How to Drive Sales With Hyper-personalization

Intro

People like to feel special. Marketers and sales specialists across the globe have long known this and they’ve created marketing and sales techniques that capitalize on this phenomenon. Personalization and hyper-personalization are among these techniques.

If you go to the official Apple website right now and try to purchase, let’s say an iPad, as soon as you reach the checkout section, it will allow you to customize the product for free and add a personalized message. Think for a second whether or not you’ll take advantage of that opportunity and have your very own personalized iPad. Statistically speaking, the odds are high that you will go for it.

Customers seek personalized experiences. As a matter of fact, a recent study from Startup Bonsai suggests that 80% of consumers are more likely to buy from a company that provides a tailored experience. That is why personalization and hyper-personalization have become a must-use tool for any business.

Breaking down personalization

Personalization or otherwise known as personalized marketing is a strategy that creates/markets offers which are focused on the individual characteristics, needs and wants of a customer. So essentially what’s marketed to a particular individual is personalized. This strategy deviates from the standard cookie-cutter and one-size-fits-all approaches and instead, aims to understand the client and offer them a personalized experience.

Personalization can be as basic as using the client’s name in an email to tailoring your whole website to their needs and preferences. By now, we’re all so used to receiving emails with our names that it seems odd to receive the once-so-common emails with generic greetings like “Hi there.”

Customer support is another area where personalization is now widely used. O​​ffering a more personalized experience for your customers will help establish long-term relations and turn them into loyal customers.

As a marketing technique, personalization has evolved and we now see a rise in what’s called, hyper-personalization. It takes personalization efforts a step further and aims to learn about the clients and integrate that information in marketing activities.

Personalization and hyper-personalization are no longer an option. Customers expect it, so it’s a must for businesses to drive sales and if you haven’t yet jumped on that train then you’re losing a lot.

Let us see where and how you can use hyper-personalization to drive sales.

Using hyper-personalization

To be able to use hyper-personalization, you need data. This tactic is entirely dependent on how much you know about your customer – their name, where they live, where they work, what their shopping habits are, what their level of knowledge regarding your product is. Your task is to even guess and predict their hopes and wishes depending on their behavior, and offer them just that. And for all of these (and more), you need data.

How to collect customer data for hyper-personalization is a topic deserving its own article but just briefly, here is how you can obtain customer data:

• Ask the customers (e.g., filling out a form on a landing page),
• Track their website behavior,
• Buy third-party data.

For hyper-personalization purposes, the data collected directly from the customers and the data that you track are the best and the most accurate.

What can you hyper-personalize? Primarily 2 things:

1. Content
2. Customer journey

Generating leads, increasing brand awareness and driving traffic to your website are all challenging. So when you do end up succeeding whether it’s through due to your digital PR strategy or pure luck, it’s important to design a personalized customer journey to sustain those results.

What serves as the basis of hyper-personalization?

• Location
• Demographic and firmographic attributes
• Knowledge of the industry
• Knowledge of your product (previous interactions with your product/service i.e., previous purchases, queries, how long they’ve been your customer, etc.)

Suppose you have the data, where and how can you use that for hyper-personalization?

Email marketing

One of the best channels to pilot hyper-personalization is email. As a first step, if you are not already then start using names instead of vague and universal greetings. Here are some other more impactful recommendations:

• Based on your customer behavior analysis, send them relevant and valuable offers and reminders. For instance, if a customer is browsing your swimsuit collection then it makes sense to send them emails about your discounts on sunglasses and sandals. This can also work extremely well with periodic payment reminders, or products that need replacement after some usage. If a customer has purchased a vacuum cleaner from you, it might make sense to send a reminder to change the filter in a year or so.

• Make a distinction between your clients based on their level of knowledge and experience with your product. For instance, if you’re a SaaS company that has users that are new sign-ups and also users that have been with you for years, split them and send them emails that respond to their needs. In other words, tailor the messaging of your SaaS onboarding emails. For example, an old user might be more interested in product updates, while the new ones are more willing to receive video guides on how to use the product. You can also always offer them a demo of your product to get to know them better.

Probably the most famous tool for hyper-personalized marketing and sales is Hubspot, the biggest CRM in the market. First of all they have a very extensive list of predefined triggers that you can use to send emails whenever a certain event happens. This can include submitting a form, visiting a specific website page, actions in the dashboard of your product, contact properties, interactions with your sent emails and even ads. Hubspot even has a scoring system, where users are assigned points based on their activity. You can send different emails based on the score they’ve reached, but more importantly, whenever a user reaches a certain level, you can redirect them to your sales team for a more personalized approach. Having a dedicated sales team can be a challenge for smaller companies like startups, but in many cases it is worth trying to find additional funding like startup loans and investing into it.

According to Reforge Growth Series, one of the biggest mistakes SaaS companies make in email marketing and notifications is sending emails only based on time triggers (e.g., 2 days after sign up). What you should do instead is contact your people based on their activities, and send corresponding emails depending on what they did.

Push notifications

The next marketing channel where you should 100% employ hyper-personalization is push notifications. Studies suggest that the opening rate of push notification rate can be improved 20% by using emojis, 40% by industry-specific send times, 25% by rich formats (25%), 4 times by personalization, and 3 times by advanced targeting.

Essentially, you have an opportunity to quadruple the open rate of your push notification by just personalizing them. The personalization here entails showing the customers information that derives directly from their past experience and speaks to their needs.

The industry-leading tool for push notifications right now is Onesignal, but there is still a lot of open space and competition in this sphere.

Search Advertising

Next on the list of to-hyper-personalize is your search advertising on Google Ads. This tool offers Dynamic Keyword Insertion, which basically lets you change the content of your ads based on the keyword your potential clients searched for.

For example if you write “Buy Keyword:Shoes,” Google Ads will try to substitute it with a similar keyword from your ad group that they have searched. People will see titles like Buy Sneakers, Boots, Footwear and so on. In cases when Google cannot dynamically edit the keyword, it will use Shoes instead.

The advantage of dynamic keyword insertion is that it lets you create ads that are more personalized and contain the specific text that the users are looking for. Adding these keywords in your meta-title and meta-description can significantly increase the click-through rate of your ads.

Running good search advertising campaigns is not an easy task, and the majority of it comes down not to the configuration, but selection of correct keywords. I would recommend you to use a keyword finder tool for that. The keywords you discover can also heavily help you in SEO, but that’s another story.

Website content personalization

And last but not least, custom website pages and recommendations. If you wonder how this works then take a look at Amazon. Depending on your recent searches and purchases, your Amazon homepage changes accordingly.

There is a widespread misconception that website content personalization is only for eCommerce websites. While it works great for this niche but it’s not excluded to them. Any company from news outlets to nonprofits can use this to engage their visitors.

Website content personalization can have a high return on investment but it does require significant human and engineering resources. You will need to gather the data and have people in the team who will experiment with and maintain the personalization of the website content (Usually Product Managers or in some cases Conversion Rate Optimization Specialists).

You can also personalize the onboarding experience for your new signed up users. In this case the biggest factor is the industry knowledge, and this is exactly why you may see so many SaaS products asking you if you’ve used similar products before. By knowing this information companies can know if they should guide you by teaching all the features of the tool, or simply redirect you to the dashboard so you can explore it on your own.

Conclusion

Marketing trends especially in the realm of Instagram and TikTok come and go, but there are certain techniques that stood the test of time. Personalization and hyper-personalization have proven to be among them. From the customer’s point of view, it’s great to receive an answer in the form of your product/service even before they have a question. So boost your hyper-personalization and engage with your audience better.