Digital Personalization: Key Trends & Insights for Marketers

Marketing has metamorphosed. The goliath machinery of the past, top-heavy and slow-moving, has given way to the sleek and streamlined processes that help businesses adapt at the speed of consumer impulse in today’s digital world. 

To keep up, brands are looking for newer, better, and faster ways to fully integrate their marketing efforts. One of the key components every retailer needs? 

Digital personalization. 

What is digital personalization, why does it matter and how can you capitalize on current personalization trends? We are going to break it down for you. 

What is Digital Personalization in Marketing?

 Digital personalization in marketing is all about knowing – and anticipating – your customers’ needs and wants in order to deliver the best, most relevant messages and offers to them. 

At its most basic, digital personalization is a matter of creating relevance in all of your marketing messages – getting the right message to the right customer at the right time. 

With so much competition in the digital landscape, brands in every industry are increasingly focusing on personalization as the main way to set themselves apart from the competition. 

From on-time email or text reminders to restock on products to helpful, responsive online chatbots, digital personalization is key to delivering the relevant experience more and more shoppers aren’t just expecting, but outright demanding.

That’s why so many retailers are focusing on an across-the-board approach to personalization and reorganizing their processes to create a more integrated, streamlined, and consistent user experience throughout the customer journey. 

Why Digital Personalization Matters

Personalization has become the focal point of optimized, fully effective digital marketing. Today’s customers expect to receive relevant-to-them messaging and will quickly leave any space that bombards them with messages, ads, and offers that don’t apply to their personal needs, wants, or circumstances. 

The most obvious reason personalization matters is that it works – relevant product recommendations simply lead to more sales. But successful digital personalization pays off in a number of other ways, including better conversion rates, increased time spent on your website, better customer engagement, and, as a result, improved customer experiences.

In short: The rise in personalization has led and will continue to lead to more personalization. And so, to stay competitive and to build customer loyalty, retailers need to find the best ways to reach and serve their specific customers’ needs.

How to Implement Digital Personalization for Your Brand

Implementing digital personalization strategies across the board can feel intimidating. But in reality, creating personalized message triggers and other techniques can be done in a way that makes your life easier, not harder. 

Incorporate these best practices to create a marketing strategy that can move your brand forward, without driving you crazy.

Diversify Your Approach

There are a myriad of ways to diversify your personalization efforts. 

Geographical targeting, customer personas, email segmentation, and predictive research models all help you pare down and focus on your core customer groups, while also curating the massive amounts of data available to you.

You will create far more powerful and effective SEO, social media strategies, and even improve mobile app experiences by diversifying your digital personalization efforts.

Create Personalized Content

Personalization is many things, but it is definitely not a one-and-done or one-size-fits-all strategy. Incorporating segmentation across channels not only increases your chances of successful personalized targeting, but it also decreases the risk of channel silos, and the inevitable stagnation that follows.

One of the most effective ways forward is smart content. This includes email reminders, cart abandonment notifications, post-purchase emails and more, all triggered by specific behaviors and directed by your wider personalized marketing strategy.

Utilize AI Chatbots 

Artificial intelligence has made the leap from science fiction to real life, and it’s becoming increasingly popular with marketers and customers alike. With 24/7 availability and a wide range of easy-to-program features, AI chatbots can now serve multiple customers while employing human-like conversational marketing messages and scripts. 

With additional features like troubleshooting tech issues, checking in on order statuses, answering commonly asked questions, and even scheduling appointments, AI is a boon to customer service and digital personalization alike. 

Not utilizing this tool would be a major missed opportunity.

Digital Personalization Best Practices

A fully realized personalized digital marketing strategy isn’t going to happen overnight. It takes careful planning and implementation. But it can be done, and by following these best practices your brand can create a personalization strategy tailored specifically to both your needs and your customers’ needs as well.

Establish Your Vision and Set Your Goals

Trying to implement any marketing strategy without first clearly defining what you want to do and how you’ll measure success is dooming yourself to failure before you even begin.

You need to set clear definitions for success and plan your goals according to where your brand is in the present moment.

Measuring success is a highly brand-specific metric, so it will look a little different for everyone. Make sure you understand what you need, where you want to be, and how you’ll track your own unique progress toward those goals.

Embrace a Data-Driven Mindset

In an omnichannel marketing world, massive amounts of data are available to you. The problem is how to channel, curate, and utilize that data, without overwhelming yourself or your customers.

Maintaining clean, focused data creates smoother data integration, so you can leverage that data to make actionable decisions, identify opportunities, create operational efficiencies and deliver highly targeted and personalized marketing messages on time, every time.

Create an Omnichannel Digital Personalization Strategy

Avoid marketing silos at all costs. Your brand needs to be as flexible as possible in an omnichannel environment, and silos are too confining and restrictive. 

A large part of the success of your digital personalization strategy hinges on a cohesive experience of your brand across channels and throughout the customer journey. Your brand needs to be active, present, relevant – and unified.

Broaden customer expectations by staying active on your website and social media platforms, through SMS messaging, email marketing, and through mobile app personalization.

Invest in Right-Fit Digital Personalization Software

Again, successful personalization relies on creating the right messages for the right customers and delivering these messages at the right time. Creating a successful personalization strategy means you need the right-fit digital personalization software to help you deliver those timely marketing messages.

AI machine learning and other marketing technologies are only growing in their power to drastically enhance the digital customer experience. Your brand needs to leverage this tech in order to make a lasting impact on your customer journey.

You need to find the right-for-you personalization software that can enhance your personalization strategy and efforts across every single one of your marketing channels. 

Are You Ready for Your Digital Personalization Transformation?

The pace of marketing in a digital landscape requires brands to stay focused, relevant, and as streamlined in their strategy as possible. Personalization is the key to creating a highly individualized experience for your customers across channels and throughout their customer journey.

But how ready are you to implement the above and other digital personalization efforts into your overall marketing strategy? Just how personal an experience are your customers able to have with your brand?

If you don’t know where to start, or are stuck and can’t seem to move forward, let Bluecore show you the way. With the Bluecore digital personalization platform, you can create more successful marketing campaigns through automation, predictive modeling, smart content, and more.

Request a customized demo to learn more about how Bluecore can help you personalize your digital marketing strategy today.