Tech Tools to Help Personalize Marketing Campaigns

80% of shoppers are more likely to buy from companies that personalized marketing campaigns for their customers.

80%… if you remember nothing else from this post, remember that.

As competition grows in every industry, the need to create an elevated consumer experience becomes even greater. These days, average isn’t good enough when it comes to marketing. Companies have to find unique and interesting ways to spark the interest of their target audience in order to drive growth. In efforts to accomplish this, many companies have invested time and energy into personalizing their marketing campaigns to specific customers or a subset of customers in order to elevate the consumer experience. Learning how to personalize marketing campaigns will allow you to reduce ad spend, increase ROI and improve customer satisfaction.

Personalized marketing campaigns are continually proving themselves to be a powerful trend in marketing and thankfully, there are a number of tools and technologies that help any company create the best customer experience possible.

Customer Data Segmentation

The most important component to any marketing campaign is data. It would be impossible to successfully market to customers without some idea of who they are, their age, where they live, their contact information, etc. These simple demographics and information help companies determine what products or services to create and how to best market them to potential buyers. But with so much customer data, you may be wondering how you can possibly streamline your efforts to market to every customer within your target audience. An easy way to do this is by adopting a customer data segmentation software. 

Customer segmentation allows you to create characteristic-specific customer queries. This helps to divide your entire customer base into related subsections based on their interests or demographics. With this information, you can then create targeted campaigns that speak to each customer’s desires. While many use this method, the apparel, beauty, media, and automotive industries have been known to find plenty of success in its use. For example, with car sales, it’s important for salesmen to make a strong connection with each client because it is such a large purchase that may take some convincing. Knowing a little about the customer’s background and purchase history may help the company to market vehicles that may be similar in price and features to some of their previous vehicle purchases. While this is just one example, you, as a customer, may even be able to think of examples when you received a very personalized ad from one of these types of companies. 

Artificial intelligence

While customer segmentation proves its benefits for a number of industries, artificial intelligence (AI) takes the concepts of segmentation a step farther. Instead of generating your own queries to personalize marketing campaigns, AI uses machine learning to do it for you. The more data AI receives, the more the technology’s knowledge expands and evolves to understand customer behavior and personalize each customer’s experience accordingly.

The largest example we see of the use of AI technology in eCommerce and retail is Amazon’s recommendation feature. This feature has reportedly driven about 35% of Amazon’s sales and that’s because of AI technology. The recommendation feature creates personalization by suggesting items similar to your purchase history, purchasing price, current cart content, and site behavior. However, it also drives the businesses’ sales given that a customer is much more likely to purchase an item that is relevant to them as opposed to a general product that is being marketed to everyone on the site.

Augmented Reality

Augmented reality (AR) continues to make an impact within the field of marketing. With its roots in the world of gaming and entertainment, it has evolved into a technology with seemingly no limits. Essentially, the technology creates an interactive experience by overlaying a computer-generated simulation onto our current reality. While using an application or software that includes AR technology, you are able to view the simulation on the live view taken from your smartphone or laptop. In recent years, AR has been a huge contributor to elevated and personalized user experiences within businesses as well. 

For example, in 2019, the apparel company, Gucci, put the technology to good use by rolling out an AR feature within their app. The feature allowed customers to try on Gucci footwear, virtually. Similarly, this “try on” feature has been used in the beauty industry, home decor, and vehicle sales. This feature helps to personalize customer experience without necessarily using customer data segmentation. Instead, the basic characteristics of the technology allow the user to create their own personal experience from the store, home, or wherever else they may be. This personalization has also shown its benefits because bout 40% of customers say they would be willing to pay more for products sold using AR technology.

Remarketing Apps and Software

As the online world continually expands, more and more industries are transitioning into eCommerce. The internet’s vast connectivity makes it easier for companies to connect to several other channels of communication with their customers. Companies use email services, social media, and chat services to stay connected and market to their customers. As discussed, segmentation is helpful in personalizing these types of marketing, however, there is also great opportunity in remarketing.

Remarketing is the technique of marketing two or more times to the same customer based on their previous site behavior, cart content, and purchase history. Or, in other words, the technology provides a personalized marketing campaign to customers who have visited your site without making a purchase. You can imagine that this would be difficult to keep track of in a physical location however, it is a great way to bring back customers to your website. Examples of this include, abandoned cart email notifications, sending product ads related to the pages the customer was viewing, etc. All of these things provide customers with their own personal advertisements separate from those sent to the masses. Also, instead of waiting for the customer to return to the site, you can market again using the information you have gathered from them already. In fact, some basic retargeting statistics from 99 firms suggest that waiting for the customer to return to your site to market to them may not be effective. According to the article, 98% of people will leave your website without buying anything. Unfortunately, about 75% of those people will never come back. While these statistics are alarming, they are certainly a major area for opportunity in remarketing. Thankfully, there is a wide selection of remarketing tools and software that companies can implement into their current marketing strategies. 

Personalizing your marketing campaigns is no easy task. The more your customer base grows, the more it diversifies which in return, makes it harder to market to every type of customer. However, there are a number of technologies in today’s market that make personalization in marketing simpler and much more effective. With the use of these tools and tactics, your business will be on its way to reaching Amazon-level marketing success!