How to Personalize Your Digital Outreach

Did you know that 78 percent of Internet users in the U.S. say that personally relevant content from a brand increases their purchase intent? That’s a mind-boggling number – one that speaks to the importance of individualizing the communications you send to your prospects and customers.

Even if you’re aware of this, however, it can be a little daunting to get started with marketing automation and personalization. Here are some tips for managers who want to use marketing automation to augment sales.

1. Learn How to Segment Your Database
Segmentation might sound like an advanced marketing technique, but it’s really pretty straightforward. The idea behind it is this: Instead of sending generic communications to your entire database, you group contacts based on certain commonalities. Then you can use much more targeted marketing campaigns that almost always perform better than the “batch and blast” method.

Let’s look at segmenting your database in the context of email marketing. Here are a few ways to segment your email lists:

• If you’ve created buyer personas (which are basically profiles that include detailed information about your target buyers), you can group prospects and customers based on their personas.
• You can also segment by inbox engagement. Contacts who have clicked on every one of the emails you’ve sent (and taken further action on them) would go in a group, while those who have never interacted with your emails would be in a separate segment.
• Another idea is to segment existing customers from prospects.

These are all tried-and-true segmentation methods, but you can get creative and split your database however you see fit.

2. Automate to Execute Personalized Nurture Campaigns
Once you’ve grouped your contacts by market (or whichever form of segmentation you choose), it’s time to map your communications accordingly.

Let’s say you want to reach out to your existing customer list. One effective idea is to further parse that list into which customers have purchased which services from you, and then send an email that offers them a limited time to buy a complementary service at a reduced price.

For example, let’s say you own an air conditioning repair company. You could group all the customers who purchased your initial in-home AC evaluation service, and offer them a 20 percent discount off a repair job if booked within the next two weeks. Using smart automation will allow you to set up a campaign like this, in which contacts automatically receive follow-up by email, appointment reminders, and so on. This combination of personalization and automation will help you get in front of your audience, increase the likelihood of more sales, and save you time.

3. Review Impact and Revise as Needed
As with any marketing tactic you try, regularly check in on what your personalization efforts are yielding. Did that customer email campaign we just mentioned result in 10 new jobs booked, for a total sales boost of more than $5,000? That’s plenty of proof that segmenting your database based on past purchases and complementary products or services is something you should try again. Did a personalized effort fall flat? Dig into it further to try to find out what was missing – or whether you could’ve tailored the communication to your audience even further.

When you shift your emphasis away from what your customers and prospects can give you, toward how you can better personalize what you offer them, everybody wins. By using segmentation, smart automation, and personalized campaigns, you’re sure to see an uptick in happy clientele – and, of course, sales.

Clate Mask is the CEO and founder of Keap.