4 Undisclosed Secrets About Personalized Marketing Find out here what your competitors don't want you to know.

Personalize or perish. This seems a bit harsh but it's true. The customer expects tailored message one-on-one experience with the brand. Marketers knew the true potential of setting the personalized environment in a complex multi-channel customer journey.

We, marketers, don't have a magic wand to know what customers are thinking while browsing the website. What we have is technology and data to identify who they are and what interest they have. The advent of IOT has further raised the expectations bar high; especially because of wearable tech gadgets customers think anything can be possible. The end goals of personalization are many.

• Generating marketing qualified leads
• Increasing the sales
• Improving the website engagement
• Creating better customer experience

Omnichannel Personalization

Let's start with omnichannel. For the customer, whether it is online or offline customer need a blended experience. With the omnichannel platform, retail companies now profile the customer data. Each footprint of the individual journey will be tracked from the website, email, mobile, contact center and although to in-store.

So let's say a sale representative is talking with a known customer on the floor. The retail store has both online browsing and offline purchasing history. In last spring, as shopper showed the great affinity towards specific brand sale representative shows product recommendations displayed on mobile POS. Further, if the specific personalized item is unavailable in the store; same will be shipped through the website or other store's inventory.

Here is another example: While contact center associate having a call with the customer, with the help of a platform, he or she sees the previous in-store, the web and mobile interactions in one single interface. Now contact center associate upsell or cross-sell with personalized communications throughout the call.

Marketing Automation

According to marketingautomationinsider.com, in 2015, over 142,700 businesses are now using marketing automation tool. Yet, only 369 of the top 10,000 websites have implemented it.

Even now, most of the companies segment the marketing database and personalize the messages accordingly.

At least 80 per cent of the companies are left behind in using the marketing automation tool for marketing the products and services. However, with a large number of data already available in the companies, the challenge is how to nurture the prospect leads in quick time.

Marketing Automation has taken a driver seat steering the marketing team in engaging with prospects and customers. The benefits are many:

• Manages individual conversation with millions of potential customers
• Personalized emails automated with respect to the previous conversation
• Personalized Emails delivered based on the previous behavioral data
• Leads nurtured automatically

Marketing Automation is an extended arm of email. Brand sends marketing and transactional emails as per the behavior of the visitor. For example: With user's browser history, time spent on the specific page, clicks clicked on the call to action buttons on email, tool drive visitors to the relevant landing page.

Personalized Advertising

This year marketers have moved one step ahead in advertising. Previously retargeted ads shown to who visited the specific page of the website through dropping the cookies to the browser. Now if you have a list of contacts you can upload all the gmail addresses and roll out pay per click ads. These ads will be displayed in, Gmail sponsored promotion, google search network and youtube.

Leverage Twitter Audiences on Twitter and Custom Audiences on Facebook. Again, if you have emails and phone numbers you can roll out Facebook and Twitter ads.

Marketers can see the silver line in banner ad performance. Thanks to programmatic ads. Display ads failed to serve the true purpose of advertisers. Even Retargeting is able to live up to the expectations.

Whereas programmatic ads deliver customized ad to each member of the audience. Customer-driven data is stored in Publisher platform and Data management platform, in addition, the personal data too stored in marketing automation tool.

For Example, John visits your website and spent some time viewing denim jean of Levis brand. Now advertiser can bid higher in the next websites that john visits. Even you can find the other sites that john has visited in search of denim jean.

Website personalization

Website personalization is the low-hanging fruit. Personalized content is key to increase visitor engagement on the website. Below are few examples of website personalization.

• Dynamic content is delivered with respect to the location. Tracking the IP content is delivered by country and city. Company's career page shown according to the country, the home page of food delivery website displayed on the basis of cities.
• eCommerce companies leverage the clickstream analysis. For Example, companies learn the interaction and click of every user to deliver the real-time contextual experience. Offers, guides, product recommendations, search results, are personalized.
• Create personalized landing pages with respect to the search query of a paid campaign. For example: when a user searches Marvel T-shirt and clicks on the snippets of the PPC ad, technology matches the search query to the specific product in e-commerce site and dynamically creates the landing page.

Personalization wins the heart of customers. In a way, marketers can show how much they have understood about the customers. A truly holistic experience builds the customer loyalty. With an element of surprise and personalized marketing did at the right time, it leads to increase your ROI.