What is Personalized Marketing? And How Much Personalization is Too Much?

Tailoring marketing efforts based on data collected from individual customers is key to creating meaningful connections and enhancing the customer experience. By leveraging insights such as specific interests, shopping preferences, purchase histories and behaviors, marketers can deliver relevant messages and offers that resonate to drive conversions and ensure customers feel valued and understood.

Personalized Marketing Defined

To personalize something means to adapt it to the needs of an individual, and this is the essence of personalized marketing: Tailored marketing based on data collected from individual customers. 

Personalization in marketing requires data from individual customers to be successful – what are their specific interests, shopping preferences, purchase histories, behaviors, etc.?

As a marketer, this data helps you deliver more relevant messages and offers to your target audience. Of course, you want personalization to drive conversions, but to do that, the intention behind personalization has to be to enhance the customer experience.

That’s because people don’t want to be treated like a number or to feel like you only see dollar signs when they visit your website or storefront. They expect to be seen and known enough by you to have experiences specific to them – that is the type of marketing that moves the needle and creates brand loyalists.

Personalized marketing isn’t new, nor is it restricted to digital marketing. Technology certainly makes it easier to deliver (read 10 B2B Marketing Automation Tools to Make Scaling Simple to see how), but it isn’t the only way to make prospective customers feel special. Here’s an analog example for you: When I checked into my hotel room on the first evening of a multi-evening stay, I discovered a handwritten note addressed to me, welcoming me to the hotel and the city. As a bonus, I also received a bag of candy, which was well-received after a long day of traveling! That was a low-/no-tech and low-cost way to create a personalized experience that left me feeling special and that created a positive association with that hotel and the hotel chain. 

3 Key Aspects of Personalized Marketing

Effective marketing personalization requires three key aspects that we’ll review in detail: data utilization, custom communication, and omnichannel consistency.

Data Utilization

Personalization requires quality data. To create campaigns that resonate with your target audience, you need information about individual members, ranging from broad to specific. Broad information includes demographics – their age, gender, location, etc. Then, you narrow in by using their purchase history. To gain even greater insights, look at their online behavior and real-time actions on your website.

Custom Communication

Tailoring communication to individual customers through personalized emails with custom subjects and content, product recommendations, and targeted ads based on browsing history makes your marketing efforts more relevant and click-worthier.

Omnichannel Consistency

Your marketing efforts aren’t limited to a single channel, and your personalization efforts shouldn’t be either. Personalization across your emails, social media channels, website, mobile apps and more makes for a consistent user experience that is vital for maintaining customer engagement and building loyalty.

The Pros and Cons of Personalized Marketing

Personalized marketing done right is beneficial for your business. But doing it right is not always easy; without the proper care and tools, costly missteps can happen.

Pros

1. Improved Customer Experience

Feeling valued and understood as a customer can’t be understated. (The mechanic I take my vehicle to leaves a personalized thank you card inside my car after each visit. That warm and fuzzy feeling I have after each visit is part of why I keep going back!)

2. Increased Engagement and Conversion

Customers are more likely to respond to messages tailored to their interests and needs.

3. Better ROI on Marketing

Personalized marketing can reduce customer acquisition costs and increase customer lifetime value.

4. Creating Brand Superfans

Marketing ROI is easier to achieve when your customers feel strongly connected to your brand. It increases their loyalty, which results in increased repeat business (and referrals!).

Cons

1. Data Privacy Concerns

Do you ever feel like you’re being watched a bit too closely online? Your prospects do too! How you collect and use consumer data for personalization has the potential to raise privacy concerns if you don’t balance personalization with data protection regulations.

2. Tech and Implementation

You need a lot of individual consumer data for effective (and not creepy) personalized marketing, and that requires the right tech tools to help you collect, analyze and aggregate it all. For smaller businesses, this might be financially and/or logistically out of reach.

Examples of Personalized Marketing

Marketing personalization can get complex, but it doesn’t have to be. Here are three tried and tested examples of simple yet effective personalized marketing.

Personalized Emails

As people subscribe to your emails or place an order on your website, you are likely collecting key pieces of information about them that you can use in subsequent emails. 

Use their first name in email subject lines or in the email greeting to “talk” directly to them.

Segmentation allows you to deliver personalized emails on a larger scale, though you can also send tailored content on a smaller scale like self-improvement experts Tony Robbins and Dean Graziosi did after a webinar. Those who registered for the webinar received a follow-up email with a picture of Dean “holding an envelope with each participant’s first name handwritten on it.” Did this take more time than sending the same email to everyone but with personalized greetings? Most certainly. Did it create a more memorable experience for recipients? Without a doubt.

Product Recommendations

If you shop online, you’ve likely seen “for you” pages based on your previous purchases or had other items “you might like” suggested to you on individual product pages. Amazon is a prime (pun intended) example of this. The grocery store I place online orders for pickup with has a wealth of data on my shopping habits and uses it to send me personalized coupons based on the products I have bought from them before.

Custom Ads

Digital ads are often generic and are easily scrolled past. You can stop the scroll and capture the attention of your prospects when the content reflects their interests and past interactions.

Start Personalizing Your Own Marketing

Personalized marketing, when executed thoughtfully, offers numerous benefits, from improved customer experiences and increased engagement to better ROI and the creation of brand superfans. However, marketers must navigate challenges such as data privacy concerns and the need for technological tools that may be beyond their budget. 

By understanding and implementing effective marketing personalization strategies, businesses can create impactful, tailored interactions that drive long-term success. Whether through personalized emails, product recommendations, or custom ads, the power of personalization in marketing is undeniable and essential for building strong, lasting customer relationships.

To start with personalized marketing today, visit our website or schedule a demo of our proprietary CRM, Bamboo Reach.