7 Examples of Excellent Personalization Marketing
Who’s the most interesting person in the room? It’s only human nature to suspect, deep down, that maybe it’s us. People love to feel like kind of a big deal. That’s why, for all the talk about nosy algorithms following us around the internet, personalization marketing works.
Advances in technology and data analytics have allowed for tremendous growth and evolution in personalization marketing. It’s also proven to engage buyers and provide a solid ROI. For example, Exceed.ai has found that AI based email personalization can boost engagement by over 50%.
In fact, nine out of ten consumers find it appealing when brands make an effort to offer them personalized experiences. Which makes sense, as 79% of companies who utilized a personalized marketing strategy exceeded their revenue goals.
Effective personalization does require a bit more finesse than remembering to call prospects by their first name every other sentence. One of the best ways to get the most value from personalization is to leverage the data and insights generated through Account Based Marketing (ABM).
ABM encourages sales and marketing teams to work together to target specific customer accounts. Personalization is one of the best tools in the account based marketer’s arsenal to deliver targeted messages that get the right kind of attention.
Still, you can’t number-crunch your way to the perfect personalized content experience. There’s always a touch of artistry to the best examples of personalization marketing. Let’s take a closer look at personalization and showcase seven examples of companies really doing it right.
What is Personalization Marketing?
Personalization marketing is all about tailoring your content to the individual with the help of customer data and advertising technology. There are lots of ways to do it. Sending out an email with the customer’s first name in the subject header is personalization marketing. So is crafting a custom presentation aimed at a specific purchasing agent at a company you’re targeting. The latter approach might be a bit heavy-handed for the average consumer, but it can make perfect sense — and be very effective — in a B2B marketing context.
For decades, traditional marketing has placed quantity over quality and prioritized broad appeal over niche messaging. Personalization marketing takes the complete opposite view. Like any good marketing strategy, the success of personalization comes down to delivering the right message to the right audience. ABM can help you do that. It provides you with the information needed to deliver personalized messaging that feels relevant and engaging, instead of pushy and overly familiar.
Why Should You Personalize Your B2B Marketing?
The best personalized marketing usually involves an element of problem-solving. It has insight into the target audience’s needs and presents them with a fitting solution. This kind of messaging cuts right through generic content that, at best, can make only educated guesses as to what the audience’s problems and needs are at the moment.
One of the biggest challenges with any marketing strategy is attributing where success is coming from. It’s tough to figure out exactly which marketing activities led to conversions.
But don’t worry. Once again, ABM comes to the rescue.
ABM provides the data and framework that allows marketers to make accurate attributions. This information allows them to focus on the activities that turn into actual sales and generate the highest ROI. 87% of marketers say ABM delivers better results than their other marketing efforts. So it’s pretty hard to make a case for strategies that rely on opaque or conjecture-based attribution models.
Excellent personalization makes customers feel like you’re listening and that the solutions are designed with their particular circumstances in mind. Doing this fosters loyalty, goodwill, and repeat business in a measurable way. To show you what we mean, here are seven examples.
7 Examples of Excellent Personalization Marketing
1. Spotify’s “Discover Weekly”
There are some things we miss about the good old days of analog media, and one of them is getting thoughtfully curated mixtapes from your friends. The music streaming service Spotify is now your friend with all the mixtapes, served up as a “Discover Weekly” playlist customized for each user.
Each playlist consists of 30 songs the user has never played before. The songs are selected by a recommendation engine that looks at user behavior, content tags, and audio analysis of the songs themselves – creating a listening experience that’s both horizon-expanding and readily enjoyable.
2. Sapiens’ Content Recommendation Widget
For over 30 years, Sapiens has been a leading global provider of software solutions to the insurance and financial services industries. Still, they were seeking to grow their customer base and expand into new markets. But they were having a hard time determining whether their content marketing was delivering a positive ROI.
TrenDemon set Sapiens up with a personalization marketing solution that tracked customer journeys and identified their highest converting content. They created a content recommendation widget that provides visitors with individually tailored reading suggestions, along with custom CTAs that keep their bounce rate low.
3. CodeAcademy’s Personalized Emails and Landing Pages
Simple, striking, and straightforward. CodeAcademy’s landing pages are often held up as great examples of how a clean and focused approach can produce the best conversion rates.
Where CodeAcademy shines is in how well they pair personalized marketing emails with matching landing pages. The landing pages build on the information and offers presented in the email, and invite conversion with a short form. Bringing email and web content into alignment like this enables sales through targeted content. It ensures a seamless and consistent customer journey.
4. Cadbury’s Personalized Video
Once upon a time, generating customized videos for individual customers would have been either too expensive or technologically challenging. Now, it’s feasible for any marketer that recognizes the considerable conversion potential of video content and personalization marketing.
The chocolatier Cadbury shows us that even a product as universally beloved as chocolate can benefit from a personalized approach.
Users who opted in were presented with a custom video that incorporated information and photos from their Facebook profile. Cadbury used this data to match the user with a specially chosen candy bar flavor. The campaign worked very well, with a 65% click-through rate and more than a third of users converting.
5. Bringg’s Landing Pages and Newsletter
As a leading logistics platform for enterprise businesses, Bringg offers tools and resources to help their clients streamline delivery and create better customer experiences. They set a goal of increasing the number of prospects who book demos through their website. However, Bringg was unsure how to determine what content was most effective at bringing about this specific conversion.
By using TrenDemon to evaluate their customer journeys, Bringg was able to increase their demo booking rate by more than 20%. TrenDemon was able to do this by providing concrete data about which landing pages and mailings were generating the most conversions.
It turned out that Bringg’s newsletter was a better conversion tool than they’d assumed, and that certain landing pages did better than others. The information enabled Bringg to invest more in their newsletter, produce more personalized and relevant content, and to direct visitors to the landing pages that converted best.
6. BustedTees’ Emails Segmented by Time Zone
When it comes to audience segmentation, there are many ways to slice the pie. Some are obvious choices, like demographic categories, but you can get creative with segmentation. BustedTees did just this when they sent out personalized emails segmented by time zone.
Once they had data on their customers’ history of opening emails, they personalized send times according to when individual customers were most likely to open and read them. The result? An 8% lift in revenue attributed to email marketing.
7. Revolve’s Exit Popups
Even the most in-the-moment customer behavior can usefully inform personalization marketing. Consider the exit popup, a website’s last chance to keep visitors engaged before they close that tab and navigate elsewhere. The clothing retailer Revolve certainly gave it some thought and came up with a winning solution.
Creating exit popups that work can be tricky, but Revolve carefully analyzes mouseover activity and other user behaviors to time their popup just right. They serve it up with a pretty sweet offer, too — 10% off in exchange for an email address. It just goes to show that personalization doesn’t always have to go deep to be effective.
Be Excellent and Personalize
Having access to the technology that enables personalization marketing opens a world of possibilities. Personalization marketing provides marketers with a rich toolbox of creative ways to cut through the noise and clamor of broadly targeted campaigns.
Personalization helps build stronger relationships with the customers and leads who really matter. When personalization marketing is combined with account-based marketing and savvy strategy, you’re on your way to a positive ROI.
Whether you’re looking to update your marketing strategy to get more conversions, or just want to learn a few new marketing tricks, let the preceding excellent personalization examples be both a lesson and inspiration. Following the customer journey data will show you how to give your latest campaign the personal touch it needs to succeed.