How to Personalise your Marketing Communication

Personalisation is essential across all marketing channels, from Twitter to email. Getting to know your customers, speaking their language, and addressing their pain points are all crucial if you want to build real relationships and make money.

In this article, we’ll talk about why personalisation is so important and how brands can make sure their content is more personalised and in tune with what their audience wants to see.

Why is personalisation so important?

Personalising your content and your interactions with followers is critical today. It’s not really optional — if you fail to do this right you stand to lose customers and be overtaken by your competitors.

Here are a few reasons why personalisation is so important:

• It’s a sure-fire way to boost engagement. In fact, research by HubSpot found that message personalisation is the #1 tactic used by email marketers to increase engagement rates.

• Personalising your emails can be a great way to make them more effective — more than 20% of marketers say personalisation can improve email engagement

• Customers love it. In fact, 90% of U.S. consumers find personalised marketing content somewhat to very appealing.

• It’s what prospects expect nowadays. 92% of marketers say customers and prospects expect a personalised experience — up from 85% in 2019.

How to improve personalisation

So how do you improve personalisation across your brand, ensuring you connect with your audience and potential customers in a much more effective and meaningful way? There are a number of steps you can take, and it’s important to instill this goal into all your teams.

Here are some of the best ways to make sure your marketing is always personalised:

Get to know your customers. You can’t personalise anything if you don’t know your customers. So talk to them — on the phone, on social media, on internet forums, using chatbots, via email, in blog comments, and everywhere you come into contact with your audience.

Find out their challenges, pain points, questions, and the problems they desperately want to solve. This information will allow you to talk to them in a much more personal and authentic way.

It can help to create customer personas — template-like profiles of your typical audience members containing information like general likes, dislikes, age, goals, challenges and other useful demographic information that can make communication easier.

Use data wisely. The marketers of today are blessed with a huge amount of data, far more than ever before. This data allows you to gain crucial insights about customers that help you personalise communication.

It ranges from simple things like the ability to use first names in email subject lines, all the way to more complex things like a finer understanding of your customers’ demographic groups and what they truly consider important.

Create good content that speaks to your audience. Once you’ve gained a solid understanding of your audience and their struggles, challenges, and pain point, it becomes much easier to create effective, personalised content.

Content can take a wide variety of forms and work across many different channels — from blog posts to social media, email, and videos. Some of these may seem more suited to personalisation than others — for example, an email can address your customers by name and refer to their specific business.

However, even broader content types like blog articles can be personalised to an extent — it’s all about knowing your target reader and tailoring the content to address their broad needs and challenges.

Work across all your channels. As mentioned above, there are many different channels that brands can use to communicate with their audience. Make sure to make the most out of every channel, and don’t overlook or omit any.

It’s important to use multiple channels because different segments of your customer base will be present on different ones. Your older customers, for example, are unlikely to be spending much time on Instagram or TikTok, so if you rely solely on these channels you’ll be missing a chunk of your audience. When it comes to personalisation, you can tailor your messaging more accurately according to who is using each channel.

Brands that are nailing personalisation

Amazon. The e-commerce giant is excellent at learning what its individual users want and providing suggestions and ideas to match it. They’re experts at using the vast amount of data available to them to give their customers exactly what they want and make billions in the process.

Spotify. Anyone who uses Spotify will know that the platform and its communication channels are packed with personalised suggestions, tips, and content to help its users get the most out of the software and find out better ways to use it.

Netflix. Netflix didn’t become a household name by staying disconnected from its users. It uses personalisation every step of the way, from first-name greetings to a wide range of recommendations and tips tailored to each individual user.

The bottom line when it comes to personalisation is to think about the bigger picture. It’s not just about adding first name tags to emails (although that helps), it’s more about a mindset that aims to tailor each piece of content or communication to your customer’s specific desires and needs.

At Blue Beetle, we can help you personalise your content and ramp up your digital marketing efforts in just about every area to drive your company forwards. To find out more, get in touch.