5 great personalized marketing examples

Summary

Personalization is the real breakthrough in digital marketing. It is an age-old strategy that is well suited to cutting-edge technologies. Its scope is truly vast and multifaceted. In this post, we identified 5 very different personalized marketing examples.

What is personalized marketing?

Personalization is the breakthrough in digital marketing; it is for any kind of business, for multinational companies and start-ups alike, for organizations both small and large. But what are we talking about when we talk about personalized marketing? 

It’s about strategies that are focused on a one-to-one dialog between the company and individual customers. And what is the starting point? 

Big Data, that is, the digital footprints that we all leave at all times, in the online world. Through data analysis, companies can gain a very deep understanding of their audience, right down to the detail of the individual person. 

The ultimate goal is to calibrate your communications and marketing strategies based on the individual customer.  

We focused on this in Personalized marketing: a definition of our series devoted to personalization. 

In the second piece on 5 benefits of personalized marketing of our series, we dissected the main benefits that come from personalized marketing. 

They can be summarized in 5 points: 

1. Improved brand image because customers themselves can turn into testimonials. 
2. Soaring engagement rates and attention-grabbing ability.
3. Decisive improvement in customer experience, resulting in higher retention rates. 
4. The opportunity to put targeted, surgical upselling and cross-selling actions on track.
5. The opportunity to gather new and increasingly up-to-date data: a base from which to continuously improve your campaigns. 

Now it’s time to get even more practical by analyzing some highly successful personalized marketing examples. We will start with a pioneering example and then move to the areas of travel and tourism, fashion, entertainment, and finally design and furniture. 

We will do this by examining cases related to well-known companies that everyone looks to for inspiration. 

Not surprisingly, all of these companies have embraced personalization for a long time now. 

1. Coca-Cola: among the pioneers of personalization 

Do you remember the “Share-a-Coke” campaign?  

It’s the one where the names of individuals were printed on cans and bottles, with an invitation to share their own “personalized Coke” on social media. 

Thinking about it now, it seems like ancient history. It was certainly one of the very first personalized marketing examples with such a large and ambitious target audience. 

The year was 2011 (for digital times, we are almost talking about a different era), and the campaign was first launched in Australia. Later, given its enormous success, it was exported to more than 70 countries around the world. 

The initial target audience from which the idea originated was Australian millennials: 50% of them  had never tasted a Coca-Cola. 

The goal, therefore, was to try to reconnect this huge and interesting segment of the public to the historic brand, to reconnect them in an emotional or “intimate” and personalized way. 

This was a very basic level of personalization, yet the operation worked remarkably well, turning individuals into true brand “ambassadors”. And this should give us pause. 

Here’s some data for you, collected only 3 months after the campaign was launched in Australia; it’s really impressive (source: ogilvy.com): 

• Consumption of Coca-Cola among young Australian adults grew by 7%. 
• Over 76,000 “digital cans” of Coca-Cola were shared online. 
• Traffic on the brand’s Facebook channels increased by 870%. 
• The number of photo and video views related to the campaign, on Facebook alone (and again in 3 months) were over 121 million. 

And – mind you – at the time, Instagram had only been launched a few months and was not nearly as widespread or popular as it is today! 

2. Delta Air Lines – Video marketing and personalization 

Let’s turn to an example from the world of Travel & Tourism (a sector that impacts everyone and one that was dramatically affected by the pandemic). 

It’s an example that perfectly demonstrates how powerful the combination of personalization and video marketing can be. We are referring to “The Path You Make” campaign, created by Delta Airlines. 

The company created thousands of personalized and interactive videos aimed at its Delta Skymiles customers.  

The goal is to make each and every recipient feel special, to make him or her feel at the center of the company’s interests, both in terms of service and, even before that, in terms of one-to-one communication. 

The ultimate goal, in this case, is very clear: loyalty. A really decisive point, as this data reminds us, which is always good to keep in mind: 

• Winning a new customer costs 6 to 7 times more than retaining one (source: inc.com).   
• A 5% improvement in Customer Retention can yield up to 25% more profit (source: bain.com). 

So, here’s personalized video in action, which according to Forbes is “the marketing breakthrough that brands need” (source: forbes.com). 

Personalized and interactive videos, built based on the characteristics of each individual recipient, for any type of business is the specialty of platforms such as Babelee.  

3. Louis Vuitton – tailored to each individual 

The world of fashion and design often changes faster than other industries. In some ways, fashion marketers are somewhat “doomed” to identify and ride new trends before anyone else. 

We’re not surprised, then, that one of the most important international brands in the industry has decided to turn toward personalized marketing. We’re referring to Louis Vuitton, with its “My LV” campaign. 

The brand has decided to complement its image (which aims at exclusivity) with interesting personalization opportunities, especially in its online shop. In short, each person can build his or her own custom Louis Vuitton accessories. 

The benefits are the usual benefits of personalization: improved brand image, loyalty, and the transformation of customers into testimonials. But that’s not all. 

These types of campaigns have caused the production of User Generated Content on social networks to soar: and we’re talking about one of the most ambitious goals for all those involved in social media marketing. 

4. Netflix and its personalized suggestions 

If we talk about personalized marketing examples, we cannot fail to mention the suggestions, “related” and – more generally the data-driven recommendations that we have all become accustomed to on platforms like Amazon…just to give the most striking example. 

Another area where this kind of personalized marketing is really central is in streaming entertainment platforms. That goes for all of them: Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Disney +, Infinity, NowTv, etc. 

In particular, Netflix has taken personalization to the next level (and it’s constantly being updated). 

It’s not just a matter of correlations and suggestions based on the user’s history and characteristics Personalization also takes shape in the thumbnails and teaser videos themselves, which, for some content, are not one-size-fits-all, but are variable depending on the characteristics of each specific user. 

Thus, one person might receive a thumbnail with an actor in the foreground whom the user will find familiar and whose films he has seen before. Another person might view a teaser with multiple action, tension, or love scenes–always from the same film–depending on the preferences and tastes he has shown. Of course, all of this happens in an automatic way. 

In short, it’s about increasingly refined personalization and moving toward what some call “hyper-personalization”. 

5. Ikea and the frontier of Augmented Reality

We close this short list of personalized marketing examples by looking even further ahead. 

One of the enormous advantages of personalization is that it can complement and integrate with the most diverse technologies in a virtuous circle of continuous updating. 

In this very interesting case, for example, personalization goes side by side with Augmented Reality (AR) technologies, one of the most promising frontiers, together with Virtual Reality (VR) for everything related to marketing and communication…but not only. 

Ikea has deployed this union of personalization and AR within its Ikea Place smartphone app. 

How does it work? 

Each individual user, using his or her home environment, can see simulations of Ikea furniture within their home, with a relative accuracy of about 96% in size. 

Viewers can proceed directly – in just a few taps – to purchase the items (with further customization possibilities). 

As you can guess, the experience is not just useful and functional. It also allows for an immersive, fun, smart, cutting-edge mode. And this only brings the customer and the company even closer together, increasing engagement, loyalty, and everything that follows. 

Here, even in this forward-looking example, we see the great strength of personalization, the real heart of its effectiveness, summed up: combining one of the oldest secrets of commerce, that is, targeting each person in a targeted and diverse way, with increasingly advanced digital technologies.