The 4 Pillars of Personalization in Digital Marketing

Marketing today is more than connecting customers with messages about products or services they are interested in — it’s about creating a customer experience. As new tools and technologies emerge, the demand for personalized and meaningful experiences from customers remains at the center.

Not only does striving for personalization lead to stronger relationships with your customers, it undoubtedly leads to stronger business results. While putting personalization at the core of your marketing strategy is critical to success, it can be a daunting undertaking. 

At the foundation of personalization are four pillars, which if followed, will lead you through the process of personalizing for your customers. 
 

Establishing User Personas

A persona is a representation of an audience segment based on demographic data (quantitative concepts and averages about this representation) and psychographic data (qualitative insight into what motivates their behaviors or preferences). 

This informs organizations as to how and why they appeal to certain types of customers, as well as the strengths and opportunities that are present throughout their prospective customer experience with the brand. Developing your personas are a key part of any personalization strategy to ensure you have a strong understanding of your audience.

Segmenting Your Audience 

Once you have your personas identified, segmenting your audience will help organize your customers by persona— including consumer preferences, purchasing behavior, and engagement history. Distilling your audience down into specific lists or persona types will help you create personalized messages by persona, and run segmented campaigns for that specific audience. Once your segmentations are in place, you will want to start crafting your strategy for how you can communicate with these various audiences at scale.

Creating Dynamic Content

Dynamic content is a game-changer when it comes to building personalized marketing campaigns at scale. Dynamic content enables you to create website sections, or content blocks in emails, that change based on the persona attributes—which may be dictated by data extensions, behavioral characteristics, or audience type. 

Tools like Salesforce Interaction Studio® (formerly known as Evergage) enable the use of dynamic content across channels for increased efficiency and personalized communication at every touchpoint.
 

Automating Campaigns 

Automation is the most important part of scaling your personalization efforts. Automating key processes, such as segmentation, customer journeys, and data management not only saves marketing teams up to 100+ hours a week, it gives them time to focus on strategy and continue to level up their customer engagement. 

However, the key to automation can not be a "set it and forget it" strategy. The data from each of your campaigns should be constantly evaluated to help drive iterations to your marketing strategy, and automations need to be continuously monitored. 
 

For more information and real customer examples of  how to create personalized experiences in your marketing check out the ebook “Leveraging the Power of Personalization.”