How personalization drives business impact

2 sides of personalization: business and client.

We all heard about personalization or customer-centric marketing approaches. Most of what we hear is “it’s the thing”, “it’s the future” but same time, “it’s such a commitment” and “it’s so expensive”, “it’s so difficult”. And I’m not gonna lie to you, it’s not easy. It’s not easy because it’s an unknown and not a traditional road yet but after a bit of commitment and learning, you would see it’s the only way how you would want to drive your business from now on.

So, let’s talk about the business impacts of personalization and how it drives results through every stage of the funnel, and in the next article, I’ll talk about the road you would need to take to make it happen (subscribe to not miss my post!).

Business side.

For short, it directly impacts Revenue by affecting Life-Time Value (time to conversion, cross-selling, up-selling, churn prevention), Net-promoter score, effective prioritization of sales team effort.

I’m a big fan of Pirate Strategy in the funnel mapping approach, so, I would use it to describe client-business touchpoints.

Awareness (the stage where you are grabbing their attention).

Properly implemented personalization at the awareness stage requires investment in time for research, segmentation, copywriting from different viewpoints, tracking, and data wrangling.

There are 2 aspects of personalization at play at this stage:

1. The better you understand the potential customer you are trying to attract and the better you address their pain points and pass this “I got you” message through the language they speak, the higher your ad quality, the lower your cost per click.

2. The better you could trace your previous contacts with the potential visitor, the better and narrower the message you could serve to them, the lower cost per click.

The main business outcome of the personalization at the awareness stage is that for the same marketing budget you would get more (or spend less $ to hone your KPI). Personalized content delivery:

1. Lowers cost per click

2. Lowers cost per Landing page view/next click action

Acquisition (the stage where you are acquiring their contacts)

The same magic works for the acquisition stage. In this case, we are talking about landing page message synchronization with the traffic source.

Properly implemented personalization requires investing your time in landing pages and proper tracking development to synchronize with a traffic source and the segment.

Personalized content delivery on the acquisition stage pays off in:

1. Higher conversion rate
2. Lower cost per conversion: contact/data acquisition.

Activation (the stage where you are nurturing the acquired contact by proving that you are “the one” who they are looking for)

At this stage, you already have some data which helps to assign the contact to a certain segment and persona. Or you have a journey that helps to acquire more data about the contact, so you could further personalize the messages and channels you are reaching the contact through.

This segmented messaging approach drives business value in a few directions:

1. Helps score the lead and prioritize the contact outreach
2. Decreases time to the first transaction
3. Helps to bring down the cost per opportunity

Revenue (the money-in stage)

At this stage, we are talking about having the first returns on investment of all of our hard work.

Personalization helps to:

1. Prioritize sales outreach work, by collecting data on lead, it helps to contact those who are ready to be contacted. Efficient human resources allocation means higher results: less time spends per sales contact, more calls/meetings per day.
2. When a client feels that the seller knows him and understands his needs without additional explanation, s/he leaves the place on a positive note, so s/he has a higher chance to spread the word about you and come back to you with more money.
3. Higher amount of the first transaction
4. Less time to conversion

Of course, it would require a lot of work done to build relationships between marketing and sales, build a tech stack and have operational processes in place.

Retention (the more money-in stage)

Staying in touch with your clients, collecting data on their previous purchases and their preferences would allow you to timely bring the right message to your customer. That would find a way to improve your business performance across several KPIs:

1. Cross-selling/upselling volume
2. Lifetime value
3. Limit unnecessary connections — decrease the “unsubscribe” events.
4. Remind about your business on time — reduce the churn rate.

Resurrection (the “let’s try it again” stage)

If you are owning a list of customers who got disappointed in your business, it could be a great chance to leverage the list to build a win-back journey. You not only own the contacts with them but also, know what they strongly dislike. By implementing a proper personalization program for the win-back journey, it would help to improve your KPIs:

1. Cost per lead
2. Cost per opportunity
3. Cost per conversion

Client-Side of Personalization

What does the user get out of a properly implemented personalization program?

1. High-quality service — makes them feel welcomed and special.
2. Fewer freaktion points, more happy moments.
3. Less time spent on distracting phone calls, junk email in the inbox, or letters. (Personally, I hate when I get those credit card offer calls and physical mail from RBC, just based on the fact I don’t have one with them. They are not “reading” my profile correctly, I don’t need it.)
4. Less unrelated annoying banner ads. (Personally, I would love to see something helpful for me and related to my needs at this moment)
5. Less “surfing” on the website to find new information -> more time for important information which would help to make the right decision and quickly (good for business and client).

As you can see, a properly implemented personalization program helps drive business outcomes. Unlike in the previous “old-school” type of marketing, it’s a win-win situation for both: client and business. Clients get what they need when they need it and business benefits from the quick ROI.

In my next article, I would lay out a road map of how the proper personalization program is getting developed and implemented. Stay tuned.

If you want to learn more about personalization and/or have a great project in mind you need a consultation on and/or just want to host a chat on the clubhouse platform, ping me at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marinazub/