Is personalization the future of marketing?

For the last decade, most of the marketing world has focused on raw traffic acquisition through channels like SEO, content marketing, and digital advertising via Google AdWords and Facebook.

But as clicks shift from organic to paid in some verticals, marketers are realizing that we are playing in a new world where driving the growth that seems to have come so easily for the last decade is going to require new strategies and tools.

Conversion optimization is becoming a better understood practice, but at its essence, conversion optimization involves changes to your website or product to convert more visitors to customers. We’re not talking button colors here; we’re talking full changes to your website flows and funnels to drive exponential growth.

But what if that’s just the start?

What if you could actually know who your website visitors are in real time and change your messaging to speak directly to them and sell them on your service’s benefits for their specific business?

What if you could also know if they are already a customer and remove email fields to allow them to sign up to new products or email courses with just one click?

Amazingly, this is now becoming reality and those who embrace it early will reap the benefits.

Here are four tools that are enabling the future of conversion optimization in our present day.

Drip

Drip is an email marketing platform that allows you to tag visitors who come to your site and drop them into specific campaigns and ad groups based on the pages they visit and the actions they take.

Depending on your business model, you can set up smart automations and emails that trigger based on their usage and other campaigns to which they are subscribed. Coupled with integrations to tools like LeadPages, Drip is a powerful tool for sending the right messages to your customer inboxes at the right time.

I asked Derrick Reimer about Drip’s technology and why they invested in personalization. He told me:

Years ago, it was standard practice to blast the same messages to your entire list and “personalization” meant little more than swapping in the recipient’s first name in the salutation. We believe that the best way to help you sell more stuff online is through highly-targeted messaging that speaks directly to the needs of prospects and customers at the right time, through the right medium.

LeadPages

LeadPages is landing page software that allows marketers, entrepreneurs, and anyone with access to a website to design landing pages without having to write code.

LeadPages also allows you to send campaigns to your subscribers that include a one-click signup for events like webinars or meetups. This is a great way, among others, to lower the sign up barrier for your email subscribers by not requiring them to re-enter information you already have.

And with a bit of code knowledge and clarity around who your visitors are and where they come from, you can also change the messaging on your page in real time to speak directly to them and their needs.

But if that’s over your head, then there’s a new solution.

RightMessage

RightMessage is a new beta software tool that takes what LeadPages and Drip do and takes it to the next level. The founder is a longtime Drip user who has built seven-figure businesses off the back of Drip and smart personalization via tagging, and now is building RightMessage to make messaging personalization easier.

Brennan Dunn told me that the goal of RightMessage is this:

If I had a booth at a design conference or something like that, I am going to talk to them differently than I would somebody like at a marketing conference. [We do that] offline and [we’re] just making it a little more accessible online.

The goal of a tool like RightMessage is to help you message your offering or product to your visitor based off any combination of factors such as referral source or your email campaigns to which they are already subscribed. The creators have seen conversion lifts of over 250%, and now they’re helping you do the same.

Facebook ads

You might be saying “Really John, Facebook ads? Everyone does those.”

I have to mention Facebook ads because they are more powerful than most people realize.

For example, within Facebook ads you are able to run a video campaign to a broad yet still targeted audience. Once someone watches your video for a predetermined number of seconds, you can then move them into another audience and show them a different set of ads across the Facebook network.

And of course, the Facebook ad pixel installed on your site is the most powerful personalized marketing and messaging tool out there.

Based on their activity on your site, you can take the messaging they’ve seen via RightMessage or a similar tool and serve them ads that reinforce your message and encourage them to come back and take action.

Your turn

Hopefully your marketing strategies mind is now churning with the possibilities of personalization in marketing, and hopefully you’ve already started implementing them in your own marketing.

I’d love to hear the personalized marketing you’ve done to drive real results for your clients, so tweet them at @getcredo and we’ll retweet them!

Top image via Unsplash