4 Ways to Increase Seasonal Sales With Personalized Content on Social Media

How to use personalization technologies to drive more traffic and increase sales

Consumers are bombarded with marketing messages from retailers during holidays and seasonal occasions. They’re more selective about the brands they engage with and purchase from.

In fact, 63% of consumers are annoyed by repeated generic advertising messages. On the other hand, 79% of the companies that exceed their revenue goals use personalized marketing to reach their customers.

Source

Personalized marketing is the key to increasing conversion, and social media platforms offer a lot of opportunities for retailers to leverage the latest personalization technologies to boost revenue.

Here are 4 ways to use personalize content on social media:

 

1. Segment your audience

The foundation of any personalization strategy is to understand the preferences, behaviors, and habits of your target market. Social media marketing allows you to leverage customer data and segment your audience at a granular level so you can deliver timely and relevant messages.

In addition, your content should relate to the audiences’ customer lifecycle stages. During seasonal occasions, many consumers would actively research products and make purchasing decisions. Your posts should provide the relevant information to shoppers with a high purchase intent.

 

2. Focus on one-to-one interactions

Consumers want meaningful interactions with brands. Instead of constantly selling your products, focus on being helpful and relevant to build trust and relationships with your audience.

Monitor all your social media profiles to ensure that you’re answering inquiries or comments in a timely manner. In addition, engage your followers in meaningful conversations — for example, you can ask a question, take a poll, or tag your loyal customers for more personalized interactions.

 

3. Leverage the power of conversational selling with messaging apps

Messaging apps are popular among consumers, and brands are using these features (e.g., Facebook Messenger) to tap into the power of conversational marketing.

With the aid of AI technologies, it’s now possible to deliver highly personalized shopping experiences at scale via messaging apps. You can combine consumer data available on social media marketing platforms with your customer database to deliver meaningful interactions that’ll drive engagement and conversion.  

 

4. Use retargeting ads to reduce cart abandonment

Sales lost due to cart abandonment is a particularly acute challenge during the holiday season and merchants can recover some of these sales by using retargeting ads to re-engage shoppers on social media.    

For example, you can use Facebook dynamic ads to show the exact product a customer has viewed on your website. You can segment the target audience to deliver a highly personalized message or a special offer to increase your conversion rate.

 

Increase the effectiveness of personalized content with customer data

While social media platforms allow you to access a large amount of user data, you can augment the effectiveness of the content by layering on your own customer data to deliver the most relevant and timely information.

By using a robust customer data management platform that supports multi-channel campaigns, you can leverage your database to reach shoppers that are most likely to make a purchase.

Request a demo today to see how our unique personalization solution can help you increase seasonal sales on social media.

Increase eCommerce Conversion this Holiday Season with Personalization

3 key strategies to make more sales on your website with personalization strategies

 

Did you know that 72% of consumers find that online gift shopping has made life easier during the holiday season?

As a retailer, you can’t afford to ignore the various ways that eCommerce can boost your online sales.

In particular, personalized marketing technologies allow brands to engage with consumers online and increase conversion rates. Here are three effective strategies to increase your eCommerce conversion rate this holiday season:

 

1. Optimize website user experience with personalization

Shoppers that engage with personalized website content are more likely to convert. Research found that even though visitors who clicked on product recommendations accounted for only 5% of clicks, those clicks represented 30% of Cyber Week revenue.

You can deliver a personalized experience by displaying relevant content based on a customer’s preferences, browsing behaviors, and purchasing history while augmenting the shopping experience with features such as wishlist, past purchases list, and personalized gift guide.

In addition, you should leverage existing customer data to streamline the checkout experience, reduce cart abandonment, and optimize conversion rate. For example, by pre-selecting options based on customers’ past preferences, providing one-click checkout using existing customer data, and pre-filling forms using information from customer profiles.

 

2. Promote personalized offers with Email Marketing

Email marketing is a great way to engage with your email subscribers and customers who are already familiar with your brand and therefore, more likely to make a purchase.

Leverage your customer database and segment your email list to send emails with offers tailored to specific groups based on their past purchases, customer lifecycle stages, or other data such as preferences, interests, geographic location, and demographic data.

You can set up behavior-triggered workflows, which are initiated by how recipients respond to your previous emails. You should also leverage email retargeting — which can help eCommerce websites increase their revenue by as much as 400% — to re-engage visitors who came to your site but didn’t take action.

 

3. Implement an Omnichannel Personalization Strategy

While 86% of consumers would make an in-store purchase, 75% also order gifts online. Instead of engaging with a brand on one specific channel, consumers do so via a variety of touchpoints — whenever and wherever that’s most convenient for them.

Multichannel shoppers tend to spend more per transaction, so it’s important for retailers to be present in multiple customer touchpoints so they can engage with shoppers at the right place and in the right time.

To increase the effectiveness of your omnichannel marketing strategy, use a customer data management tool that collects customer information so you can understand how shoppers engage with your brand. You can then generate insights on how to deliver the most relevant offers through each channel based on customers’ real-time interactions with your business.

 

Implement your eCommerce personalization strategy at scale

Personalization marketing is a proven way to increase eCommerce conversion rates. In order to implement this strategy at scale, you need the ability to fully leverage all customer data so you can deliver the most relevant content and offers.

Our customer data management platform and its syndication layers, which enables real-time acitiviation of content and offers on multiple channels, allow you to effectvely engage your customers by leveraging the power of personalized marketing.

Request a demo today to see how our solution can help you increase eCommerce conversion this holiday season.

How to Use Marketing Personalization to Increase Holiday Sales

5 ways to use personalization technologies to increase revenue this holiday season.

 

The holiday season presents a great opportunity for retailers to drive more sales and boost profits. However, with the increasing competition from both online and offline merchants, it’s becoming more challenging to cut through the clutter and get shoppers’ attention.

Thankfully, you can leverage the power of personalized marketing to capture the attention of your customers and generate more sales. Personalization has been proven to increase sales, ROI, and customer lifetime value:

Image source

Here are 5 ways to use personalization to increase sales this holiday season:

 

1. Analyze historic data

Metrics from last years’ marketing campaigns is a treasure trove of data that can help you better target promotional messages with personalized information, and deliver them at the right time through the most appropriate channels.

For example, if a customer segment tends to visit your website from a particular channel or at a particular time, you can create targeted messaging to drive more traffic from those sources.

 

2. Leverage geodata to send localized promotions

Personalize your holiday promotions by leveraging location data (e.g., address information on existing customer profiles or geodata from mobile devices) to target local customers with hyper-personalized offerings and drive traffic to your store.

For instance, you can send personalized emails to existing customers with an exclusive in-store promotion or use location services to promote special offers via a mobile app when a shopper is within a specific distance from your store.

 

3. Use AI technologies to deliver real-time offers

AI technologies allow you to analyze a large amount of consumer data and apply the insights to deliver real-time promotions based on each shopper’s preferences, behaviors, or purchasing history so you can increase conversion with the most relevant offers.

If a website visitor exhibits browsing patterns that resemble a specific audience segment, you can display product recommendations that are most popular with that group — similar to how a “lookalike” audience works in many targeting strategies.

 

4. Deliver relevant offers with push notifications

As more consumers are shopping with mobile devices, merchants can leverage push notifications to deliver timely offers via their mobile apps.

By using the vast amount of behavioral data you have collected on customers and website visitors, you can use push notifications to deliver the most appropriate promotions when shoppers exhibit certain browsing patterns that indicate a high purchase intent.

 

5. Entice existing customers with personalized offers

Offering exclusive promotions to existing customers is a great way to improve loyalty and boost customer lifetime value. You can increase the effectiveness of this strategy by leveraging customer data to create personalized offers that cater to each shopper’s preferences and behaviors.

For example, customers who are low spenders should receive a different offer than high spenders. The incentives you use to entice infrequent customers are likely to be different than those intended for frequent buyers.

 

The foundation of an effective personalized marketing strategy

To effectively implement a personalization strategy that will increase sales this holiday season, you need to start with a robust customer data management platform so you can effectively utilize consumer data to deliver a personalized shopping experience at scale.

In addition, choose a software that will allow you to automate the distribution of promotional messages via a variety of channels based on individual customer’s real-time interactions with your brand.

Request a demo today to see how you can use our marketing personalization solution to increase sales this holiday season.

4 Ways To Use Personalization For Healthcare Marketing

Apply marketing personalization to augment patient experience and improve patient retention.

The healthcare industry is becoming increasingly competitive while patients expect interactions with a provider to resemble other consumer experiences.

In order to stand out from your competition, as well as to attract and retain more patients, your medical practice needs to deliver an excellent patient experience that makes receiving care from you convenient and seamless.

With the aid of advanced marketing technologies, many businesses are now delivering personalized user experiences that have helped them increase customer acquisition and retention.

These strategies can be applied to the healthcare industry as well and here’s how you can augment your patient experience:

1. Personalized website content

Sharing helpful and relevant content with your audience and patients can help build trust and relationships. In addition, users are more likely to return to and engage with your website if they can find what they need easily.

You can program your website to show customized information and make content recommendations to the visitors based on a variety of criteria. For example, the search terms they use, the links they click on, the pages they have visited, or in the case of registered users, their medical histories and preferences.

Image source

2. Customized patient portal

More and more consumers prefer to manage their relationships with service providers online via a self-service portal. A customizable patient portal can help you deliver a seamless experience that’ll improve patient retention, reduce errors, and lower administrative cost.

Image source

Deliver a fast and convenient experience by incorporating each user’s medical history, preferences, and other personal data into the patient portal experience. Posting reminders and offering the ability to schedule an appointment, pay invoices using saved payment information, and order prescription refills are a few examples of this.

3. Targeted email marketing

Marketing automation and email personalization have been proven to generate an ROI of as high as 400% when combined with proper segmentation and content targeting strategies.

Image source

By sharing targeted content that’s most relevant to each recipient, you can stay top of mind and nurture relationships with your audience. Such content can include information on specific medical conditions, event announcements, and seasonal resources.

You can also improve patient retention or re-engage lapsed patients by sending out reminders for regular checkups or vaccination visits and make it easy for users to set up an appointment through your online portal.

4. Omnichannel patient support

Consumers want to interact with businesses through their preferred touchpoints and be able to “pick up where they left off” if they switch channels in a middle of an interaction.

They also expect such interactions to take their histories and preferences into account so they can receive personalized content, recommendations, and solutions.

By using a customer data management platform, you can set up a single customer view to facilitate patient communications and ensure that your team is accessing the latest information in real-time to provide the best support possible to improve patient satisfaction.

How To Design a Personalization Marketing Strategy For the Healthcare Industry

4 keys to increasing patient acquisition and retention with personalized content and offers.

Personalization has become one of the most effective marketing strategies for any business to improve customer acquisition and retention by increasing audience engagement and building relationships

It’s no different in the healthcare industry. In fact, with an overwhelming amount of health-related information available, it is now more important than ever to deliver content and services that are helpful and relevant to your patients.

Here are some essential steps to designing a personalization marketing strategy for your healthcare practice:

1. Create personas and map out the buyer’s journey

The first step to successful personalized marketing is understanding your audience by creating a series of buyer personas. 

These personas help you identify your patients’ priorities, the questions they have, the language they use, and their main concerns so you can design communications that speak to them. You can leverage this information for creating your content, designing your offers, and setting up your promotional strategies.

You also need to understand where your patients are in their decision-making process; for instance  they could be researching a medical condition, looking for a provider, or ready to schedule a visit. You can deliver the most relevant content and offer at the right time.

2.  Design targeted content and offers

When you have gained a clear understanding of your patients, identified where they get their information, and segmented your audience according to a variety of criteria, such as health conditions, you can then design targeted content and offers to deliver an individualized experience in the right place and at the right time.

Distribute the information and offers through multiple channels, such as personalized website content, emails, phone, printed materials, and social media, based on the patients’ preferences and past interactions with your content to maximize engagement and conversion.

3. Communicate the privacy policy

In a survey, 49% of consumers don’t mind businesses having a certain amount of their information so they can receive content and offers that are more relevant.

However, healthcare services involve more private and personal information than a typical retail business so there’s a fine line to tread when you use patient information to deliver personalized content.

To reinforce trust and patient relationships while distributing targeted content, you need to clearly communicate your privacy policy and how you utilize patient information before adding your patients’ information to your CRM system.

4. Analyze the data to understand user behaviors

There’s no one-size-fits-all personalization strategy and there’s only one way to find out what really works for your market and your practice, and that’s by analyzing the data to understand how your patients interact with your content and respond to your offers.

To effectively implement a marketing personalization strategy, collect patient information, and analyze the data to fine-tune your marketing communications, you need a robust customer data management system that provides you with a single customer view and offers content recommendations.

Request a demo to talk to our personalization expert and see how Nectarom can help you deliver a personalized patient experience.

How To Use Personalization To Optimize Every Stage Of the Customer Lifecycle

Deliver the most impactful message to drive traffic, convert sales, and build customer loyalty

 

The most effective marketing strategies deliver the right message to the right audience in the right place at the right time to drive traffic, build relationships, convert sales, and build customer loyalty.

Understanding your customer lifecycle stages can help target content and deliver a personalized shopping experience to your prospects and customers.

Image source

In this article, we’ll look at the different customer lifecycle stages and how you can optimize your shopping experience:

Define your customer lifecycle stages

The first step is to review your buyer’s journey and define the various lifecycle stages, which may vary slightly depending on your industry and business model. In general, all customers go through the following: the awareness stage, the consideration stage, the decision stage, and the retention stage.

Image source

Apply personalization to customer lifecycle stages

Using a marketing personalization strategy, you can deliver the most relevant content and offers to each customer based on their lifecycle stages:

Awareness stage

Prospects at this stage are searching for a solution to their challenges and may not yet know about your brand.

Based on their browsing behaviors, such as clicking through to your website while performing a search on a particular keyword or reading a few articles on a particular topic on your website, you can recommend more relevant content to build trust and establish brand awareness.

You can also entice visitors to sign up for a lead magnet so that you can capture their information and build a 360-degree customer profile, which will allow you to further understand their preferences, behaviors, and needs for future personalized interactions.

Consideration stage

At the consideration stage, prospects are evaluating the different solution categories for their problems.

You can personalize the website experience to focus on content designed for this stage, such as by providing the pros and cons of each solution category.

They’re also likely to be on your email list, so you can send them personalized emails with links to such content or create a custom audience for your social media ads to promote these links.

Decision/purchase stage

Your prospects have decided on a solution category and they’re deciding who to purchase from.

They have probably visited your website a few times, viewed the sales pages, and researched about your products or services.

Send personalized emails or recommend website content designed for this stage. For instance, you could make use of demo videos, case studies, and testimonials.

You can send cart abandonment emails and include a special offer to entice them to take action.

Leverage pre-sale support, such as live chat, messenger app, or searchable knowledge base, to answer questions, address objections, and deliver a personalized customer experience that will help increase conversion.

Retention/advocacy stage

After your customers have made the purchase, continue to offer a personalized experience to build loyalty, entice them to make recurring purchases, and tell others about your products or services.

You can send personalized emails to share customer-exclusive content, perhaps an email on the different ways of using the products they have purchased, or recommendations and special offers on related and relevant products.

You can also personalize post-sale support by associating customers’ profiles to the products they have purchased so that you can direct them to the most appropriate resources when they log onto their accounts or get in touch with your customer service department.

Customer database: the foundation of effective personalization

A robust customer database is the foundation of an effective personalized experience appropriate for each stage of the customer’s journey.

Our data management platform (DMP) allows you to centralize your omnichannel customer data and organize the information in real-time so you can deliver the most relevant content to your prospects and customers based on their latest interactions with your brand without missing a beat.

Spring Clean Your Customer Data For Effective Personalization

How to increase the quality of your customer data for effective personalized marketing

Marketing personalization has become an indispensable strategy for retailers who aim to increase sales and improve customer loyalty through the use of targeted content and offers.

Image source

While having the right technology is important, the foundation for implementing an effective personalization strategy is the quality of your customer data.

Without accurate information, you won’t be able to deliver targeted content in the right place at the right time to the right audience.

How to clean up your customer database for effective personalized marketing

It’s important that you regularly clean up your database and audit the sources from which you collect the information to ensure that the customer data is supporting your marketing personalization strategy:

Review web forms

If you’re generating leads by using web forms, ensure that you’re collecting relevant information that helps in targeting your audience effectively.

Consider whether you’re asking for the right kind of data at the right level of detail. Gathering too few details doesn’t allow you to effectively segment your audience while requesting too much information can cause form abandonment.

Audit data fields

Duplicate fields or repetitive information in your customer database can cause errors and confusion.

Ensure that the fields in your customer data management system are set up correctly so that data from web forms, lead generation mechanisms (from your website, social media, or messaging apps), and eCommerce platform is categorized and collated correctly to support your personalized marketing campaigns.

Refine segmentation

Audience segmentation isn’t “set it and forget it.”

Revisit the way you’re segmenting your audience periodically to ensure that it’s supporting your overall marketing strategy.

You can also enhance audience segmentation with the information you gather during the user-interaction sessions with your brand. This includes the products they’re interested in based on their browsing behavior and the questions they ask during a live chat session.

Set up single customer view

To effectively collect and utilize all the available customer data, you need to create a 360-degree customer profile so that the information can be stored in and accessed from a centralized location.

A single customer view allows you to gather relevant customer data and effectively leverage the information to deliver a customer-centric experience through personalization.

Review analytics

There are many different ways to deliver personalized content and offers. Are you leveraging the right customer data to form your strategy?

The best way to find out is to review your analytics and see if your personalization strategy has been effective in driving traffic and generating sales.

If the metrics aren’t meeting your expectations, you’ll have to adjust and test your personalization rules to ensure that you’re using your customer data in a way that helps deliver the most effective content and offers.

Build a solid foundation with a robust customer data management system

After you put in the work to clean up your customer data, ensure that it’s managed and utilized in a way that will help you implement personalization marketing effectively.

A robust customer data management system has become indispensable for marketers who want to use personalization to increase the effectiveness of their omnichannel marketing initiatives.

Request a demo to see how our customer data management system can help you derive customer intelligence and actionable insights so you can make data-driven business decisions and achieve your marketing goals.

 

Here’s What to Expect from Marketing Personalization this Spring

There are plenty of buzz-words going around in tech right now, but the term that has the most practical implications for retailers in Spring 2018 is something much simpler than “voice search” or “virtual reality.” It is the ability to respond to data in real-time that’s more important to the marketing success of a company than any other sweeping technology trend being sold to retailers right now. For companies to have a high success rate with their marketing methods, they need the capability to quickly respond to industry trends and shifts in consumer sentiment. This allows businesses to send consumers marketing communications which can be quickly refined based on which social media platforms, preferred advertising channels and promotional messages appeal to that particular customer at a given moment.

Knowing When to Send a Message

The biggest factor in a company’s success with their personalization initiatives, then, is time. Consider this: AdAge reports that 80 percent of consumers are more likely to do business with a company if it offers a personalized experience. It’s true that this refers to analytics compiled from long-term customer relationships that help brands know what marketing message to send to customers; but also – and perhaps more importantly – this refers to the analytics which help companies determine the best day and time to send marketing messages to a specific customer in order to incentivize them to make a purchase.

To better understand why you need to be able to send the right customer the right message at the right time, think about it like this: How much more likely are you to read, consider, or act on advertising messages from your favorite brands on payday, when all of your expendable income is just sitting there in the bank? Well… most customers are no different, which why this is just one example of how timing truly is everything when it comes to sending marketing messages with measurable ROI.

Following Up in the Right Way

Want to know how not to personalize your marketing efforts? Don’t send customers advertisements or promotions for an item they just bought. This happens in retail way more often than it should, and it stems from a company’s failure to fully integrate their back-of-house technologies to provide real-time data sharing across systems. When technologies aren’t fully integrated it results in an inability for a retailer’s POS system to communicate relevant information, such as the price point and SKU of purchased products, to their CRM system.

When there is this type of a disparity in information sharing between systems, there is nothing preventing a company’s software from making common marketing mistakes that can make customers feel undervalued, such as sending an email saying, “We haven’t seen you in a while,” when that customer just made an online purchase that day, or bombarding a customer’s iPhone with product images of an item they just bought.

An Opportunity for Fast-Action

A recent study by Accenture and Forrester found that customers are underwhelmed by the digital experiences being delivered by most brands. In fact, only 7 percent of existing brands are actually exceeding customer expectations. This means that the bar is still very low for omnichannel experiences, and that companies can set themselves apart by giving customers a targeted, synchronized experience along their path-to-purchase.

As the global conversation about technology continues, an increasing number of company leaders are getting distracted by advancements in arenas such as virtual reality and in-store robots. As a result, there is more opportunity than ever for business-owners to differentiate themselves by refining their customer experience and exceeding customer expectations with real-time personalization and targeted omnichannel marketing initiatives. NectarOM makes it easy for businesses to fully integrate their back-of-house processes, so they can accurately and skillfully respond to customer behavior in real time.

Conversational Selling: Take Personalization To the Next Level

Increase customer satisfaction and conversion with conversational marketing

Live chat and messaging apps have become an integral part of any omni-channel customer service strategy.

Customers value the ability to get answers when and where they want and companies are improving customer satisfaction and conversion rate thanks to the capability of providing real-time responses.

One study found that 38% of customers said they have made a purchase due to a good live chat session. Live chat assistance has also been noted for helping to decrease cart abandonment by up to 30%, which in turn lead to an increase in sales.

Image source

The key to getting the most out of live chat or messaging apps is to deliver a personalized experience tailored to each customer with conversational selling.

One-to-one conversations: the most effective way to convert

Remember the good ol’ days, before lead generation forms and email marketing, when people made sales solely by talking to other people!

With the help of advanced marketing technologies, it’s now possible to have one-on-one conversations with a large number of prospects and customers simultaneously and deliver a highly personalized experience in a way that’s most convenient.

This is often called “conversational marketing” – a process of having real-time, one-on-one conversations to capture, qualify, and connect with your best leads anytime and anywhere.

How to optimize conversational marketing

At the heart of conversational selling is a customer-driven approach that focuses on one-on-one interactions.

With the aid of technology, marketers can scale up these personalized interactions such that one employee can manage multiple, concurrent one-to-one conversations.

Here are some characteristics of conversational marketing to leverage:

Real-time interactions and fast responses

Conversational marketing is effective because customers can get the assistance they need right away.

With the combination of chatbot and live agents, you can effectively provide customers with the most relevant information as quickly as possible.

Chatbots can be programmed to respond to specific questions while triaging more complex requests so that a live agent can step in to assist promptly.

Customer-centric engagements

You don’t convert customers only by collecting leads. You make sales when you engage prospects in a dialog to understand what they need and offer a solution.

Conversational selling is effective because it focuses on having a two-way conversation so that you can deliver the most relevant information or solution based on the context of the interactions.

Personalized conversations

These one-to-one conversations are contextual and informed by a customer’s past interactions with your brand.

Even if you’re talking to a lead for the first time, you can add a personal touch by getting insights from their browsing history, the page on which they’re initiating the contact, or their locations based on IP addresses.

Customer insights

You can glean customer insights and collect additional information to enrich existing customer profiles through conversational marketing.

For example, when you ask a customer if he wants to be notified when there’s news about a certain product category, you get information on the kind of items they’re interested in to inform your segmentation and marketing efforts.

The information gathered through these conversations can help you get a more in-depth understanding of your customers so that you can fine-tune your sales and marketing strategies.

The key to seamless customer experience

Conversational marketing helps deliver seamless customer experience and facilitates prospects’ progression down the purchasing path.

A 360-degree customer profile is the key to success for this marketing strategy.

This single customer view allows your team to deliver an outstanding purchasing experience based on all the interactions a customer has had with your brand so you can maximize the use of technologies such as chat and messaging apps to optimize your ROI.