Why personalization matters in marketing and sales

With the increasing adoption of artificial intelligence, data mining, and analytics, this is the age of personalization. Companies that succeed will be those that deliver personalized customer experiences.

What is personalization in marketing and sales?

To convince and convert your leads or potential customers, you need to know them. You can’t persuade them with broad insights. What’s needed is personalization that will help you gain granular insights into their preferences and intent.

Without personalization, you’ll be talking to a category. With personalization, you’ll be talking to an individual. And everybody wants to be treated as individuals and not groups.

5 reasons why personalization matters in marketing and sales

Once you understand your customer’s pain points through data, you can offer them tailored experiences. Here are five reasons why your marketing and sales need personalization.

Customers expect personalization

Nobody wants a business to treat them as a nameless, faceless entity. People want content they’d like, products they’d be interested in, and offers suited for their needs. They want personalized conversations instead of generic communication.

That’s because consumer behavior happens in a particular context. Businesses need to understand that relevance to deliver better experiences.

No two individuals’ Amazon or Facebook experiences would be the same. Since customers are getting used to such individual-specific interactions, they’d not take kindly to any brand that has a broad message with no relevance to them.

Helps differentiate your brand

Social media platforms and online marketplaces are already delivering customized experiences that are based on the user’s past actions and preferences. YouTube and Netflix know what you might like next. That’s also a reason why these platforms have been so spectacularly successful.

Personalization helps you differentiate your business from others who don’t respect the customer enough to know more about them. When a customer gets an email from a brand that knows their shopping history, preferences, current pain points, they are more likely to open and read it. Any random offer email will be treated as spam.

Even addressing them by name, wishing them, and extending an offer on their special occasions, and automated emails based on user journeys can help you stand apart from the clutter of generic messages.

Enhanced customer experiences

Whether you’re in B2B or B2C, knowing a customer better can help you deliver more fulfilling customer experiences with greater chances of conversion. The logic is quite simple; when you know a customer, you would have a better idea about their challenges.

If you’re planning to sell your products or services to a firm, knowing more about their current challenges, solutions they would have used, and their budgetary bandwidth would help you tailor your offer. Such a customized pitch would have better chances because the business would know that you have done your homework and understand them.

If you’re targeting individual customers, this calls for personalized user journeys. his will have greater resonance and faster responses because your call to action is contextual. Your automated emails, recommendations, and social media interactions would be for an individual as opposed to a segment.

Increases revenue

When customers have better experiences with your business, they’re likely to spend more. You won’t have to flood the customer with unnecessary recommendations. What you suggest will be based on their interests and choices.

That’s why, as a customer, out of the millions of books that are available on an online marketplace, the emails you get may only suggest five or ten. That ensures that the customers don’t have to waste their time searching sites for the next book to buy.

When the recommendations are relevant, it feels more like a conversation than a customer interaction. Those personalized experiences will encourage customers to spend more, which will increase your conversion and revenue. According to Forbes, businesses that create personalized experiences get double-digit returns.

Improves customer retention

As all businesses know, retention is significantly more cost-effective than customer acquisition. Customer loyalty has tremendous significance for the bottom line. Even an increase of 5 percent in retention can boost your profit by 25 percent and even up to 95 percent, according to an analysis.

Personalized experiences keep customers loyal to businesses because any shift will cost them both time and effort. They will have to start their user journeys from scratch with a new business and wait for a while for the brand to provide tailored content or experiences.

Importantly, happy customers will also be eager to refer your business to their friends and family. Such referrals, especially in light of social commerce, can also simplify your acquisition.

In short

Your range of products and services or your expertise will be secondary to whether it has any contextual relevance to your customers. Through personalization, you can create enhanced customer experiences that have better chances of converting them and keep them coming back for more.