Personalization
at Scale

Personalization is great, but how
do you achieve it at scale?

Personalization

When you're able to anticipate and deliver against your prospects' needs without them having to put in the effort, you're naturally going to have more success because the experience becomes highly intuitive and nearly frictionless.

Rather than providing one static digital journey for each customer, personalization delivers a tailored buying experience for every consumer—becoming more sophisticated, advanced, and customized with each progressive touchpoint.

The goal of personalization is to build and strengthen consumer relationships through more relevant experiences, which is proven to lead to more engagement, more sales, and more revenue.

To start, lets talk about the path to personalization:

Our top-tip list

Follow these tips for setting up email personalization at your organization. Personalization works best when you're able to use clean, error-free data and set up airtight processes to avoid errors. Error-filled personalization is a one-way ticket to a bad customer experience.

Identify Obstacles

Personalization can require substantial resources, budget, and manual execution.

Take inventory of the data available to you, the data you would like to have, and any stakeholders or SMEs (subject matter experts) you need to consult, and create a plan based on what is achievable.

TIP: Start small and layer on additional layers after you've created a successful framework

4. Content Strategy

Personalization works because you're adding value that's relevant to your audience. Here are some content ideas:

Top-of-Funnel (TOFU): Blog, eBook, infographic, podcast, video Middle-of-Funnel (MOFU): Blog, eBook, case study, webinar
Bottom-of-Funnel (BOFU): Case study, datasheet, webinar Upsell/Cross-Sell: Case study, datasheet, webinar Loyalty/Advocacy: Survey, newsletter, rewards program

2. Review Personas

Lock in your personas!

The best way to personalize is by studying your target consumers' pain points, demographics, firmographics, and behaviors in order to o provide resonant messaging that drives engagement and strengthens relationships.

3. Set Goals & Outcomes

What do you hope to achieve? Better landing page conversion? Close the lead to pipeline conversion gap? Reduce customer churn?

Identifying outcomes will lay the groundwork for the content, segmentation, and funnel stages you'll need to support.

Want more?

Check out this great blog on email personalization myths!

Test, Score, And Optimize

Congratulations! You should now be delivering some really engaging customer journeys that are encouraging more conversions, sales, and brand stickiness. But don't stop there!

A/B Test: Test messaging, tone of voice between different personas, cadence, content, etc. Montior changes and optimize based on winners.

Review Lead Scoring: Determining where a prospect is in the buyer's journey can be challenging and may require updating lead scoring. Work closely with your team members across departments to develop a system that works for your company, and continue to improve your efforts over time based on your results.

KEEP GOING!

Best Practices

Personalization strategies to boost conversions

SKIP

Personalizing subject lines by {‌{first name}‌}

INSTEAD

Personalize with {‌{company name}‌}, {‌{industry}‌}, or {‌{job title}‌}. It's not done as much, so it will help you stand out a little bit more.

TRY

Personalizing the friendly from. Break up your marketing communications with different senders so your audience doesn't feel like you are crowding the inbox.

Some examples might be: from Act-On Team, from Act-On Tips, from Act-On Webinars, Act-On Insider etc.

CHECK

Your data is the key to personalization—make sure it's accurate. Because the only thing worse than not personalizing is getting it wrong!

If you aren't confident in the data, keep it simple. Match your tone and message to your ICP, rather than trying to be uber-specific and missing the mark.