You know it’s for you. You click. Something tells you good marketing is sucking you in…. but you’re impressed. So you read on.
My team and I sent 158 hyper-personalized emails to super cold leads as part of a larger marketing & sales experiment. We got an open rate of 75.95% and 6.96% reply rate. You know … nothing special.
What stood out for us was the quality of the feedback that we received. Not once. Not twice. Quite a number of people who hadn’t heard about Hera before appreciated the effort we put in before even meeting us.
Over 9 trillion dollars (yes that much) is spent yearly on Marketing and Sales. Chances are, you are contributing a sizable amount. So if you are spending that much, the last thing you want is for your sales efforts to be ignored.
At Hera, we power B2B companies with high-performing Content Marketing & data to grow their funnel. Over the years, we’ve learnt that Personalization in B2B Marketing can make all the difference between an ideal prospect handing you thousands of dollars to help them or just ignoring you.
So how would you use personalization to better reach your customers?
First, let’s talk about what personalization is, and what it isn’t.
What personalization is
In 1984, a person saw an average of 2,000 ads per day. By 2014, they saw around 5,000. In 2022, add tik-tok videos and violent twitter clap-backs.
Your potential customers are constantly being bombarded with different forms of advertisements. People are tuning out.
To get them interested, you have to stand out in some way.
How? Great! Let’s talk about personalization 🙂
Personalization is when a business considers an ideal customer’s habits, actions, interests, and needs and sells to them according to insights garnered from all these.
Check out this cold email I sent that uses relevant and contextual information I got from proper research.
You get the idea? Read on…
What personalization is not
Personalization is not sending a generic message with the person’s name (and probably their company name) and hoping that it would somehow resonate with them.
Really though, the “first name” thing has been overused. It only proves you know my name and where I work. It doesn’t give me enough reason to care about you.
Improve Your Marketing and Sales Process With Personalization
Now that you know what personalization is, let’s take a look at what you need to do in order to make it work for your sales team.
1. Gather information on your target audience.
Nike comes to mind. In 2015, Nike sent out 100,000 different personalized videos to customers documenting their workout progress over the year before. This video contained each individual’s miles covered, minutes logged, location, and weather conditions during their workouts. They were able to create each video using information they had gathered from Nike+, a built-in app for all Apple products.
What was so great about this campaign?
The only way I knew about it was because it popped up on my wall. Organically. Someone shared proudly, in a “Nike gets me” way. And while it was not particularly salesy, Nike enlisted renowned illustrator McBess to add a fun, Meliere-esque look to each of the videos making customers want to share it with friends and on their social media. And my, they did share.
Related: Is Influencer Marketing What You Need Right Now?
To properly sell to your target audience, you need to know them. When you know their habits and patterns, you will be able to offer them what they need, when they need it.
For Nike+ customers, Nike offered encouragement to keep working out.
2. Listen to what your audience has to say.
People are 40% more likely to buy items that are recommended to them based on information they’ve shared.
Cadbury did something really smart with their diary milk campaign.
First, they created a campaign that required customers to click on Cadbury’s Facebook page. After the campaign, the team collected data from their profiles and sent them a personalized video filled with their Facebook photos and other personalized information. The video clip also ‘revealed’ the best dairy milk chocolate product for that customer.
Results? A whooping 65% click-through rate and a 33.6 percent conversion rate. Think about this slowly, at Cadbury’s scale.
Listening to your audience helps you understand their pain points and ensures that you sell to them in a way that emotionally resonates with them.
3. Make personalized recommendations.
Netflix is CRUEL in the personalization game. They don’t stop at following me to my email. They splash the entire screen with “Recently watched”, “Based on your history”, blah blah blah. They even goes as far as personalizing the movie posters to show actors or actresses I am familiar with.
And I love them for it.
Netflix gathers information from over 300 million profiles and put the insights to good use. There is a very slim chance that any two or more users are ever shown exactly the same combination of movies on the Netflix homepage.
A word of caution: You can get really good at making recommendations that it becomes creepy. And of course, no one wants to use a creepy product. So you need to know where to draw the line between attention to detail and creepiness.
4. Segment by location
An Amazon.com user, who also buys regularly from Amazon’s UK store, will see this when they visit the US site.
Segmenting by location allows you to show the best offer or products that customers need, where they need it.
Location-based segments also ensure that you can solve simple problems – like displaying the right size labels – so your product is less confusing to local buyers.
5. Send out personalized messages.
Via Email
There are 3.9 billion daily email users in the world today. For your business, it’s an excellent opportunity to connect with your audience. But it also means a lot of competition. How do you stand out?
Every year, Spotify sends out personalized emails titled ‘Your year Wrapped’ which lets customers know what music and how many minutes of music they’ve listened to in that particular year.
Not only does the campaign act as a powerful marketing campaign for Spotify, it is also an effective way of re-engaging users and drawing their interest through data on their personal listening habits. Some Spotify users even share the images on social media.
Achieve a level where your users will happily share your brand, and you’ve hit the marketing jackpot. But nobody will share thoughts of a faceless robot with no interest in what they do. Don’t be that ‘bulk email’ guy.
Via Social Media and Online Communities
My team helped a client launch in a competitive marketing by first securing a list of enthusiastic prospects to come along from day one.
It was easy to succeed at this because we took out time to learn about the target audience, engage in their communities, and build a symbiotic relationship. It went really well that a number of people let us into their DMs. And came through.
Related: How to build a community on Social Media
How does personalization help you?
Hopefully by now this question is answered. But just in case, here are four reasons to engage in personalized outreaches today.
1. You get to effectively reach and engage your customers.
72% of consumers say they only engage with personalized messaging.
This means that with personalization, you get to reach and build strong relationships with your existing customers while creating familiarity. This way you’re always at the forefront of their minds whenever they need a product or service you provide.
2. It improves trust with your customers
People want to know that the brands they use care about them, and take the time to do the necessary research.
In fact, 84% of consumers say you have to treat them like a person, not a number, to win their business.
When you sell to people in a way that shows that you are familiar with them, you build trust, and as that trust grows, customers are more likely to make repeat purchases and over time, get that service or product from only you.
Related: Storytelling in Business
3. You build a loyal and passionate customer base.
Personalized content leads to repeated purchases in almost 44% of consumers.
When people are loyal to something, they stick with it most times, through thick and thin. Apple has a large number of people who’ve fallen in love with the brand. How do we know? They are loyal and vocal about their passion. Ask Android users. The diss is real.
Okay, back to what we were saying. Passion means they are going to talk about it. High-trust marketing you aren’t paying for 🤷🏼.
4. Increased sales, revenue, and conversion.
Wrong or no personalization could hurt your conversion rate, and revenue.
At scale? Check out the “Share a Coke” campaign. A bottle of coke with your name? Refreshing!
The Coca-Cola campaign caused consumption/sales to increase by 7% the year the campaign was run.
We’ve used personalization to achieve really amazing results to, on a budget. You don’t need to be a big spender to make it work; you just need to be really creative.
Conclusion
People are bombarded!! ADHD is at an all-time high.
Now more than ever, it is important that you include personalization tactics that will resonate with your target audience in your marketing and sales strategy. Or risk losing them to the latest tik-tok dance video.
The tactics change everyday, but the fundamentals remain the same: know your audience, and actually solve their problems. No BS.
If you would like a Marketing partner to grow your business with, I will like to hear from you. Book a meeting with me here. I have helped over 24 startups so far grow their funnel and expedite their growth. Bring on all the questions you have and let’s map those to the results you want.
Stay winning!
We have worked with over 24 startups to drive conversions through increased community presence and relevant blog posts that we help distribute. To understand our process, book a 15 - 30 minutes meeting with us.
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