Building Effective Marketing Personalization with Survey Research

Marketing personalization is a key ingredient in sustaining a business, as it improves businesses’ relations with their target market on several fronts. 96% of marketers say that personalization helps them advance customer relationships, while 88% said that it had a considerable lift in business results. 

Customers themselves prefer personalization in marketing, as 36% of customers believe brands should provide more personalized marketing materials ; however, they are hesitant to share too much information. Thus, the onus is on brands to deliver personalization, but without making their customers feel uncomfortable when performing market research.

There are several ways that survey research solves this problem, so that brands don’t have to choose between the two alternatives of a personalized experience but with intrusive probing, or a non-personalized experience, but without intrusive prodding.

This article explores marketing personalization, its importance, types and how survey research helps businesses execute personalized marketing.

Understanding Marketing Personalization

Also referred to as personalized marketing and one-to-one marketing, marketing personalization is the practice of using data and technology to deliver individualized brand messaging, product offerings and customer experiences (CX) targeted to individual customers.

As its name suggests, this method is an alternative to generic messaging and even the kinds targeted towards particular target markets (albeit broad groups). 

This kind of method is also oppositional to traditional marketing, which focuses on the quantity of messages over their relevance. In traditional marketing, brands would cast a wide net of marketing efforts, such as cold-calling, billboards, subways ads, emails and more, but earn a small number of buying customers.

Marketing personalization, on the other hand, is centered on creating personalized messaging relevant for specific people, the kind that doesn’t appear to be mass-produced. It is a means of interacting with customers that feels more human, as it involves their preferences, interests, likes and dislikes and other aspects. 

A marketing personalization strategy can include the following examples: 

1. Customized email marketing campaigns
2. Customized social media marketing
3. Personalized ads 
4. Fear of missing out (FOMO) messaging
5. Targeted product recommendations
6. Tailored content 
7. Personalized calls with representatives

The Importance of Marketing Personalization

Personalized marketing is critical for a number of reasons. Broadly speaking, it can help businesses optimize a wide number of marketing campaigns and make headway in ROI.

First off, personalized marketing grants businesses the ability to reach specific audiences. Collecting customer data allows businesses to better understand the makeup of their target market. Thus, performing personalization allows brands to perform market segmentation in the process, acquainting and acclimating businesses with their various customer segments. 

This allows brands to build more effective email, content and other targeted marketing campaigns. For example, if your market segment likes certain music, brands can use music references in their email campaigns, blog posts, or their email opt-in forms for a more personalized experience.

Personalization also improves the customer experience. CX goes beyond hiring friendly customer agents to assist and engage customers. This is because CX involves all the experiences that customers undergo in their customer journey, from nurture content and emails, to social media interactions, browsing a website, making a purchase and revisiting a brand post-purchasing. 

Given the importance of customer experience, businesses ought to personalize their content at any point in a customer journey. 80% of customers are more likely to buy from a brand that offers personalized experiences.

Personalization helps improve content marketing strategy, which is especially important given that content steers many decisions, thoughts and associations with a company. Personalized content marketing makes businesses stand out from the crowd by creating unique and relevant content. 

In turn, this creates positive associations with a brand and increases the chances of prospective and current customers returning to a website. This allows businesses to further nurture them, as well as to be continually etched in their minds.   

Personalization is also a means for relationship-building, as it creates more personal and stronger relationships with consumers. As such, businesses can show their customers that they care about them, with personalized marketing such as birthday wishes, discounts on birthdays, a personalized rewards system, thank you emails and more. 

As a result, personalization boosts customer loyalty, a critical concept for maintaining a successful business, as loyal customers buy frequently, make recommendations about a brand, act as brand advocates, are more willing to try a brand’s new products, along with contributing in other ways. 

Given that personalization involves studying customer buying behavior in order to send individualized messaging, it allows marketers to make better product recommendations. Making recommendations is key to pushing conversions, given that they tend to be relevant to the customers’ interests and past shopping activity. This is also a key tactic for cross-selling and upselling.

Finally, the most considerable benefit that marketing personalization offers is raising sales and conversions. When businesses grow their customer loyalty and retain consumers through personalized messages and offers, they will be more likely to buy. This idea piggybacks off of the aforesaid figure of 80% of customers being more likely to buy from a brand with personalization. Thus, businesses can count on this tactic to increase their revenue.

The Aspects of Marketing Personalization

There are a number of ways that brands can forge marketing personalization. While the means are plentiful if not virtually limitless, there are certain aspects that form the basis of personalized marketing. Businesses should include these components in their personalization efforts, whenever they are in doubt.

The following lists the key elements of personalization in marketing:

1. Hyper-targeted content
   1. Content that calls out a particular segment, persona and individual customer
   2. It involves understanding customers beyond their gender, ethnicity and age.
2. Specified content
   1. This content addresses specific needs, desires, behaviors, habits and more.
   2. It involves prospect-specific news feeds, topics, and content resources/ collections.
3. Responsive design
   1. A kind of dynamic content, which omits setting up individual campaigns, and trying to route customers into the most fitting one, you create a single campaign, (1 email, 1 landing page, etc.) which are presented differently based on the target on the receiving end.
   2. This brings out the convenience side of personalization, as it is customized for a particular customer. In turn, it will make the customer feel that the company took the time to know him.
4. Forging a sense of customer identity.
   1. Personalized messaging gives customers a sense of identity rather than being treated as another part of the masses. Instead, they are made to feel like unique individuals.
   2. This solves the grievances of mass marketing, given how often customers are flooded by it, whereas a personalized message treats customers as not just another member of a herd. Thus, the messaging will be more credible. 

How Survey Research Fosters Marketing Personalization

Survey research is an invaluable component of the personalization process. Before creating any personalized marketing campaigns, let alone reaping their benefits, brands must understand their customers as close to an individual basis as possible.

After all, it’s impossible to engage in personalization when you do not know how to personalize. Every market segment iis different, not least every individual customer. What works for one segment or customer, will be ill-fitting for another. 

Thus, brands need to establish a firm grasp of their customers’ identities, thereby extracting customer data on who the customers are, what makes them unique and how a business is fitted to cater to their individual needs and remedy their unique pain points. 

Surveys obtain the insights into all of these concerns and more. They allow brands to collect better data for decision-making and gain quick access to a wealth of customer feedback. This feedback is useful for gauging existing marketing campaigns, along with setting up new ones based on the intel brands gain on their target market. 

Surveys help brands learn the ins and outs of customer behavior, along with gaining valuable insight into the unique characteristics, habits and thoughts of their customers. Therefore, businesses and market researchers should use surveys as the primary means for personalization campaigns and understanding their customers at large.

Taking Personalized Efforts to the Next Level

Customer data is the most valuable thing that businesses can leverage in order to build the most effective personalized campaigns. To do so, they need access to a breadth of customer data; while this may appear to be a feat, survey research makes it easy and practical. 

However, not all online survey platforms are built the same. Businesses must bear that in mind and choose their online survey tools wisely.  A strong online survey platform allows brands to hyper-target their respondents, set up a number of surveys, deploy the surveys on a large network and ensure the respondents are chosen via randomization — something that random device engagement sampling (RDE) makes possible. 

The Pollfish platform offers all of these capabilities and more to ensure that market researchers are obtaining the highest quality of data for their personalized marketing campaigns, along with all others.