Marketers have long understood that using a person’s name in marketing materials helps get their attention. Using names in emails or promotional materials is just the tip of the iceberg. Personalization can extend beyond emails and newsletters to blog posts, social media, and even video marketing to drive brand awareness, increase brand loyalty, and generate results.

The trick to successful personalized marketing is collecting and using data to learn enough about your customers to create customer personas, segment customers, and build marketing experiences that speak to the target audiences.

Dig Deep Into Data

It is no longer enough to personalize emails with customer names and hope that will compel customers to open and click emails. Greeting line email personalization should be your baseline level of personalized marketing at this point. Today’s consumers are savvier than ever and they will quickly realize that just because the email bears their name, doesn’t mean the content inside of it is relevant to them. If you keep this up for too long, they’ll soon start to disregard the emails.

It’s time to go deeper. To do that you need to be collecting and analyzing customer data. Customer data can be collected from email lists, surveys, and purchase histories, as well as website, email, and social analytics tools. Armed with that data, businesses can then use it to create segmented lists to send highly-targeted content to users of a particular platform, whether that is email, social media, blogs, or newsletters, or direct marketing.

Segmentation Options

Analytics programs offer several different ways to segment data. Contacts can be segmented by:

You can then use this segmentation to build a personalized marketing strategy that targets specific audiences. This is valuable because the targeted audience has already demonstrated an interest in or acted on certain content, products, or services. You have a much higher chance of the customer taking the desired action because you’ve personalized the content to their specific need or interest. Think of how well companies like Amazon and Netflix do this. Each time you log in to your account, there are “recommendations for you” – which are all based on your past actions on the site.

This type of personalization works so well because it takes some of the workload off of the consumer. It’s so much easier to take a look at products that have been recommended to you and make a decision than it is to scroll through pages and pages of content just to find something that maybe, kind of meets your needs and that you may or may not decide to purchase.

Personalized Marketing Build Brand Recognition

Personalized marketing aligns perfectly with content marketing because they support similar end goals. They both build brand awareness, loyalty, and recognition. Consumers are much more likely to remember and feel good about the brand that remembers their name and birthday or the anniversary of their first purchase or email sign-up or social media interaction. We all want to feel special and personalized marketing does just that. If it comes down to a business that takes the time to send you a birthday greeting and one that doesn’t, more people are going to go with the brands that seem to care about them and shows a human side to the business.

After all, that’s what content marketing is all about: fostering a human connection to build relationships and ultimately business success.

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