How to Create Personalized Marketing That People Will Love

Have you found a Coke with your name on it yet?

By replacing their logos with 250 popular names and terms of endearment, the company's "Share a Coke" campaign was able to transcend over a decade of declining sales.

Why the sudden turnaround?

Quite simply, people love personalization.

It has a certain "wow factor" that stirs up curiosity and invites engagement. 

Aware that engagement is what we're all after, we've rounded up several examples of effective marketing personalization to inspire your own efforts. 

With 74% of people admitting their frustration with websites that deliver content that doesn't align with their interests, you can't afford to ignore this marketing technique. (Source: Janrain)

Adaptive CTAs

While having a call-to-action at the end of every blog post will help to assist conversions, having the right call-to-action at the end of every blog post will change the game.

According to a HubSpot study of over 93,000 CTAs, personalized CTAs have a 42% higher view-to-submission rate than standard ones. 

Essentially personalized CTAs aim to provide a more relevant experience for the visitor by presenting them with an offer that it tailored to their lifecycle stage. 

Let's take a look at how HubSpot uses personalized CTAs to increase their conversion rates:

1) CTA for customers

2) CTA for leads

3) CTA for visitors

Each offer is strategically selected to appeal to the needs of the visitor at their unique stage. While a free guide on how to "crush your competitors on social media" will help to warm up new visitors, a live class exclusively for customers will serve to delight existing ones. 

Customized visuals

Did you know that while 80% of your online visitors will watch a video, only 20% will actually read your content in its entirety? (Source: Digital Sherpa)

Scary, right?

While we're not urging you to throw in the towel on written content, visual marketing, specifically video, is quickly becoming one of the most effective tools for marketers looking to capture and hold the attention of their audience. 

In preparation for Zumba Fintness' annual Instructor's convention, their marketing team seized an opportunity to leverage personalization in a highly visual way.

Essentially they created a personalized video to be included in their launch email to promote the convention that included the name of the recipient alongside footage from last year's event. 

The response to the video was overwhelming, as recipients took to social media to share their excitement over the personalization:

For good measure, they chose to test the effectiveness of the email by A/B testing the personalized email against a control variation. The results revealed that the personalized message saw a 40% open rate and a 21% click-through rate, while the control message saw a 31% open rate and a mere 5.4% click-through rate. 

"Fortunately and unfortunately, it spilled over into the control group and they see what other people received. It's rare that you're ever upset that you didn't get to see some marketing message from a company. I think it means we were doing something right," said Zumba Fitness' Senior Manager of Email and Marketing Automation, Wayne Miller.

Relevant emails

Getting your marketing emails opened and clicked is a longstanding frustration of marketers across the board. 

As a result, it's likely that you've experimented with a ton of different subject lines from witty to ultra specific to thought provoking. Not to mention the drafts on drafts on drafts you've tossed in an attempt to convey the most value. Despite your efforts, rising above the congestion is still a challenge.

But what about personalization?

The Science of Email Marketing report revealed that emails including first name personalization had higher click-through rates than those that did not (5.8% vs 7%.)

Further research revealed that including the company name within the email increased click-through rates from 7.5% to 15%. 

These small inclusions help to engage recipients by conveying a personalized email experience that makes them feel less like a nameless, faceless number in your database, and more like a friend. 

While including your prospect's name or company in an email is a solid place to start, there are more advanced email personalization techniques that have proven their ability to boost conversions. 

For example, list segmentation allows marketers to deliver more targeted content to specific groups of people. This can be arranged so that while one group sees one variation of an email, another group sees something entirely different. 

According to the same report, marketers who send emails to one list receive a lower average click-through rate than marketers who employ anywhere between 2-6 lists. Point being, before you blast out that email to your own database, you'll want to consider how you can slice and dice the list to deliver an email that speaks more specifically to different personas or lifecycle stages.

For more on how to create loveable (high converting) email content, check out the free ebook below. Simply fill out the form and it's all yours.