A personal touch can be the difference between a customer choosing your offering or a competitor’s. Today’s consumer wants to feel like your business understands their problems and offers solutions that work best for them. And today’s marketing teams need the help that automation can provide to personalize at scale.

Journey mapping helps your team better understand your customers and visualize all possibilities for predictive messaging and personalization.
/ See Step #2 – Assess where you are

But implementing personalization can be daunting. It often involves researching, segmenting, and organizing your audiences; creating individualized messaging and unique user experiences; and selecting the underlying technology platform(s)—it can be enough to abandon the effort entirely.

But personalization doesn’t have to be intimidating. We recommend five simple steps that help our clients quickly and efficiently personalize their offerings to better serve their customers.

STEP 1 – Look for easy wins.

Find areas where you can easily add personalization, such as enhancing email content and leveraging basic name and demographic information. You want to take advantage of the core capabilities you have today before building anything new. This can add the personal touches your customers desire while you create a game plan for a more indepth project.

STEP 2 – Assess where you are.

Work with members of your marketing and customer success teams to get the full picture of how you’re tracking your audiences.

• Do you have a CRM? If you do, are you using it effectively? If not, do you need one?
• What other systems are storing and tracking information about your customers?

Analyze how you can best leverage the tools and data available on the market today and identify potential gaps.

STEP 3 – Find out what your audiences really want.

You may think you know what your audiences want, but without user testing and research, you can’t be sure. And with new services available today, user research and testing doesn’t have to time-intensive or costly.

We recently shared how to conduct user research easily and effectively. Learn more here! This process can provide huge dividends in helping you create a product that your users want and use.

STEP 4 – Map out your customers’ personalized journeys.

Create journey maps for each individual customer type. This process puts you in your audiences’ shoes, allowing you to see how they interact with your business through multiple touch points. Journey mapping helps your team better understand your customers and visualize all possibilities for predictive messaging and personalization.

STEP 5 – Select a technology platform and start small.

Implementing a large personalization project can be complex and put a heavy strain on your marketing resources (including your assets, content and people!).

Tips

• Use your journey maps to define the areas where personalization can be implemented easily and will deliver the most business value. This could be through higher revenue, reduced operations costs, or improved customer use.
• Work together with your team to ensure the project you choose is something you can accomplish, while best using your time and resources. For example, starting small might mean understanding your users’ locations in order to offer them products or services that make sense for them or remarketing based on page views.
• Take a “build-on” approach – ensure first that a wide breadth of data is available. Then, layer on additional elements of personalization in a controlled manner to test and learn what is most effective.

Adding personal touches can help your customers feel like your business understands them and their unique needs. Follow these steps to start the personalization process—without being overwhelmed by it.

Ready to take on your own “personalization project,” but have some questions about where to start?

Have no fear. Submit your information below and we’re happy to talk shop about all things digital.