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Personalized marketing campaigns have become essential for today’s businesses to attract and retain customers. However, truly personalizing a campaign in an efficient way when you have a large base of prospects and customers can be challenging.
Marketers must find ways to tailor their campaigns to each individual’s unique needs and preferences while also making sure that their efforts are efficient and cost-effective. Below, 20 Forbes Agency Council members share their No. 1 tips and strategies to help marketers personalize campaigns without sacrificing efficiency.
1. Enlist The Help Of Artificial Intelligence
Today, you can use AI to personalize various types of campaigns, such as outbound email campaigns or LinkedIn outreach campaigns. This can be done fast and at scale. Additionally, leverage variables such as title, city, company name and other details to vary your copy from one version to the next. - Zamir Javer, Jumpfactor
2. Personalize The Timing And Channel
Look at ways to personalize that don’t necessarily involve a lot of different content variations. For instance, look at how the timing of the content or offer corresponds with the customers’ actions, or determine their preferred channel of communication. Personalizing the timing and channel doesn’t involve the labor-intensive task of creating multiple versions of content and graphics. - Greg Kihlstrom, GK5A
3. Leverage Host-Read Podcast Ads
Host-read podcast ads are a great way to personalize campaigns. By providing podcast hosts with talking points, the host can create a powerful ad read that stays within a brand’s guidelines but is personalized for the audience. When hosts are voicing ads, they tend to have higher listenership, producing excellent results while providing efficiency because the brand is not required to create the ad. - Heather Osgood, True Native Media
4. Keep An Up-To-Date Database
Set yourself up to accurately and efficiently segment campaigns by keeping your customer relationship management database clean, complete and up to date. We encourage clients to keep as many details as possible in their CRM, including contact and demographic information, relationship type and records of all emails and calls. This also helps coordination between sales and marketing teams. Don’t forget to review it regularly! - Natalie Nathanson, Magnetude Consulting
5. Remember What Your Goal Is
If your goal is to send out as many emails as possible, using dynamic media to send out thousands of messages with some personalized greetings might be the most efficient choice. However, if your goal is to gain new clients, taking more time to personalize campaigns and connect with prospective customers will likely be the more efficient option. - Evan Nison, NisonCo
6. Use Dynamic Content
Dynamic content allows you to personalize the message and imagery in your direct mail pieces based on recipient data without requiring a separate design for each individual piece. You can create more relevant and engaging direct mail pieces that are more likely to resonate with your audience and drive response rates. Plus, save you loads of money and time on setup and versioning. - Mike Gunderson, Gunderson Direct Inc.
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7. Take An Agile Approach
Take an agile approach to launching a marketing campaign. Start with a minimum viable product, then test and reiterate until you find a campaign that works. One common pitfall that many brands fall into is microtargeting without fully understanding their audience or having the budget to support it. Establish clear success metrics for each variant to avoid wasted spend and drive better results. - Hugo Loriot, fifty-five
8. Use A Proven Template
Personalization is the cornerstone of high-quality work and provides insurmountable value for clients. To personalize campaigns without sacrificing efficiency, companies should have a proven methodology in place as a starting point for projects. When a client requests work, employees can combine thorough research for individual campaigns with a preexisting template to create unique deliverables. - Kathleen Lucente, Red Fan Communications
9. Start With Data
Analyze and segment your audience, and then use targeted messaging and dynamic content to create relevant experiences. Automation and testing can further optimize personalization at scale. Don’t overlook the importance of measuring results to continually refine and improve your approach. - Kenny Tripura, Edkent Media
10. Personalize The Campaign Within A Known Framework
If a client wants a custom amount of social content each month, consider how that strategy will impact them in the long term and adjust accordingly. Base it on tangible past results that clearly showcase how similar strategies have panned out. - Hannah Trivette, NUVEW Web Solutions
11. Evaluate Clients’ Needs And Listen To Them First
If clients want to go the route of hyper-personalization, make sure to give them a roadmap, clearly outline the journey and offer ways to maintain the tempo to sustain this approach in the future. Before jumping on board with something over-personalized, evaluating all the pros and cons is very important. - Nataliya Andreychuk, Viseven
12. Take A ‘Crawl, Walk, Run’ Approach
Often, brands end up with hyper-personalization and lose their ability to drive overarching business outcomes. Personalization can be incredibly powerful when incorporated with a clear roadmap, goals and learning outcomes. It must be tested at multiple levels—consumer, creative, context and channel—and optimized to scale it efficiently. - Venkata Bhonagiri, Mindshare
13. Combine AI And Human Approaches
Combining AI and human approaches in the ideal way to personalize a campaign. AI provides data on the target audience, such as demographics, age and social media analytics, enabling audience segmentation. Then, human creativity comes into play to craft personalized messaging right for the target audience. This approach delivers campaigns that are highly relevant to the target audience and result in improved outcomes. - Michael Kuzminov, HypeFactory
14. Take Time To Do It Right
The most effective campaigns are personalized. Therefore, you’re not sacrificing efficiency by investing in personalization. Too often, I see clients and agencies have a lot of activity, but no strategy. My best tip is to slow down and invest the time it takes to communicate well and do it right. Behind every transaction is a relationship. You can’t “phone it in” and still build trust. - Jason Mudd, Axia Public Relations
15. Have An Additional ‘Database’
Have an additional “database” (business results, user profiles, any additional analytics that the campaign system doesn’t see in default settings and so on) and inject these metrics back into your ad system. Using that, you can automate according to these “invisible data” and narrow your targeting towards these highest-performing target audiences. - Honza Borysek, advertia digital
16. Segment Your Audience Per Data-Driven Insights
Personalize campaigns while maintaining efficiency by utilizing data-driven insights to segment your audience based on their preferences, behaviors and demographics and then tailoring messages that resonate with them personally. In addition, automation and dynamic content can help you scale personalization by automating the process of delivering customization without sacrificing efficiency. - Ajay Prasad, GMR Web Team
17. Dive Deeper To Understand Your Audience
Develop a specific buyer persona that defines and bifurcates your audience, helping you customize your messaging. Alternatively, you can also leverage advanced automation to personalize campaigns by employing deep-learning algorithms that will help marketers personalize at scale while improving the overall conversion metrics. - Candice Georgiadis, Digital Day
18. Ensure Your Content And Offers Are Relevant
Ensure the relevancy of your content and offers by tracking users’ behavior, interests and demographics. The more information you have about your audience, the more likely you are to be able to target them with highly relevant ads that will get them excited about your product or service. - Rudy Mawer, Mawer Capital LLC
19. Communicate Constantly
Measure twice, cut once: By ensuring you have correct information about and from your client every day, you can ensure they receive fresh media content that doesn’t sound stale. Stalk your clients’ social media profiles, ask them what’s new and become their friend. You will spend less time redoing pitches and changing angles if you have them dialed into your personal cell phone first. - Victoria Kennedy, Victorious PR
20. Create A Strong Brand Style Guide And Voice Guide
For us, putting in extra time and effort when creating the brand style guide and voice guide is critical to delegation when creating personalization and continuity of brand identity. Creating a really strong foundation of usable tools, examples and elements is worth its weight in gold. When time is short, I’d say customizing copy will have an outsized impact. - Nicholas DeNitto, Manufactur
