In previous blog posts I’ve written, 2017 is all about the year of personalisation.
From a very simplistic email received in your inbox from your favourite clothing store to entire website layouts being constructed and targeted specifically at a particular demographic or industry.
Personalisation is the way to go, and if you’re not being personal with your customers or clients then you really are missing a trick.
What follows is 5 ways that you could personalise your marketing.
Gather the data
First and for most, you’re going to need data, and a hell of a lot of it.
Data holds the key to a lot of information about the kind of audience that your website or product is attracting.
To get your hands on the data you’re going to need to get it from Google Analytics, HotJar and any other application that is assisting you with identifying the types of people coming to your website.
You may event want to split this data into two/three categories, those that are coming to your website and are just visiting, those that are visiting and interacting with the website i.e. submitting a form or downloading a resource and three a visitor coming to your website that has fully converted to a customer by buying into your product or brand.
Set your personas
This might sound a little backward, after all you would of already made some assumptions about your target market prior to putting the website live, right?
However, with your data to hand you are now set to carve out a clear picture as to who, what and where these people are coming from.
Don’t be afraid to really narrow down the kinds of people that visiting, using and even buying from you.
So who are your buyers are they single females aged between 20-30 that buy Hello magazine, regularly exercise and are addicted to soaps.
Are they married 40 somethings with an interest in finance and are regular purchasers of the Investors Chronicle and holiday around 3 times per year.
Defining your personas will give you a clear understanding into who is using your company and your products.
The more you know about your buyers the easier it’s going to be.
Knowledge is power.
A/B Testing
This is where your personas and data is really going to come in handy.
For a moment lets imagine you’re an online store selling luxury suits, your typical buyer is around the 40-50 market, holds a degree, works out regularly, earns around 45k a year, drives a BMW 6 series, and has a long term partner with kids who are older.
You know your customers name, from where they have ordered from you previously, you know their interests and most of all you know that the customer will always choose the blue over the black suit jacket every time.
So set up some A/B testing pages, displaying the same information in a different way and at different times of the day.
Perhaps include a “Hello William”, or whoever your persona is, at the top of the page followed by, “welcome back, we thought you might like”.
Analyse the data gathered from this experiment and choose either the A or B page layouts.
Keep it personal
Personalising one page is one thing, but there is nothing stopping you tailoring the entire website experience based around your customers previous website visits and the like.
Although this might become a little tiresome, offering your customer his favourite coloured cuff links along side his new white shirt could certainly help cross sell and increase margins.
Remember keeping it personal at every interval is important for both you and your customers.
What about physical marketing?
Running a physical store on the high street and running an online store are two different things, but both are vital as part of a multi-channel operation.
You can’t really move the products to different part of the store, just to please Mr Smith. It might also alienate your other customers, employing such tactics. So what’s the solution?
When it comes to offering click and collect it is more about the service towards the end and also ensuring the customer has to walk through the entire store to get to pick up his stuff, which just so happens go past the impulse buy section.
Consider how you have your website structured, if you’re offering a range of suits, for instance, cross selling products like cuff links, and ties, both of these would be regarded as an impulse purchase, so put them close to the click and collect in the store.
If you also handle orders from women, which most clothing companies do, offering impulse purchases like hosiery, jewellery, perfume all within convenient distance to click and collect.
Ensuring your website and your physical store are all personalised sounds like a big job, but you’ve already got 98% of the tools to get started.
So what are you waiting for? Get personal with your customers.