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4 Marketing Personalization Tips for Digital Businesses Crafting personalized messages is one way of forging profitable, long-lasting relationships. Check out these four actionable tips.

By Steve Tan Edited by Jessica Thomas

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

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As an entrepreneur, you can grow your business exponentially through the power of personalized marketing and laser-focused messaging. Laser-targeted sales messaging allows you to cut through the noise in a world where consumers are bombarded with information overload.

Delivering highly relevant and personalized messages is one way of forging long-lasting customer relationships that will drive loyalty and sales in the long run. The key to effective personalization is strong segmentation. Begin by correctly identifying your most important target audience, and focus on creating messages that will resonate with them and bring value to them.

What is personalized marketing? This is a data-driven marketing technique that helps foster relationships with your customers on an individual level.

Take note that marketing personalization is a two-way street. The customer provides signals through digital behavior, such as online browsing, posting on social media and purchases. The company responds to the signal by sending the customer a timely and relevant message called a trigger.

By analyzing the digital behavior of your target audience, you will gain valuable insights that can guide your marketing personalization efforts. This information can help you identify what works and what doesn't in terms of marketing tactics and messages.

When you get marketing personalization right, you can deliver relevant real-time messages for each customer. The more customized your message, the more likely people are to convert.

Here are 4 marketing personalization strategies for digital businesses:

Create targeted content

Content relevance is crucial to personalized marketing, but delivering it at the right time is even more so. Creating targeted content can accelerate conversion speed thanks to delivering timely messages at the perfect time.

For example, when a person revisits your online ecommerce store, you could offer them something more relevant to their journey. On their first visit, the user could be shown an ad, and on their second visit, you could offer a free ebook. By their third visit, you could offer a discount coupon.

Anticipate the future needs of consumers. By analyzing browsing behavior, you can provide a tailored experience for the visitor and trigger the right actions in order to keep them onboard. Leads will be more likely to convert when they receive the right content, products and offers for their individual needs.

Related: Personalized Marketing Is No Longer a Luxury

Personalize based on referral source

A referral source is the method by which a visitor arrives at your ecommerce store. Establish relevance and trust by personalizing landing pages based on referral source.

When you launch a campaign, take time to assure visitors that they're in the right place when they click an ad. To personalize content for visitors coming from that specific campaign, highlight key information from the ad right onto the personalized landing page to improve overall user experience and drive more conversions.

For example, if you launch a paid ad promising a coupon and the visitor arrives on your website without seeing the coupon immediately, there is a chance that the visitor will become confused and leave frustrated.

As more visitors experience faster and more effective ways of finding the products and services that they need, the higher the likelihood that they will return to your site.

This becomes even more crucial when you are launching ad campaigns in various social media platforms.

For instance, a person hears about your company's product because of an influencer's social media post. That person then clicks the link posted by the influencer and lands on a generic homepage that does not mention the influencer or the recommended product. This might prompt the person to leave immediately and result in a lot of bounces from your landing page.

Take the time to craft personalized landing page offers and targeted calls to action that are specifically designed for the influencer's followers.

The text could mention the influencer and list the products they've recommended in the past. The copy could also compile reviews made by the influencer about the product. This way, there is a higher likelihood that the person will become engaged and convert as a customer.

For this reason, it is important to create dynamic copy based on the visitor's referral source — whether it's from ads, emails, social media or other websites.

Related: Perform Powerful Personalized Marketing in 4 Easy Steps

Personalize your site's pop-ups

Utilizing pop-ups on your website can be an effective way to the attention of users and motivate them to take your suggested action. Take note that pop-ups are much more effective when they are relevant to the content that visitors are already consuming on your site.

Customers see value in receiving the content they actually need, especially if the content is exclusive to subscribers and isn't readily available on the web. For instance, if the user is reading a blog post on dropshipping suppliers, you could offer your reader access to content, such as a PDF file that could be used to compare dropshipping suppliers or a white paper listing contact details of dropshipping suppliers. You can then prompt the reader to enter their email addresses to download your free content and receive the file in their inbox.

In addition to this, you can also use a pop-up message to remind a visitor who is about to leave your site about the product left in their shopping cart.

By offering visitors what they want, they'll be more likely to act.

Related: 4 Undisclosed Secrets About Personalized Marketing

Make use of location data

Location-based personalization is particularly useful when promoting brick-and-mortar stores or pickup locations. This is an excellent way to drive your marketing personalization efforts, especially when marketing to mobile users.

By using geography-based targeting, you will be able to customize your message to the people who are most likely to welcome your offer.

First, ask permission from your website visitors to track their physical locations. You can then use this information to provide store-specific deals, such as bundles for sunblock and beach towels in branches situated near the beach.

Done right, marketing personalization can create personalized experiences that can lead to increased sales and customer loyalty.

It can help companies that want to personalize at scale and skyrocket their growth in the digital world.

Related: How to Balance Marketing Automation and Personalization

Steve Tan

CEO of LeapVista

A serial entrepreneur with over 14 years of ecommerce experience, Steve Tan has founded several startups. Tan is also the CEO of LeapVista, an education company that offers transformative mentoring and world-class ecommerce education.

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