Evolve Your Marketing: Get on Your Customers' Level

[Nick_S]

Evolve Your Marketing

Because digital marketing is constantly evolving and developing, small business marketers are presented with a unique opportunity — the opportunity to level up their marketing game and add new, impactful strategies to the mix. Solid, ongoing email, social, and text messaging strategies can help build relationships and create success — but what’s out there to help you understand your customers, personalize your messaging even further, and reach them in their preferred online locations?

In this three-part series, we’ll be hitting on three big ways small business marketers can take their marketing efforts from status quo to something truly spectacular through automation, personalization, and more.

Get on Your Customers' Level

So once you know and understand your customers, what’s next? Understanding them doesn’t matter if you don’t communicate with them in a way that demonstrates that understanding. One-size-fits-all marketing can feel inauthentic and fall flat, but by adding personal touches to your email and text messages, you can build relationships at scale — quickly, easily, and without having to create dozens of custom emails each time you reach out to your audience.

Here are ways to take what you know about your customers and turn it into something that speaks to them personally.

Dynamic Content

What is dynamic content and how does it work in email?

Every business wants its content to be dynamic — that is, energetic, stimulating, and progressive. But in digital marketing, dynamic content is content that changes based on the user before they ever interact with it at all.

This means you can create and send all your contacts a single email, but by adding dynamic content blocks, you can include content that changes based on your contacts’ information stored in standard and custom fields within your database. Depending on what information you set out to gather from your contacts, you can use dynamic content to personalize your email in more refined, more specific ways. Dynamic information can be simple things like name and geographical location all the way up to complex things like product preferences and donor status, depending on your database.

A great example of this would be a gardening center asking users about their preferences when they sign up: Do they plant more flowers or food plants? Do they like houseplants or luscious landscaping? Then they can use a dynamic content block in their newsletter to display a coupon targeted exactly to their users’ preferences. One on-sale orchid, coming right up!

How does this help me take my marketing to the next level?

Ultimately, the success or failure of your marketing hinges on a single factor: whether your audience responds to it. Personalizing your outreach is one way to ensure you’re reaching the right people with the right message, and that they feel the message was fully intended for them.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

What is search engine optimization (SEO) and how does it work?

For instance, this could mean the difference between saying “American pub-style restaurant” on your website and sa

 

ying “Modern pub serving American cuisine, with an expansive menu including burgers, hot wings, steak dinners, and homemade desserts.”

How does this help me take my marketing to the next level?

If you’re not an SEO expert, then it can be difficult to look at your website and see where you can make improvements. But using tools that can assess the copy and content of your website as a whole and create scoring, insights, and recommendations can be a quick, easy way to make certain you see where improvements can be made — and where you can provide your customers the exact information they need to make a decision.

Unlike other forms of content personalization, SEO efforts work to make sure you’re speaking to the right audience before they reach your website, and help you deliver the experience they expect, boosting both their knowledge and their perception of your business.

Ecommerce Segmentation

What is custom segmentation and how does it work?

Custom segmentation is the practice of creating more advanced groups of customers based on their interactions with your business. For ecommerce businesses in particular, this segmentation is based on buyer behavior.

This segmentation works hand-in-hand with your online store provider (like Shopify, WooCommerce, and others), utilizing information generated during the shopping process to create customer segments. These can be basic criteria (like whether a customer has placed an order) or more advanced (like how much a customer has spent, or what specific products they purchased). Some providers even provide individual spending projections, allowing you to segment your digital marketing to that, as well.

Ultimately, how you segment your audience as an ecommerce business is dependent on the amount of information you get — so the more thoroughly you can integrate your shop into your digital marketing (and vice versa), the more sophisticated and impactful your outreach can become.

How does this help me?

Loyal customers are the backbone of any retail business, and ecommerce is no different. By talking to your customers about how they buy, what they want, and what they need not only ensures engagement and future purchases, but also lets your customers know you’re paying attention to their relationship with you, and that how they shop with you matters.

This type of segmentation can help you to create personalized product recommendations, impactful win-back campaigns, and long-lived loyalty programs. Get on your customers’ level and you’ll find they’ll want to stay on yours, too!

Have questions? Let us know below! If you have any experience with dynamic content, SEO, and ecommerce segmentation we'd love to hear your success stories!