12 ways to personalize your brand experience
Personalized shopping is everywhere. One minute of scrolling, and you encounter catered ads that can identify if you’ve looked at a B2B software one day or viral Tiktok slippers the next.
Personalized brand experiences happen in the real world, too. When you walk into your favorite restaurant, you are greeted by name. Personalization is an integral part of any business. It establishes regulars, repeat customers, and (hopefully!) community.
The quickest way to organically build that community is by establishing customer relationships. You’ve probably read that sentiment in other B2B blogs before, so:
Personalization happens when you reach the customer beyond their keyboard. Every interaction and conversation becomes personal because your brand has become important to them.
In this post, we will explain why customer personalization is vital for success, illustrate how brands incorporate personalization throughout the customer journey, provide 12 tips for implementing brand personalization with your product, and discuss how to measure your efforts.
Why is personalization important in marketing?
Customer. Relationships.
When you have a customer relationship, instead of just a transaction, your digital marketing performance metrics elevate to the next level.
80% of shoppers are likelier to buy from a brand that provides an experience tailored specifically to them. Additionally, according to Salesforce, 66% of consumers expect you to personalize their experience, so your marketing campaigns will come off especially flat if they’re generic. And up to 70% of people say a company’s knowledge of their needs affects their loyalty to the brand.
If you’re looking for both new and repeat customers, personalization strategies are key.
Brands should incorporate personalization through every part of the customer journey
In life, relationships are complex; you have to work to make them last. This sentiment holds for brands, too.
When you think of the customer buying journey, you can improve your outcomes at each funnel stage by using personalization.
To gain awareness, you can make semi-personalized ad campaigns targeting folks by their interest, demographics, and tons of other data points embedded in ad algorithms.
Once you’ve achieved an actual sale or conversation, you can use your customers' purchase history to make personalized recommendations with higher conversion rates.
The bottom line is that brand personalization is far more than just using merge tags in your email marketing — there are opportunities to create memorable experiences at various touchpoints throughout the entire customer journey you should be taking advantage of.
Speaking of tactics, let’s get onto our list of 12 ideas for brand personalization you can implement with your team.
12 ideas for personalization with your brand
These ideas and examples of personalization span from your app’s UI to marketing tactics to how sales gets involved for the close.
1. Customer accounts
When it comes to web and app sessions, you can offer only so much personalization to an unknown user. This is especially true in an increasingly cookie-less world.
If a user logs in, however, you can attribute all session data to a unique identifier, which opens many doors regarding what you can personalize for the user. For example, with a logged-in session, you can save a user’s progress on your site or app so that they can resume right where they left off after the last session.
In addition to adding convenience, marketers and developers can schedule personalized offers based on data they wouldn’t have otherwise.
2. Display choices
Don’t be afraid to let your users choose their own level of personalization. You can present many options within your UX design to allow users to enhance their experience across the entire app.
For example, some users prefer to use dark mode on their devices. Providing this an option (and perhaps even including a notification alerting them) allows them more control over their environment.
Additionally, display customization can assist users with vision impairment and help with more accessibility.
With Sendbird’s UI Kit, you can access a set of prebuilt UI components that allows you to easily craft an in-app chat with all the essential messaging features. Our development kit includes light and dark themes, fonts, colors, and more.
3. Use data to enhance experiences
Customer data is a treasure trove of personalization opportunities. Using a CRM like HubSpot allows you to match data to marketing automation workflows that help you offer relevant communications unique to the individual.
We’ll cover some examples of how to use customer data for marketing strategies below. Still, the first step is implementing technology to help you capture, store, and analyze customer data points.
4. Send personalized messages
Sending personalized messages to your customer via email, SMS, and in-app notifications is a great way to show your users that you understand their needs.
At the top level, you should at least include your customer's first name when addressing them to make it feel like a 1:1 interaction. Make sure to collect this data during your onboarding process.
You can also use your app analytics to guide users toward deeper and more meaningful conversions within your product. For example, if you have a popular feature that a new user has discovered yet, guide them toward their ‘aha’ moment with personalized messages based on app usage triggers.
5. Personalized loyalty programs
When done correctly, personalized loyalty programs can ultimately express brand personalization. The trick is to figure out what type of reward offers the strongest motivation for your customer. For a commodity product, like gasoline and/or groceries, your best bet is to reward loyalty with some discount customers can earn with repeat purchases.
Other loyalty programs might reward their regular customers exclusive products and/or experiences or early-bird access — either way, they receive more value than one-off customers.
6. Segment your email lists
Personalizing emails is more than just including {{first.name}} merge tags in your subject lines.
Once you get over 100 email subscribers, you should no longer be blasting out generic emails 100% of the time. Instead, consider segmenting your email list using product data, customer status, demographics, or other account data.
Segmentation allows you to use your emails to address the primary pain point of your audience. For example, a paid subscriber has already decided your product is the best way to solve their problem, therefore, they need education on features to get value from your app.
On the other hand, a free trial member needs encouragement to move them toward a paid plan; they should receive proof points and case studies showing how others like them have succeeded with your product.
If you want more from your email marketing, personalized content that speaks individually to the user's problems is critical.
7. Utilize social media
Social media is a great way to bring your brand voice to life and provides many opportunities to connect personally with your customer and fans.
One way to get personal with social media is to use your channels for customer support. Soliciting feedback and solving your customers' issues in public shows customers that you care about their experience. Still, it also signals future customers to the same effect.
Discord does a great job providing customer support via Twitter while maintaining an informal and approachable voice, which fits their brand perfectly.
Additionally, brands can use social media to engage their customers by sharing their product use cases and tagging them with their social media handles. The email client Superhuman is known for engaging with its users via Twitter and LinkedIn, and even has a “Wall of Love” page on its website showcasing positive product feedback posted on social channels.
8. Personalize sales follow-ups
Sales can be tough, but high-quality personalized follow-up can be a great way to sign new clients. But the “Just checking in” email after a product demo or free trial signup can fall on deaf ears, partially due to the lack of personalization.
Pocus is pioneering a new approach called product-led sales by turning product data into actionable insights for sales teams. Growth teams can map product data to opportunities for revenue by creating sales workflows based on data-driven insights, helping them to turn free trials into customers and single users into team subscriptions.
9. Ask your customers what they want
In addition to data-driven insights you capture organically, sometimes it’s easier and more effective to ask your customers their preferences.
Depending on what stage your user is in (free trial, paid membership, power user, etc.) there are a few different ways to do this.
You can use yes/no pop-ups for casual users to segment them according to basic criteria. For regular users, you might inquire about their communication preferences (email, SMS, frequency, etc.) to communicate in a style that fits their needs. For power users, consider sending Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys to find out ways you might be able to turn them into brand evangelists.
10. Use ad targeting
Ad targeting provides a means to personalize the brand experience before somebody becomes a customer. If you’ve done your research, there’s quite a bit of information you can know about your target audience before engagement.
Here are just a few examples:
Existing customers vs. new customers: Segment these audiences and tailor your creative to match your goals best. Existing customers should leave reviews and evangelize the product, while new customers may need more info on pricing and solving their problems.
Location: Someone shopping inside the U.S. might have different buying motivations from somebody in APAC, but they will undoubtedly have different cultural references. Make sure your ad copy speaks their language and utilizes proper context.
11. Product recommendations
Upselling and cross-selling are ways to increase average order value, which is a crucial metric in understanding how much people trust your brand. While almost everyone understands how this works from a retail standpoint (think about Amazon or your favorite online clothing brand), this method also works in the B2B space.
Rippling provides HR, IT, and finance software for companies with employees. And while a company could bundle a ton of their different products right from the start, that’s typically not how it works. Instead, Rippling offers a specialized product, such as a payroll tool, then has their sales team engage the customer with upsells based on specific triggers. For instance, if the staff at Rippling sees that one of their customers just added a bunch of new employees, they might reach out and see if they need help with device management, which is another service they offer.
Product recommendations can go way beyond the “You might also like” pop-up banners on retail websites.
12. Content recommendations
The longer you can keep somebody reading your content, the greater your chances of converting them into a customer.
HubSpot mastered providing its readers with relevant content recommendations long ago. The simplest example of this is how all of their blog posts end with a call to action to read or watch something else — often a webinar or a whitepaper behind a form submission.
But the art of it isn’t in the technical execution; it’s the fact that they know their buyer’s journey so well that they move seamlessly from product awareness to solution consideration all in one setting. First, you’re reading about how to increase email conversion rates (the problem). Next, you’re listening to a recorded webinar about segmenting your email lists (a solution to the previous problem) using their software.
How do I measure personalization efforts?
If you’re going to try one — or all of — these personalization efforts, you’re also going to want to track their effectiveness. No matter which tactic you choose, you’ll need to set up your test like a true scientific experiment, meaning:
Record your stats for a given time before you implement your changes, then re-record them for some time after you’ve implemented them.
Here are several metrics you’ll want to measure:
Engagement rate (CTR, social media engagement, etc)
Cost per lead
Average order value
Customer lifetime value
ROI
Pick and choose the ones that make sense for your business.
Make your in-app experience personal
As you can see, personalizing your brand is more than just one marketing channel — it takes a focused effort across multiple touchpoints to truly make your customers feel special.
Sendbird is an ideal partner to help you add that extra gloss to your mobile application.
Innovative brands around the world boost engagement, conversions, and CSAT with Sendbird's conversations platform. Build social, marketing, and support chat into your app in a way completely customized to your brand goals.
Ready to get started with Sendbird? Try for free for 30 days or talk with our sales team.
