Grow Your Business with the Power of Personalization and Marketing Automation

This is a guest post from Dan Fries of Clicky, focused on how you can add email personalization to your digital marketing to drive leads to your website where you can then provide the tailored experience required to help them convert. Dan shows bootstrapped entrepreneurs how to prepare for a better exit by making better long term financial decisions.

What if you could reach potential leads at the exact moment they are considering buying from you, and without wasting time, during which they could go to your competitors?

What if you could send them highly personalized content that correlates with their behavior and actions on your website?

And what if you had the power to take a lead that was merely interested in your company and give them the exact information they need?

Advanced digital marketing has today given every business the ability to automate and yet fully personalize digital interactions with potential customers through email marketing. Companies who do not embrace this ability will be left behind in an increasingly digital world.

In this article, we will discuss how the ongoing pandemic has pushed marketing and sales even further into the digital world, and why your company needs to invest in a highly personalized, automated email marketing strategy to ensure they remain competitive in this new landscape.

1 Why The Best Marketing Campaigns Are Both Automated and Personalized

Automation allows your company to engage in marketing at a greater scale, whereas personalization enables you to connect with your customers and stay attuned to their spending habits.

Every good marketing campaign starts with an email list, which is generally derived from a solid landing page with a compelling CTA on your website. Take care to pay attention to your website and the data regarding user interactions with it so you can craft your marketing efforts accordingly.

One way to ensure that your marketing emails get read is to offer something to your leads for free: an email containing tips or valuable information is more likely to be read than a generic sales message.

Crafting an interesting subject line, (sometimes poised as a question) and coupled with a personalized greeting with the receiver’s name greatly increases the chances of it being opened.

You will inevitably have to try different approaches to find the right type of outreach marketing that works for your brand, and find a perfect personalization formula along the way.

The good news is that personalized marketing efforts typically lead to an impressive ROI, which justifies any additional expense for any company. For example, consumers are now used to engaging with businesses via text messages and open up business texts 98% of the time, which simply is too big of an opportunity to pass up.

You see, you have many different marketing outlets for creating personalized messages besides email, including text messaging, phone messaging, and social media. Work on developing your campaign with each of these outlets in addition to email.

2 The Novel Coronavirus and Closing the Sale

Successful companies have been able to adapt to the crisis and already understood the power of an online presence and digital marketing, specifically email marketing campaigns, to maximize sales. Companies that wanted to stick to traditional methods and fumbled to adapt have been or will be left behind in the dust.

People were understandably frightened by the health and economic concerns generated by the virus. Consumerism can be organized into four primary categories:

The “hibernate and spend” customer

Typically financially well-off, concerned only about the health aspects of the coronavirus. They stay indoors as much as possible and have greatly increased their spending online as a result.

The “keep calm and carry on” customer

Does not change their habits much, and continues to buy and operate as usual.

The “save and stockpile” consumer

Saves their money by cutting back on luxuries and discretionary purposes while also stocking up on essentials as much as they can.

The “cut deep” consumer

Sadly the type most impacted by the pandemic, enduring serious economic wounds from the lockdowns and uncertain of their future.

Many marketing experts are noticing that the ability to adapt and continue offering products and services to these new types of customer types instilled confidence in their companies. Savvy marketers are sending emails and creating new banners for their websites addressing the pandemic head-on and offering messages of comfort.

These companies take a heavy blow and somehow turn it into an opportunity to build relationships: companies like Amazon, Walmart, Target and Progressive quickly adapted to the “new normal” while still giving customers ample ways to spend.

Clever companies realize that consumers are home now more than ever, and use this opportunity to amp up digital marketing and perfect landing pages on their website. The importance of UX, crafting flawless CTAs and using split testing to hone in on the right message enables successful companies to interact with users and build highly qualified email lists for further email marketing efforts.

The businesses that are truly able to maximize profits and scale up their email marketing campaigns often do so by combining automation and personalization. The most popular email marketing services already include numerous automation features such as behavioral or welcome series, reminder emails, surveys, product updates, and so on. At that point, it’s up to you to introduce personalized messaging yourself.

After all, an estimated 75% of businesses already use some form of marketing automation for their customers. When combined with personalization in an email marketing campaign, their marketing efforts can yield staggering results. It won’t hurt to introduce automation into your own marketing efforts.

3 Personalization to succeed in challenging times

If you were interested in a company’s product or service, and that company found a way to reach out to you with a message that showed they wanted your business and truly understood your needs, would you be more likely to buy? Of course, the answer is yes. But the real question is - can your company survive when competitors are doing the same to your customers?

The public health scare from the novel coronavirus has separated the fit from the fragile companies in an increasingly digital world. But the good news is that it’s easy to stay in the game. Simply invest in an automated, personalized marketing strategy and use an email marketing campaign as a kick-off point, and watch the leads flow in. You won’t regret it when the time and energy spent is paid back quickly in increased sales - in fact, you’ll wonder how you ever did business without it.