Getting it right with personalization and the pitfalls brands should avoid

There’s no doubt that personalization holds the keys to better engagement and customer retention. Brands that personalize have a positive brand perception, excellent sales conversion, and smooth customer experience, among other benefits.

That’s because personalization evokes emotions and catches people’s attention.

Imagine that you were walking in a crowded area and someone called you by your name. Of course, you’d stop and turn to find out who’s calling you, right?

Now, imagine that the same person tried to catch your attention by calling a generic name. You would keep walking on, right?

That’s the power of personalization.

Personalization is one of the most innovative strategies to implement in this age. It’s the toast of everyone that’s trying to create a distinctive brand.

Here are four pieces of stats to prove it.

• Instapage says that personalized email marketing generates an average ROI of about 122%.
• Hubspot also shared that personalized calls to action convert 202% better than non-personalized calls to action.
• According to Twilio, 60% of consumers say they will likely become repeat buyers with a retailer that creates a personalized shopping experience.
• Salesloft reported that they recorded a 75% close rate when they used personalized videos.

That’s why it seems like everyone is jumping on the bandwagon. But, of course, who wouldn’t, going by the immense benefits of personalization?

But the question is, how many brands are doing it the right way?

Personalization Mistakes You Should Avoid at All Cost

All too often, we see brands making personalization mistakes that are capable of hurting their brands. These mistakes often drive them to the point of frustration and put them at the risk of abandoning personalization altogether.

We’ve listed a few personalization mistakes and what you can do to avoid them. Keep reading on to find out what they are.

1. Messing up the codes

Email marketing is one of the channels that use personalization the most. Autoresponders make use of different placeholders specifying certain details about your clients. When you see an email that starts by addressing you with your name, your chance of reading such an email gets high.

But using the wrong placeholder could ruin this experience. So instead of seeing your name appear on the email, you see a ZIP code. At times, it’s the actual strings of code for the name holder that appears in the body of the email. And that’s pathetic.

Once you make this kind of mistake, your readers get the impression that it’s a code at work and not you addressing them. So you should always check carefully before hitting the send button. Sending out a test email to yourself will also help in this situation. It gives the chance to double-check and fix any potential errors before sending out the original email.

2. Not defining the persona appropriately

Personalization aims to improve customer engagement. Brands that pay attention to personalization relate with their customers as humans rather than abstract entities. This creates a deeper connection with them and ultimately leads to a long-lasting relationship.

There’s the need to define audience persona to deliver tailor-made messages that resonate with them. Usually, when brands fail to represent their user personas well, they keep communicating in ways that aren’t appropriate. This creates a disconnect between the brand and the audience, which often results in customer dissatisfaction.

A typical example of how not to personalize is the case of a brand sending out congratulatory messages to women with infertility issues about the arrival of their babies. Silly mistake, isn’t it?

3. Personalizing with outdated or inaccurate data

It’s the availability of data that makes personalization possible. Without data, you can’t understand your customers’ behaviours. You wouldn’t know their lifestyle preferences, appeal to their interests, address, or pain points. And this puts you in a difficult situation.

But it’s one thing to have data at your disposal. What’s more important than having data is making sure the information is accurate. You don’t want to establish communication with your audience with old, outdated data. For example, it doesn’t make sense to keep promoting diaper products to women who have stopped having children. Even when you have the most loyal customer base, it will get to a point where they’ll start to get pissed off with your messaging. So you have to be careful.

Updating your data is something you should do regularly. For example, you may want to divide your audience into segments, so each of them gets customized messages. That would ease the path for creating intelligent correspondence with your audience.

4. Not paying attention to details

Certain situations may require you to handle your correspondences manually. In such cases, personalization is also done manually. But the challenge with this approach is that you’re prone to making errors.

For example, if someone makes an inquiry about your brand via email or voice-mail, the right approach would be to treat their question manually. But in doing that, you should pay attention to minute details. For example, don’t misspell people’s names while addressing their concerns. Also, avoid mispronouncing their names.

It’s okay if you make such errors once in a while. But doing it repeatedly would make you come across as an insensitive or careless brand.

5. Not personalizing at all is the biggest mistake

So far, we’ve identified four of the most common personalized marketing errors. You should avoid them as much as you can. That said, it may interest you to know that none of these mistakes is as bad as leaving out personalization from your marketing plans entirely.

There’s a lot to lose by not personalizing your marketing. It starts from lacking the vision to identify new possibilities in your business. Aside from this, your brand will always play second fiddle to brands that use personalization because it doesn’t have what it takes to stand out in a crowded market.

It pays to make errors while experimenting with personalization and learning from the process rather than not trying. After all, it’s “better to have tried and failed than to have never tried at all.”