activity.

With these insights, your marketing team can react appropriately whenever a lead performs a particular action.

2. Send personalized emails

Email marketing is one of the ever- in-  trends digital marketing techniques. If done rightly, you can get a conversion of up to 66%  and enjoy a high ROI. However, getting your users to open your emails and convert is better said than done. People perceive irrelevant emails as pushy and hence send those to the trash.

Only highly personalized emails work. You have to personalize your messages to suit your users’ unique interests and needs. You can do this in the following ways.

• Addressing users by their first names
• Communicating in a user-friendly tone in a language that’s relatable to them
• Segmenting your users before targeting. This way, you can send them only those content that suits their preferences.

3. Create thoughtful Opt-in forms & Thank You pages

You should make opt-in forms a part of your digital marketing. These are efficient in collecting email addresses and nurturing leads. However, your users won’t simply hand over their email id for free. You need to offer them a freebie in exchange. This can be like an in-depth e-book, a high-value webinar, an online course, or an eye-opening checklist.

Apart from offering freebies, you must also tailor your messages to suit particular user segments’ interests and actions. You can use contextual and behavioral data to shape your opt-in strategies to address customers individually. This will help attract high-quality leads.

In addition to working on your opt-in forms, do work on your Thank You page as well. You should tailor it to build a meaningful relationship with your customers and prospects. You can do this by-

• Including social proof to improve trust and credibility.
• Adding a link to relevant, high performing content.
• Providing a special offer, promotion, or discount.
• Encouraging subscription or social sharing.
• Asking them to take up a survey

Personalization practices for your sales team

Your sales team plays an important role in meeting your firm’s growth goals in terms of the sale of products and services, subscriptions, etc. They can personalize their efforts in targeting your audiences in the following manner.

1. Treat consumers like people rather than as sales targets.

Personalization of sale efforts is way more important than that of marketing efforts. For you need to win the trust of your prospects to bring in sales. 84% of consumers say that they can be won over by treating them like a person rather than as a sale target or a number. You can achieve this by equipping your sales team with as much information as possible about your website’s visitors.

This will facilitate your sales personnel to suggest products and resources based on your visitors’ behaviors, actions, and interests. They just need to observe what content people browse on your site, how they interact with your site, and how they journey through your business. This info empowers your sales team to converse in a personalized manner and offer better experiences.

2. Chat with prospects in real-time

With today’s advancements facilitating the easy integration of live chat into a website, many websites are using these for increasing their interactions, conversions, and customer retention. A live chat at your website is like having a salesperson ready to strike a conversation with anyone who visits your site.

Statistics says that 79% of consumers prefer live chat over email support, phone support, or support via social media, 46% of them think that this medium is the most efficient one to communicate with a support team, and 29% of them feel that info gained through this medium is better than those gained over email.

Live chat’s one-on-one communication with visitors enables real conversations, builds stronger connections, and achieves better results. You can use information gathered through other touchpoints like phone calls, emails, web forms, etc., to address a customer’s (or prospects) needs more precisely and efficiently.

3. Personalized follow-ups

Statistics say that the first meeting brings only one sale out of every 50 sales. And this one person who is ready to buy at the very first meeting is someone who has researched about your firm and believes that you offer them the best solution. When they meet with your sales team, they usually are reassuring themselves that your firm suits them well.

And as for the remaining 49 people, they are more likely to buy only when they develop a certain level of trust. And that requires some push from your sales team. They can improve their ability to onboard more customers and increase sales by using CRM data.

From CRM data, you can gain valuable insights, including the number of-

• Web pages they visited
• Support tickets they opened
• Events they registered for
• Sales meetings they booked
• Email campaigns they engaged with
• Product demos they requested for

Using these insights, your sales team can significantly increase their sales rates via personalizing follow-up emails. For instance, by tracking the posts or pages that your prospects are looking at on your website, your sales team can personalize a follow-up message incorporating their product interests and addressing their concerns, if any.

Personalization practices for your customer support team

Your customer support team is a very important part of your company. Exemplary customer support is based on extensive personalization. It will enhance customer satisfaction, lower customer churn, encourage product adoption, and decrease employee turnover. Here are three ways to help your customer team practice personalization.

1. Provide context-based support

Your customer support team would benefit by focusing on contextual conversations. Contextual communication refers to that conversation in which both your customers and your support team are fully aware of all facets of the conversation.

For instance, your support team gets a call from a customer asking for an update about their ticket inquiry. Rather than making the customer repeat himself, your support team precisely knows his need, the problem he is going through and tells him how soon it would be fixed.

Thus, context-based support helps eliminate wastage of time in trying to sort out the context of the conversation – which always is an unpleasant experience. Such kinds of contextual support can help you provide personalized responses faster and prevent customers from leaving you.

Using CRM can let you store and access all customer conversations in a single place. This way, you can quickly find inquiries by checking the tracking numbers. This also helps allocate priority to certain sections of customers. In short, contextual support in customer relationships helps eliminate vagueness and annoyance by quickly and efficiently serving the customer’s needs.

2. Target customer needs with a Knowledge Base

Today’s digital advancements have raised customer expectations higher. They seek immediate answers. The best way to offer this is by giving a self-service approach to customer support. This can be done by creating a Knowledge Base- a centralized compilation of all the important info about your organization and its products.

Here is an outline for creating your customer service Knowledge Base.

1. Describe the key elements of your business and its products or services
2. Come up with your Knowledge Base content
3. Include visuals to render your Knowledge Base easy to read
4. Broadcast your Knowledge Base
5. Request for feedback and evaluate those to enrich and enhance your content
6. Focus on continual improvement

Building and sustaining a dependable Knowledge Base would help you ensure high-quality, post-purchase service to customers.

3. Resolve customer complaints immediately

When a customer faces any issue and makes a complaint, he expects you to be there for him to help him out immediately. If he is made to wait or repeat himself to multiple support reps, he feels disappointed. This issue can be addressed by delivering personalized support. An integrated CRM system can help in this regard.

This system can provide a database of information on a customer’s past messages, purchases, and conversations and automatically create support tickets. Providing support teams with such a wholesome picture rather than just a view of the immediate problem can more equip to-

• Offering timely, ongoing, and consistent support
• Increasing the customer’s lifetime value
• Enhancing customer retention

These, in turn, can help firms stand out from the crowd and make repeated business with customers in the long-term.

Rounding off, personalization is the way for all digital marketing techniques to follow. This can ensure better experiences for customers and prospects. If done properly, personalization can lower acquisition costs, boost revenue, and improve marketing efficiency. Practicing personalization is not an overwhelming thing. Effective execution can ensure better customer experiences and generate exponential results.

Summary:

Personalization is the key to positive customer reaction. Businesses can apply their personalization efforts through their marketing, support, and sales teams. Marketing teams can practice it by relying on data to enhance experiences, sending personalized emails, and creating thoughtful Opt-in forms & Thank You pages. Sales teams can execute personalization via treating consumers like people rather than as sales targets, chatting with prospects in real-time, and personalizing follow-ups. And your customer support teams can implement this by providing contextual communication, targeting customer needs with a Knowledge Base, and immediately resolving customer complaints.