An approach to moving towards personalisation in your marketing strategy

In this month’s blog we wanted to explore all things personalisation. We will cover what we mean by personalisation and how this differs from content segmentation; a suggested approach to move towards personalisation, with examples of how others are using these techniques. You will see many claims across the internet about how personalisation can help to drive up revenue and conversion and throughout my career I have seen first-hand the benefit off moving towards a personalisation strategy.

What is personalisation?

By personalisation we mean serving someone content on an individualised basis that meets their specific needs or wants. This is a 1:1 message and you need to really know your audience and the messaging they need to be able to do this effectively.

Amazon are particularly effective at offering you personalised product recommendations based on what you’ve previously bought, viewed or what they are predicting you will want next. This is a great example of using data effectively to personalise your marketing strategy.

How does personalisation and content segmentation differ?

From experience, what strikes me is that a lot of people mention personalisation when they mean content segmentation and I say this purely because they are not having a 1:1 conversation, but rather sending the same content/message to a segment of people. I also think that content segmentation is a great way to start dipping your feet into the pool of tailoring content more and seeing the return from doing this.

A good example of content segmentation for me was when I worked with a travel brand and we would default to different route pages based on where the person was viewing the website for. We were assuming that if you lived in the North of England you were looking to travel from the North of England making the journey for people quicker.

I have also seen it done effectively with home page messaging changing based on whether you’ve identified yourself previously as a potential foster carer, existing foster carer or local authority to speed up that journey for people. Also, when I worked in fostering, we did a lot of geographic specific content that if we had the technology available now we would have split out using an A/B tool, rather than having so many pages saying similar things just with a different location.

Personalisation and your marketing strategy?

There is a good chance that if you are reading this article, then you don’t currently have any personalisation in place. Therefore, I think it is important to recognise that going from nothing to a full-on personalisation strategy is a very big leap and there are plenty of baby steps you can take in-between to test the waters and ascertain the return on investment you will receive from focusing in this area.

For example, I would focus on A/B testing in email test different subject lines and copy to see what performs best for your different audience groups. For example, do they respond better to a find out more call to action other a book now and how does this vary between different segments.

Or you may want to serve returning visitors with different home page content than new visitors to the site. For example, if they were previously looking at a holiday to Amsterdam, when they return to the site serve content about Amsterdam, from what you’re selling to soft content like things to do in Amsterdam.

A personal favourite of mine, especially when running integrated marketing campaigns is campaign mirroring. For example, I have seen this done excellently with email campaigns. By sending them an offer with a certain holiday package and when you land them on the website, they are seeing tailored content dependent on the discount they were offered. Whereas people not coming from the email will see the standard price. This has the added benefit of not having to duplicate content.

Top tips for creating your content segmentation or personalisation pipeline

1. Review existing plans and identify areas that you would like to test. Take a circular approach to this: test and learn, refine, execute, moving to standard website functionality and then repeat.

2. Agree priorities areas with stakeholders around the organisation and build your case for the value added from this activity by sticking to these areas.

3. Use tools such as Airtable to help come up with a way to prioritise and order the activity you are going to be doing. The benefit of this also includes you can be agile, if something that has a bigger benefit comes up, allowing you to focus on the activity that is going to bring the highest return.

4. Tap into your front line and customer experience team to gather ideas for tests or personalised content. There is a good chance they know what customers are struggling with and what would benefit key audiences.

We would really love to hear from you what you thought of this blog post, please leave us a comment below with your thoughts.