If your business is already doing different types of marketing online and you’re looking for the best way to increase your ROI from these channels, personalization may be the answer. Why can personalization be such a powerful tool for online marketing? Fully answering that question requires first looking at online behavior.

Not only are people constantly bombarded with all kinds of information whenever they’re online, but individuals are also splitting the time they spend online between multiple devices. As a result, attention spans are getting shorter, which makes it harder for marketing initiatives to stand out. The good news is there’s a way to cut through all the noise. In fact, that’s exactly where personalization comes into the picture.

What Personalization Means in Regards to Email Marketing

Since email marketing is our area of expertise, we want to focus on the types of personalization that work through this channel. Then once you implement this advice, you can take it and apply the same principles to other online marketing channels. When people think of email marketing personalization, using someone’s name is often the first thing that comes to mind. While there’s definitely value in using a person’s actual name whenever you email them, that’s just the tip of the personalization iceberg.

Significantly boosting engagement and other metrics via email marketing personalization is all about sending people what they want, when they want it. For most businesses, that means understanding that not every customer is interested in the same things. This is where segmenting comes into the picture.

The simplest example of segmenting is a retailer that sells different products for men and women. In this example, personalization can be as simple as segmenting between the two genders. This will prevent men from receiving emails about women’s products they don’t care about and vice-versa.

Getting Deeper Into Personalization

Once a business begins to use a technique like segmentation, they can continue into more sophisticated forms of personalization. Continuing with the example of a retailer, it may become clear that some subscribers to the email list enjoy receiving frequent emails about sales and other promotions, while others prefer to interact with less frequent emails.

By using personalization based around behavior, it’s possible to ensure that communication across a group of customers is done at a rate which is ideal for each individual. That type of approach will deliver a stronger ROI than trying to fit every single person into a single pattern.

Additionally, prospects and customers may have different consumption habits. What you ideally send to people who like to quickly run through all their emails on their phone is going to be different than individuals who may check their email less often but prefer to thoughtfully do so on a tablet or computer.

1. ROI
2. Marketing
3. Personalization