Why personalized marketing is essential for connecting to today’s customers

Today’s consumers are bombarded with marketing and advertising content from every direction. Finding ways to cut through the noise and reach potential customers is critical for any organization that hopes to enjoy sustainable success and growth. Personalized marketing is one of the best ways to provide customers with the right message at the right time in a competitive media environment.

What is personalized marketing?

Unlike more traditional marketing strategies that attempt to reach as many customers as possible, personalized marketing leverages data and digital technologies to deliver an individualized message to both existing and potential customers through their preferred channels. Although anyone who has received an automated email addressed specifically to them has encountered a form of personalized marketing, these messages merely scratch the surface of its potential.

The most innovative personalized marketing strategies evaluate data associated with each customer to create a detailed picture of their interests, habits, and needs. Marketing teams can then use that profile to create content and messaging that is more likely to resonate with them, leading to better engagement and higher conversion rates. A recent study of the retail sector, for instance, found that companies deploying cross-channel personalized marketing strategies achieved an ROI of 400 percent or more.

4 major benefits of personalization

Whether it’s being deployed for marketing or as part of a broader brand strategy, personalization can provide organizations with several benefits. Here are just a few ways personalization makes a difference.

1. Brand humanization

Today more than ever, customers don’t want to engage with a faceless, impersonal company that doesn’t share their values. In fact, according to Salesforce research, 53 percent of customers report feeling an emotional connection to the brands they buy from and 71 percent of them are paying more attention to the company’s professed values more than they did in the past. Personalized marketing strategies can help organizations relate to customers in ways that are more likely to resonate with them.

For instance, if someone is actively involved in their local community, a personalized campaign can highlight the company’s charitable efforts. In other cases, however, the best way of engaging with a potential customer may be through making them laugh. In both cases, the goal of personalized marketing is to create a shared experience based on authenticity and trust. Once a customer feels like they “know” a brand, they’re much more likely to keep the engagement going over time.

2. Accelerated growth

From a pure results standpoint, personalized marketing simply works. A 2020 McKinsey study found that personalization strategies that create a more positive customer experience increase customer satisfaction by 20 percent, boost sales conversion rates by 10 to 15 percent, and triple shareholder returns. It’s no surprise, then, that some of the world’s most successful companies (such as Amazon and Netflix) have become synonymous with personalization techniques.

To understand how personalized marketing translates into faster growth, it’s important to remember its role in creating a better customer experience. When people feel like a brand shares their values and understands their needs, they’re more likely to return to that brand in the future. Good personalization campaigns understand this relationship and are constantly looking for ways to keep customers engaged without being pushy or intrusive. No one wants to feel like they’re being marketed or sold to, but they also aren’t likely to forget when personalized marketing helped them solve a problem they didn’t realize they had.

3. Protection from digital disruptors

Although personalization is a powerful tool of some of the world’s largest companies, it also provides an effective way to compete with them. For small to medium organizations, personalized marketing that feeds into an outstanding customer experience allows them to build strong relationships with customers that can withstand the disruptive impact of much larger companies entering their market space.

By investing in personalization technology and content platforms that allow them to streamline their marketing efforts, smaller organizations can deliver hyper-focused messaging to customers that doesn’t feel like something churned out by an impersonal algorithm. As more consumers lose trust in big tech companies, there’s a huge opportunity for less established brands to capitalize on the sentiment with personalized content that reflects their values.

4. Improved customer experience

The ability to deliver a high-quality customer experience is fast becoming a key differentiator in the eyes of today’s consumers. In fact, research firm Gartner has long been predicting that most businesses will be competing on the basis of customer experience rather than price in the years to come.

Good personalization campaigns facilitate more natural communication and allow organizations to create genuine relationships with their customers. By engaging in conversations on an individual level, companies can create an interactive experience that is very difficult to find elsewhere. Personalized marketing provides the initial touchpoint for guiding customers through a buyer’s journey that’s customized for their specific needs.

Rather than taking the old-fashioned approach of bombarding people with generic, one-size-fits-all content, marketing teams can use data to craft unique messages for every audience. The goal of these personalized campaigns is to start a conversation that will lead to a mutually beneficial (and lasting) relationship, which is a different approach than the more transactional process of generating and converting as many leads as possible.

Unlock the potential of personalized marketing with digital asset management

Creating a better customer experience through personalized marketing requires software tools that streamline processes and allow marketing teams to be more agile. Speed and accuracy are critical. Nothing will undermine a personalized message faster than an inappropriate image or piece of content. Without the right solution in place, managing digital content can quickly become confusing as teams lose track of which assets are approved, which are the most up-to-date, and which are restricted to only certain uses. Effective personalized marketing requires a solution that can scale seamlessly to support vast amounts of digital assets and provide the automation tools needed to tag, locate, and edit those resources.

Canto is a digital asset management (DAM) platform that makes it easier than ever for marketing teams to work with the content that supports their personalization campaigns. By consolidating and organizing brand assets in a single, easy to access location, Canto streamlines content creation and enhances productivity. Rather than wasting hours searching for the right piece of content, marketing teams can quickly locate the assets they need for their personalization campaigns to deliver a seamless customer experience.

To learn more about how Canto can transform the way your marketing teams manage and work with digital content, sign up today for a free trial.