Strategy

5 Reasons Why Personalised Content Drives More Sales

There’s no doubt about it. People crave personalization, and lightweight personalisation doesn’t count. In fact, efforts, like using a customer’s first name in marketing emails or sending them a special birthday message, tend to fall flat with only 7 to 8% indicating they would be motivated to engage further. In fact, 31% of customers wish that their shopping experiences were more personalized than they are. They’re also willing to provide the data required to get those customized experiences. Taking those two factors into consideration, it’s no surprise that personalization in your content can drive sales. Here are five reasons why that happens, along with some real-world examples.

1. Relevance is The Key to Overcoming Saturation

Customers are inundated with an overwhelming amount of marketing content. It’s in their newsfeeds, their inboxes, the videos they watch, and it’s relentless. Deleting, hitting the skip ad button, swiping away, and scrolling past have become part of our muscle memory. In order to be seen, your content has to scream relevance, and it has to do that quickly.

The way to do that is to create personalised content. This is why 63% of marketers are creating buyer personas and using those to drive the content they produce. To personalise the content based on buyer persona you can:

• Build clear and complete customer personas.
• Identify the long tail keywords that each persona will likely use.
• Determine the platforms each persona is most likely to use.
• Narrow down the type of content that is most likely to resonate with each persona.
• Develop a unique style of communicating with each persona while still being true to your overall brand personality.

Once you have done these things, you can then begin to create content that is optimised for the keywords and topics that are most interesting to each persona.

2. Personalisation Addresses People Where They Are in The Sales Funnel

If customer personas represent a horizontal look at your audience, sales funnel position is a vertical perspective. Just like people have unique needs and preferences depending on their personalities, interests, and demographic information, they also have unique needs depending on where they are in the sales funnel. For you, this creates another opportunity to reach out with content that is truly personalised for your audience. For example:

• Sharing content about your company’s values and history with the top of funnel customers.
• Reaching out to power users and brand loyalists with detailed tips and techniques.
• Sharing product demo videos and how to content with low funnel customers and the recently converted.
• Writing content about the products and services you offer and how they work to mid-funnel customers.

3. Content Personalisation is Becoming the Standard

Personalising content is no longer a revolutionary concept. Successful brands have been doing it for some time now. These trendsetters have set the standard. Now, to have your content considered relevant, you have to match if not beat them when it comes to developing the kind of content that the audience you have targeted needs right now.

This doesn’t mean that you can’t use personalisation to increase sales. You certainly can. It’s just a matter of finding a unique ‘hook’ to get your audience interested.

4. Personalisation Builds Connections

Ethan Dunwill,  says, “To present customers with content that is personalised for them is to listen to them. It shows that you are paying attention to their needs and that you care enough to bring them content that meets those needs. That’s how you form the connections that drive sales and build brand loyalty.”

5. Personalised Recommendations Are More Likely to Resonate with Customers

Customers expect that your content is going to cover the products and services you have to offer. After all, as you nudge them closer and closer to converting, it becomes more appropriate for your content to become more focused on that. However, if you’re simply sending out generic recommendations, that’s going to be relatively meaningless to your audience.

On the other hand, if your recommendations are based on an understanding of your customer’s needs, that’s much more likely to make an impact. So, how do you make personalised recommendations that lead to sales? You start with well-written content, great visuals, and high production values. The following resources are extremely helpful.

• Canva: A great comprehensive tool for creating all types of visual content.
• White Smoke: An English spelling and grammar checking resource
• Animaker: A tool for creating animated videos.
• Photo Collage: Create visually compelling posts with picture collages.
• Easel.ly: For creating infographic.

Great Examples of Effective Personalisation

So, how are businesses actually using personalisation to impact conversions? Here are some examples.

The Point Defiance Zoo and Aquarium

Point Defiance Zoo and Aquarium had a simple goal. They wanted to sell more memberships. So, they used data to pinpoint the geographic areas of the zoos most frequent attendees. Then, they targeted people within those zip codes in their campaigns.

Paper Style

Paper Style engaged in a very basic form of segmentation. They created one segment for brides-to-be and another customer segment for friends of the bride. Then, they began sending people in each segment email content that was more relevant to them. As a result, they increased their click-through rates by161%, and their email revenue by 330%.

Doggyloot

Doggyloot saw a boost in their click-through rate of 759%, and they did it by starting the personalisation process at opt-in. Subscribers were asked for the size of their dogs when they opted in. Then, that information was used to customise the content and product recommendations they received.

Final Thoughts

By using personalised content, you meet and exceed your audience’s expectations. You create lasting bonds with your customers, and you make it clear that you’re paying attention to their needs.