Overview
- Boost engagement through personalization: Personalization boosts engagement and revenue by delivering the right content to the right audience at the right time, with consumers significantly more likely to buy from personalized experiences.
- Use data to drive personalization initiatives : Using data (like demographics and behavior), businesses can personalize across channels—email, websites, and social media—to improve conversions, ROI, and customer loyalty.
- Drive personalization across channels: Personalization extends beyond marketing into customer service, where tools like AI chatbots, tailored onboarding, and content hubs enhance support, satisfaction, and retention.
Personalization is a hot topic in the marketing and customer experience sector. It helps businesses to create more opportunities for impactful engagement with their audience or customers and is associated with diverse benefits, including increased revenue.
We’ve put together a list of our favorite examples of how leading brands use personalization to boost their marketing campaigns or strengthen the on-site customer experience – perfect if you’re looking for personalization ideas and inspiration.
Personalization in Digital Marketing
Personalization in digital marketing involves tailoring content, offers, messaging, and experiences to suit individual users or distinct ‘segments’ of an overall audience. It can be based on diverse factors like demographics, behaviors, and personal preferences.
The aim of digital marketing personalization is to improve campaign engagement and interactions, with the overarching goal of boosting revenue. When carried out effectively, it can help businesses ensure their campaigns target users with the right content, at the right time, through the right channels.
This can result in a range of benefits, including higher lead conversion rates, greater brand awareness, and improved customer loyalty. Personalization’s potential to drive business results is backed by a McKinsey study, which found that consumers are 76% more likely to make purchases from brands that use it.
Personalized Email Campaigns
Personalization in email marketing involves creating campaigns focused on generating engagement or leads and distributing them to relevant audiences. Email is a great channel for personalization because many email automation platforms are built to facilitate segmented campaigns and analytics.
To effectively personalize email marketing, businesses need to collect data such as audience demographics from a customer relationship management (CRM) platform and user behavior data from website analytics.
This data can then be used to create a personalization angle that creates compelling opportunities for engagement. Grammarly, for example, uses personalization in its B2B Grammarly Insights email campaigns.
It employs user data to send regular updates to the existing customer base, highlighting their usage statistics. This keeps customers engaged with the brand and encourages them to continue using the product, minimizing churn.
Dynamic Website Content
Dynamic website content is website content tailored to suit a specific user or audience segment. It can be implemented in various ways, including custom content hubs, personalized landing pages, or content that automatically updates in real time based on user behavior data.
Using dynamic website content helps businesses ensure they maximize the user experience for every visitor by serving them relevant content and messaging. This can boost the chances of them staying on the website and increase conversion rates.
Using personalization in this campaign allowed the business to deliver curated collections of content to priority industries and high-value audiences, driving better interaction rates and providing invaluable data insights that powered further optimization.
Targeted Social Media Ads
Personalization in social media advertising involves producing unique campaign creative for different audience segments and distributing it to them using the precise audience-targeting features offered by most social media platforms.
It allows businesses to achieve a better return on investment (ROI) from their social media ads by ensuring their creative is always relevant to the people who see it. This frees marketers to focus on building campaigns that resonate with specific audience needs or preferences, rather than casting a broad net.
The mobile phone carrier O2, for example, used personalization in a social campaign to great effect. It partnered with Facebook to segment its audience into three groups representing people who could upgrade their device early, were reaching the end of their contract, or were already out of contract.
They then developed unique creatives for each campaign and deployed the ads to the relevant audience segment. This personalized social media advertising strategy achieved excellent results, including a 49% reduction in cost per order (CPO).
Personalization in Customer Service
Personalization isn’t just about marketing. It can also be used as a lever to improve customer service, enhance customer satisfaction and build trust and loyalty, keeping existing customers around for longer.
There are diverse ways to use personalization in customer service, each with its own unique potential benefits. Implementing AI-powered chatbots to provide a personalized, always-on support resource can significantly reduce response times for queries.
Businesses can also help their customers to help themselves by providing better support content. One global automotive manufacturer used a combination of ON24’s webinar and content hubs features to do exactly this.
They created a series of webinars to help B2B customers train mechanics and distributors, supported by a collection of personalized content hubs to reinforce learnings. This customer service campaign provided value to the manufacturer’s customers and drove a 339% increase in content views.
Personalized Support
Personalized customer support involves creating mechanisms that give customers the exact support they need, when they need it. It’s a powerful way to increase customer loyalty and decrease churn, ensuring that customers always have the information they need.
The B2B SaaS project management platform Smartsheet, for example, uses an effective, personalized approach to onboarding to ensure new users are exposed to all the product’s features and capabilities.
Their welcome email includes a checklist that provides links to key resources and product areas. This checklist updates automatically as each user works through it, offering a clear way for users to become familiar with the platform at their own pace.
AI Chatbots and Virtual Assistants
AI chatbots, or virtual assistants as they’re sometimes known, are artificial intelligence-powered customer service tools that allow users to get answers to their questions in real-time. They’re an ideal solution for enhancing digital customer experiences, providing a 24/7 support resource.
Implementing AI chatbots on a website can help users solve many problems without requiring human support. Chatbots can generate suggestions on what pages to visit, where to find free training resources, or how to get in touch with the sales team. This makes it easier for users to get the information they’re looking for without having to browse the entire site manually.
49% of US adults used an AI-powered chatbot for customer support at some point in 2023, according to data from Google and Ipsos, demonstrating the utility the technology can provide.
