If you’ve ever heard of Spotify, you know that every December Spotify presents its users with their “Spotify Wrapped.” This is a summary of their listening habits throughout the year, and personalized recommendations based on those habits.
And, without fail, every year Spotify Wrapped goes viral. Why?
People get a personalized experience created for them, which they can then share with their friends and family. No matter who you are, your Spotify Wrapped is unique and personalized to you.
As a marketing expert, you’re probably thinking you can’t replicate something like Spotify Wrapped for your customers. You don’t have the complex technology, the in-depth user data, or the thousands and thousands of employees who code it every year.
But… that’s not true. You actually can create a personalized experience for your customers. It’s easier than you think, and it doesn’t mean investing a ton of extra time or resources on your end.
With the right technology, these campaigns become a breeze to build and maintain. A lot of it can be automated. Let’s talk about how.
Understanding personalized experiences in the modern digital world
Personalization is about providing customers with what they need at precisely the right moment. Focusing on these experiences is important considering companies that get personalization right have the potential to generate 40% more revenue.
Take Aritzia’s ‘Clientele Sale’ as an example. Aritzia uses data on past customers and their purchase history to give them access to a sale that’s personalized to them, and delivered right around Black Friday. They even put the customer’s name on the website.
The result? Virality and FOMO across the internet every year:
Timing is crucial; if your message arrives too early or too late, you risk losing the customer's interest in engaging with your content. So, to successfully personalize an experience like Aritzia, it's crucial to deconstruct the concept into its three key components:
Audience
Some examples of audiences you can segment are
- New website visitors
- All past customers
- All site visitors
- People who have engaged with you but not purchased
- Customers who have purchased more than once
In Aritzia’s case, they target past customers and tier them into levels based on how much purchase history they have and the amount.
Content & Channel
When you run performance marketing campaigns, you always choose what channel you’ll run ads on. Facebook? TikTok? Snapchat?
When delivering a personalized experience, it’s the exact same. What channel will you deliver the experience through and what content do you need to support that experience?
Personalized experiences can be on your website, using content like quizzes. Or, they can be through email using segmentation and dynamic fields to customize content blocks.
Timing
Finally, the timing matters most.
Depending on the experience you’d like to deliver, you can find the best timing using data available like purchase history or your site’s analytics.
But beyond data, it all starts with KYC – Knowing Your Customer.
This means understanding their buying habits and the times they prefer to browse and creating a digital profile sourced from various channels to assist them on their journey.
For example, you can deliver smaller-scale experiences, like a quiz or personalizing the text of the website itself, and can leverage tools like website pop-ups to deliver a prompt at the right time.
- Is someone doom-scrolling on a product category page and just not sure? Prompt a quiz.
- Is someone staring at a sizing page and not sure what size they’ll be? Prompt a customer support chat.
- Is someone re-visiting the site a week after looking at specific products? Show them those products on the homepage when they re-visit.
These are smaller personalized experiences make your customer feel unique—and make the conversion path from browsing your website to purchasing a lot more seamless.
Challenges and solutions to personalized web experiences
Everyone has a different idea of what exactly personalization means to them. That’s why there’s a disconnect between businesses' and consumers’ definitions of personalization.
85% of businesses say they’re delivering a personalized experience to their customers. But, only 60% of consumers say they’re receiving a personalized experience.
So what’s happening?
Running one personalized campaign a year may make you feel like you’re delivering a personal experience, but that’s just one engagement that a customer has with you throughout the entire year. And you’ve definitely got more competition than that.
How do you overcome this to provide a more consistent personalized experience to your customers? Two words: marketing automation.
What is marketing automation?
It’s the automatic execution of a task based on criteria that you set.
Oftentimes, automation is used when the task is repetitive or large in nature. For example, executing a task every time someone visits the website. If you have thousands of visitors, leveraging automation means you can execute a task hands-off without performing a task thousands of times.
This plays a huge role in overcoming the dissonance between thinking you’re providing a personalized experience and actually providing a personalized experience.
With marketing automation, you’re able to deliver personalized content based on criteria over and over again. As someone moves through their purchasing journey, you can meet them at the right time with different pieces of personalized content to tailor their experience towards them.
Personalized customer experiences through marketing automation: use cases
Creating personalized web experiences with marketing automation is exciting, At the same time, it can be a blue ocean of endless data points and types of experiences at your fingertips.
Where do you even start?
Let’s review some use cases (with examples) that you can start to implement right away.
Smart segmentation
Using analytics tools, ad pixels, or more front-facing tools like quizzes, you can collect first-party or second-party data from your site visitors or customers.
For example, you can collect information such as:
- Demographic: Age, gender, education
- Geography: Where they live, their culture
- Behavior: Engagement, loyalty
- Personality: Lifestyle choices, values or attributes
You can segment customers based on the data you collect into the appropriate marketing flow that can include content like landing pages, emails, SMS messages, push notifications, and more.
One example of customer segmentation is NOTIQ, which uses behavioral analytics to reward loyal customers with an exclusive discount.
Smart segmentation allows you to deliver emails like this automatically if someone meets the criteria you set.
Automated customer support
Automating customer support and providing it at the right time can be a game-changer for converting a new site visitor into a customer.
Kick off a live chat when a customer has been hovering on the same page for a while—offering to assist them if they’re stuck. Either through an actual chatbot or even a pop-up prompt to help them get to the right place.
You can also automate customer support to get in front of a post-purchase issue before it happens. A great example is car service centers sending personalized maintenance reminders based on the vehicle's mileage and service history.
Perfectly timed emails and promotions
Once you’re collecting data and beginning to use smart segmentation, emails and promotions are easily delivered at the right time to help convert browsers into purchasers.
Cart abandonment
Cart abandonment emails are the classic example of personalized emails delivered at the right time. Often, with a discount, you can re-engage someone you know has abandoned their cart and remind them of their purchase. Or, incentivize them to complete their purchase with a discount.
Perch & Parrow’s cart abandonment email provides a classic example of a great “forgotten something?” email:
Product recommendations
Beyond cart abandonment, you can also provide content to email subscribers pre-purchase.
For example, provide product recommendations based on someone’s preferences. J.Crew does in their “We think you’ll love these…” email:
Onboarding flows
If you have a new email subscriber or customer, you can tailor a welcome flow directly to their preferences.
This is especially important for B2B marketers who want to make sure a new customer is making the most out of the software they purchased. If a new buyer doesn’t leverage all of the features available to them, they’re not likely to experience the full product—leading to an eventual churn.
So, if the average buyer of your product requires any kind of education, make sure you set up a flow that shares which features are available and how they can use them effectively.
You can even segment these onboarding flows based on actions customers make in your software. Did they start setting up a feature but drop off part-way through? Trigger an email reminding them to finish their setup and explain the benefits of that feature in more detail.
Dynamic content
Dynamic content allows you to change the content of the email within your marketing flow based on data you’ve collected.
For example, if someone has looked at or purchased men’s clothing versus women’s clothing, you can change the content within the emails they receive to suit their needs.
Nike does a great job of this here:
Dynamic landing pages and CTAs
Depending on where someone is in their purchasing journey, you can personalize landing pages or even calls to action that are timed to where they are and what their needs will be.
Upsells/cross-sells
If someone is about to view their cart or make a purchase, it’s a prime opportunity to remind them of other products or similar products based on what they’ve added to their cart.
This works especially well if you have a threshold for free shipping. You can prompt someone to order more in order to qualify for free shipping using upselling or cross-selling.
Custom pop-ups
You can also create custom pop-ups that not only deliver at the right time based on the criteria set, but that include dynamic content like someone’s name.
If you have someone’s email and know they’ve visited your site before, you can deliver a welcome back pop-up with their name and a unique offer.
Personalized copy
Personalized copy means adding someone’s name, or using words that speak to them based on information you have. One creative way the brand Sephora does this is by incentivizing someone to create a Sephora account by offering free shipping.
This gives Sephora their email, name, and other personal information to create personalized sales and site experiences.
Adapted CTAs
You can also tailor the calls to action across your site based on smart segmentation. Bulletproof provides a great example of a call-to-action you can provide for returning customers or when you have fresh inventory that was previously sold out.
You can make this dynamic by showing existing customers “Stock Up” while showing new site visitors other content that’s more tailored to their needs.
Integrate your tech stack and automate your marketing
The hardest part about building personalized experiences is choosing and setting up your marketing automation tools.
Marketers have access to a wide blue ocean of data points. And there are so many ways you can begin to personalize your campaigns. To help you get started, we created a guide to building a modern tech stack to future-proof your business operations. Read it here.
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