In last year’s post on targeted email campaigns, we talked about the rise in personalised marketing for businesses. That trend is only going to continue in 2016.
Why? One-to-one marketing (or 1:1 marketing) has been shown to foster greater customer loyalty and better ROI. Fortunately, through CRM, email and other marketing software tools, it’s never been easier to target your prospects and customers with customised offers and content.
Here are a few suggestions – and a few tools – to help you do just that.
Know your audience
Putting customers’ first names into your print or email campaigns is a good start, but being able to offer tailored coupons or promotions can really boost sales and loyalty.
When you know who your customers are, you can create custom marketing campaigns to appeal to specific wants and needs. This sounds daunting, but being able to separate groups of customers by their interests or past purchasing behaviour gives you the power to target your marketing efforts to individuals.
So how do you do this? Start by using the information you have available. Use your email list and customer database (or CRM) and look for ways to segment campaigns. You can separate groups by purchase frequency, city, postal codes, services and much more. Then you can use this information to send grouped special offers via email, postcard or even SMS messages.
Set up automated triggers
Behaviour-triggered emails help you respond to how your customers are using your product or website. They’re a great way to get results and build interest.
For instance, if you buy something from Apple, you’ll undoubtedly get a follow-up email after you receive the item that asks you how you liked the product. And if you put something in your shopping cart and then leave the site without purchasing it, you’ll probably get an email a day or two later that says, “Hey, your items are still waiting for you!” These are both examples of behaviour-triggered emails.
Trigger emails are highly effective, with a 152% higher open rate than traditional emails. They’re a valuable communication tool that’s easy to automate with most major email platforms, and they can be used for up-selling, cross-selling, welcoming new customers and more.
Get the tools
Not sure where to begin in personalising offers for prospects and customers? Email platforms like MailChimp offer a wide variety of options for segmenting your emails (with some paid and some free choices), but there are also several online tools available that go beyond email:
- Marketo is some pretty full-on marketing automation software, offering real-time personalisation with targeted individuals through dynamically generated and personalised communication.
- Vero is a cloud-based email platform that helps businesses create and send targeted emails based on customers’ website behaviour, as well as offering complete data analysis.
- Intercom combines CRM and email tools to provide support, live chat, feedback and trigger emails so businesses gain an understanding of (and respond to) customer actions both online and in-app
- SparkPage is a B2C tool that helps businesses analyse where they’re losing customers in the conversion process, creating tailored messages suited to users’ needs.
These are just a few options to personalise your marketing. Depending on where you are in the process, your software and your marketing plans for the year, you can create plans for personalised promotions and efforts that will focus on each of your individual customers.
Need help personalising your marketing to get results? Contact Breathe Marketing today.
