5 benefits of personalized marketing

Table of contents

Summary

Personalized marketing combines the effectiveness that comes from knowing individual customers with the most advanced digital data collection and analysis tools. But what are the main benefits of personalized marketing?

What is personalized marketing?

We are devoting a full cycle of posts to the topic of personalized marketing. In fact, we believe that personalization is the ultimate breakthrough for digital marketing, a breakthrough that can and must involve the strategies of companies in every industry and of every size.

But where does the effectiveness of personalized marketing come from?

To put it briefly, it comes from the combination of ancient wisdom with the most advanced tools made available by digital technologies.

Ancient wisdom is about the effectiveness of knowing all the different audiences of your communications and marketing efforts, in order to address each one in a differentiated and targeted way.

Cutting-edge tools, on the other hand, are those that deal with the collection, analysis, and interpretation of Big Data.

With these operations – if well conducted – companies can get a very broad and deep idea of their target audience and then divide it into many segments, finally matching each segment with one person. The result?

The shift from one-to-many marketing to a true one-to-one dialog between company and customer. All, of course, fielded in an automated way.

The benefits of personalized marketing are multiple, articulated, and have many points of overlap. However, to make the discussion clear and functional, we decided to collect them around 5 key points.

Finally, in closing, we will focus on the most powerful tool of personalized marketing: personalized videos.

1. First and foremost, personalized marketing improves brand image

We can’t talk about the benefits of personalized marketing without addressing an aspect that is upstream of everything and that comes even before effectiveness in terms of sales.

We’re referring to a brand’s reputation and image. This is something delicate and fundamental. And it’s no surprise that any marketing strategy must start here. 

So, what does a brand image have to do with personalization? A lot, and for a very simple reason: the customers themselves want to feel that they are being treated as individuals with their own unique tastes and needs.

And when these customers realize that they are dealing with a company that knows how to treat them this way, a company that knows how to take care of them…this is when satisfaction is born, which then leads to loyalty (which we will come back to)…but not only that: these satisfied customers will turn into the first ambassadors and testimonials of a brand, product or service, triggering a portentous virtuous circle.

A data point to support what we have just outlined?

• 87% of consumers believe that personalized content positively influences their attitude toward a brand (source: outgrow.com).

2. Personalization skyrockets engagement

Why is the challenge to unleash engagement increasingly complicated?

Well, just think about our everyday lives. We are constantly bombarded with communications and attention-seeking, from the most diverse channels and from more and more devices.

The risk for companies and their marketing is not only that of irrelevance, but also that of being annoying and repulsive. So how do we overcome this dual problem?

We believe that it is unnecessary and sometimes counterproductive to “shout” louder than the others. So what do we do? Here’s where personalization comes to our rescue again.

Shifting to one-to-one communication allows you to speak directly to individuals, getting your messages across even amidst the din, in an intimate and non-annoying way.

The effectiveness of this strategy is well understood. 

But let’s look at some data that demonstrate the surge in engagement that comes from personalized marketing. One on the customer side, and the other on the marketer side.

• 72% of customers respond to marketing messages solely created based on their previous browsing choices (source: wunderkind.com).
• 63% of marketers confirm that personalization boosts customer interactions and improves conversion rates (source: statista.com).

3. Personalization improves the customer experience…so it leads to loyalty

We cannot talk about the benefits of personalized marketing without focusing on the Customer Experience. Upstream, it’s good to ask a decisive question: in general, how important is Customer Experience today?

As is our custom, let’s let the data answer this question:

• For 90% of consumers, the quality of customer service is a deciding factor in choosing to purchase products, services, or subscriptions with a company (source: Microsoft Dynamics 365 – Global State of Customer Care).
• 89% of customers are more likely to make another purchase with the same company after a satisfactory Customer Service experience (source: Salesforce – State of the Connected Customer).
• An even higher percentage of consumers, this time as high as 93%, are inclined to make repeat purchases with companies that provide excellent Customer Service (source: hubspot.com).
• In contrast, 50% of people are ready to move to a competitor after just one bad experience with a company. After more than one bad experience, the percentage of those who decide to turn to a competitor soars to 80% (source: Zendesk Customer Experience Trends Report 2020).

There is no need to add further commentary; this data speaks for itself. And it’s clear that the most effective way to improve the customer experience is to make each individual person feel understood in terms of his or her needs, assisted in his or her specific problems, and advised according to his or her individual tastes. Again, we’re talking about personalization.

And it is personalization that is the new starting point that leads to retention and loyalty.

Let us never forget this important statistic, one  that emerged from research by Bain & Company:

For a company, winning a new customer costs 6 to 7 times more than retaining one. A 5% improvement in Customer Retention can produce up to 25% more profit (source: bain.com).

4. Personalization facilitates upselling and cross-selling

Talking about a personalized Customer Experience also means being able to build Customer Journeys that are tailored to each individual customer.

It’s within these different Journeys where interesting upselling and cross-selling opportunities are ready to be seized.

Beyond the technical language, the concepts are very simple and part of common experience.

Upselling is the sale of a higher, more expensive version of a product (or service, or experience) that the customer already has or is about to buy. In short, we’re talking about the widespread “premium” versions, which are fundamental in subscription-based business models, for example, but not only here.

Cross-selling is a similar strategy, but it is based on selling a related product or service to the customer. What remains to be asked is this: for companies, how important are upselling and cross-selling processes?

We answer, again with some very telling and up-to-date data:

• Upselling processes increase a company’s revenue by an average range of 10% to 30% (source: Forrester Research)
• It costs an average of 68% more to acquire a new customer than to get loyal customers to engage in upselling (source: SaaS Survey).
• The odds of upselling products or services to an acquired customer are 60-70%. The odds of selling a product or service to a new customer are around 5 to 20% (source: Altfeld).
• Amazon has stated that as much as 35% of its revenue comes from upselling and cross-selling strategies.

5. Personalization triggers a virtuous circle that leads to continuous improvement

And here we come to the last of the 5 benefits of personalized marketing. This is perhaps the most indirect one, but this does not make it any less decisive.

We have seen how the path to personalization always starts with data, to be collected with the greatest breadth and depth. The end point, then, is people. But we can’t forget that for each campaign, and for each dialog established with the individual customer, you will be able to collect new feedback and new data that is increasingly targeted and increasingly precise.

Warning: this information is extremely valuable! Based on this, you can continuously recalibrate your strategies, making them more and more up-to-date and more and more personalized!

Before we move on to our final focus on personalized videos, here is a piece of data that summarized what we have discussed:

• According to a recent study, 70% of marketers using personalization have noticed a 200% increase in ROI (Return On Investment).
• And if personalization is implemented throughout the customer journey, this increase rises to as much as 300% (source: komarketing).

Personalized videos: focus on a formidable tool

So, getting straight to the point: what are personalized videos? They are videos built based on the characteristics and browsing choices of each individual recipient, even when we’re talking about vast audiences.

All, of course, in an automated way.

And personalized videos can be distributed across a wide variety of platforms. How to achieve them?

By relying on specialized platforms such as Babelee’s. 

Here is some data on the effectiveness of personalized video:

• Personalized videos attract attention and engage the viewer by 35% more than standard videos (source: hubspot.com).
• For some brands, there was an 8-fold improvement in the click-through rate for campaigns that used personalized videos (source: qoboweb.com).
• People who receive a personalized video are 40% more likely to move on to purchase a product and service than those who receive a generic video campaign (source: webeo.com).