When we talk about personalization, many marketers still think of dynamic content. Emails changing with the recipient’s name, website graphics changing according to the viewer, ad displays customized by audience segment.
It’s the most basic but still effective use of customer data, making your customers feel seen and recognized on your website and campaigns, the same way you’d greet them by name when they drop by a physical store.
Thanks to AI, dynamic content has evolved with more complex personalization for exciting opportunities to attract prospects and delight existing customers.
Dynamic content and personalization combined as a killer combo
Dynamic content adapts to every audience segment to display relevant content to that segment. Today’s AI has made dynamic content even more personalized. Marketers can now have, for example, a dynamic ad to hook their audience and the personalized messaging to match…and ultimately convert their prospects.
Dynamic content and personalization together create a spark that can be super effective in firing up your marketing and sales goals.
Using customer data made robust by AI, dynamic content personalization addresses and anticipates customer needs and offers solutions at the right time. It reaches into the root of extremely effective marketing: upselling, cross-selling, and turning your prospects and existing customers into your voluntary marketing army.
Dynamic content personalization delights with better customer experience
Many businesses place greater importance on growing their customers than nurturing the ones they already have. But finding new customers is more expensive than continuing to engage, and cross-sell/upsell to, current customers, so it’s equally important to delight your existing customers.
Virtually all of them will go elsewhere if they think they can get a better customer experience.
Better customer experience is the name of the game.
74% of millennials will switch if they have a negative experience. Millennials don’t bother about name brands. They prefer quality experiences, and 67% consider it their responsibility to talk about their experience, negative and positive.
All the above make the market fair for small to medium businesses that rock dynamic content personalization and deliver outstanding customer service and experience.
Despite the established notion that millennials don’t buy diamonds, Millennials and Gen Z like supporting businesses and spend more than Baby Boomers and Gen Xers. In 2018, millennials alone spent two thirds of the amount spent by Gen Xers and Baby Boomers.
And Millennials and Gen Z demand and expect the best experiences. With how easy and instant it is to switch across different brands online, it’s no longer necessarily about your product and how good it is.
It’s how good you make the experience with your brand.
How to make your content strategy dynamic and personalized
To attract and convert your target audiences, and to delight your existing customers, it’s all about the experience, from the first encounter with your promotional content (intrusive? informative?) to your product recommendations and nurturing during the decision stage, and on to checkout and beyond with truly relevant and helpful personalized prompts.
Dynamic content isn’t enough–updating your website with fresh, adaptive content won’t drive sales. You can create dynamic content to hook your prospects based on the data you have, but the personalization follow-through ultimately converts them.
Always take a specific route.
Dynamic content personalization narrows down everything. Beyond emails customized with the recipient name, dynamic personalized content are triggered by behavior and data to serve the customer and lead them to conversion.
Behavior-triggered examples:
- An abandoned cart leads to an email with a discount or free shipping.
- A download of a free guide triggers an email drip of extra tips that entice the lead to finally sign up/subscribe to the service.
Data-guided examples:
- A followup email (or SMS) is sent to a customer who purchased a product around the time that product usually runs out with a link for express reordering.
- An email alert goes out when a high-demand product is restocked to customers who added themselves to a waitlist, (and better yet, informing them that you’ve put one on reserve for them for the next 24 hours so it won’t run out again before they’ve had the chance to purchase)
Every offer, every email can be very specific to every customer.
Every product, and every piece of messaging is a chance to deepen your engagement with your customers. Making a sale is just a bonus.
Use AI to never disappoint.
It’s irritating to be hoodwinked by ads or interrupted by irrelevant content. 74% of online consumers hate it when websites display content mismatched to their interests.
Always follow through your dynamic, personalized ads with onsite dynamic personalization. If you hook your target customers with personalized promotions, expect them to land on your website, and your website should be just as personalized.
On-site personalization seals the deal. Use AI to match customer segments to the landing pages, services, and offers they’d recognize as meant especially for them. They give you their data; they expect you to use it.
The key is to understand who your customers are and provide the best experience at every step.
- Are they eligible for any discounts? Do you remind them about it at checkout or do you wait for them to checkout before they see it on the homepage banner? That’s more than disappointing–it can be infuriating.
- Do you implement dynamic content personalization to make intelligent recommendations, not just on landing pages or shop pages, but on search boxes too, to help them narrow down their choices according to their previous preferences?
According to a VentureBeat report, 87% of companies that use web personalization increased their most important metrics by 5% and 39% saw an increase of at least 20%.
To use AI to delight your customers, you need to…
Bring data sources together.
In 2018 Trends in Personalization, 55% of marketers say they don’t have sufficient data and insights to drive effective personalization, while 69% say their data is stored in three or more systems.
AI platforms can collect and connect the data from all your channels, so that you can start working with what you do have, because you do have data! It might be a jumbled mess, but you do have data.
Take advantage of machine learning.
All the above techniques are more than any human team can take on. Dynamic content personalization is beyond basic email personalization tactics you can feed or setup on Mailchimp.
Robust AI machine learning can wade through data, make sense of all the information, and then recognize and automate accurate message delivery so that the right content is always there for the right audiences at the right time.
You can already experience this in WordPress and website plugins for dynamic CTAs, dynamic banners and the like. These tools employ AI.
Conversions and customer loyalty come from great customer interactions.
Great customer interactions–which come from dynamic content personalization–start with the right data. AI and machine learning make it possible to intelligently funnel all customer data to its maximum efficacy for you to deliver the best customer service and customer experiences.
