This blog post is from the archived Growmatik.ai blog. In 2024, Convesio acquired Growmatik and re-launched it as ConvesioConvert. Learn more about ConvesioConvert.
Long gone are the days of one-size-fits-all marketing. The only effective marketing campaigns nowadays are those that are relevant. Those that immediately ring a bell about something you’ve been looking for lately. In fact, long gone too are the days of individually personalized banners ads. Personalization today means a little more than just the creepy ads you see on Facebook and Instagram that relate to something you were talking about with your friends yesterday. Today, we’ll talk about the next level of personalization that every marketing campaign should strive for, the best way to achieve personalization at scale: cross-channel marketing.
In this extensive guide I’ll walk you through the theory and practice of personalization at scale with cross-channel marketing and show you how it can benefit your marketing.
- What’s missing with the singular personalization approach?
- What is personalization at scale?
- How to begin with personalization at scale?
- How to implement cross-channel marketing
- Practical examples of personalization at scale with Growmatik
- Parting Thoughts
What’s missing with the singular personalization approach?
Well, nothing! It just does not deliver the promise of personalization in full. When you see your name in an email you’ve received from a brand you’ve shopped with for 5 years, you might feel a tiny bit of respect—which immediately disappears when you click on its call to action button and see items that do not relate to you at all. This is a classic example of a personalization approach that just focuses on 1 channel and forgets about the other touchpoints.
“Hey, [first name]” is not considered a personalization anymore. Since everyone is doing it, nobody cares anymore.
With personalization, we show our customers that we acknowledge their uniqueness and tailor our marketing to fit their exact needs. Giving people exactly what they need or like gives them a sense of privilege, respect and recognition. Nowadays, shallow personalization messages such as ‘Hey, [first name]!’ just don’t cut it anymore, as everyone else is doing that to your customer. Once everyone starts using the same tactic, it loses its power.
What is personalization at scale?
To improve our personalization approach, we should make the shift from single-channel to multi-channel, from fragmented to orchestrated and from one-off to consistent. This is the only way to show a different level of recognition and personalization to your customers in a massively saturated and competitive market.
- Multi-channel
A multi-channel functionality facilitates collecting information about your customer across all channels so that you can serve them relevant content on each channel. For example, their behaviour on different webpages can help you personalize your marketing emails and popups. - Orchestrated
Makes possible the creation and execution of automations that operate on multiple channels, such as website, email, Facebook ads, SMS and more, all from within one tool. For example, a cart abandoner receives a follow-up email and is shown a personalized homepage, exclusive discount popups and facebook ads simultaneously. - Consistent
Advanced triggering criteria makes it possible to define smart personalizations across different parts of the customer’s journey, from acquisition to nurturing and retention. For example, a new visitor is shown a “subscribe” popup with a freebie, then receives a welcome email. The next day he receives a first-purchase exclusive discount and, a few days later, a follow up message, in case he hasn’t used the coupon yet.
How to begin with personalization at scale?
Personalization at such a scale is not going to be easy. It involves many marketing channels, thousands of customers with specific characteristics, needs and behavior and, most challengingly, powerful software capable of executing such inclusive campaigns. And, on top of it all, we’ll need to constantly monitor and measure results and refine campaigns wherever possible.
We can only accomplish all of this with a well-researched plan and effective software. Our research should provide answers to key questions about our personalization strategy, our targeting and logistics. Specifically, we want to answer the following questions:
| WHO is your target? |
Define exactly who your campaign target is. Every target is defined using specific attributes (such as location, referral source, etc.) or behavioral patterns (such as purchase frequency, visit counts, etc.). |
| WHAT is your message? |
Define what you are going to say, the content of your message. |
| WHY are you saying it? |
Define what the purpose of the message is. What are you implying to the user or what effect do you want to have on them? Purposes can include the following:, giving a good first impression, motivating customers with incentives to make their first purchase, re-engaging them after a few days of inactivity, etc. |
| WHEN are you going to say it? |
Your campaign should be served at the right time, not earlier or later. For example, a reengagement discount should be emailed when a customer has been inactive for a specified period of time. Similarly, you should only send a cart abandonment follow up email if the user has an abandoned cart in their history. |
| WHERE are you going to say it? |
You should decide what touchpoint you want to use to serve your personalized marketing content. Will you opt for your website homepage, popups or email campaigns, SMS or social media ads? If you want to spark a conversation with an existing user, email is ideal, but if you want to grab the attention of new visitors, a popup might be more effective. |
| HOW are you going to say it? |
Will you use a direct sales pitch with personalized keywords? Will you motivate them with exclusivity? Or do you use time-boxed offers to leverage their FOMO cognitive bias? |
How to implement cross-channel marketing
In the following sections I will walk you through the steps of research, planning, execution and, finally, measurement to achieve a fully-fledged personalization at scale with your marketing. The software we will use across all of these steps is Growmatik.
1- Personalization is about journeys, not sessions. Discover it!
The first step towards any personalization at scale is unveiling the customer journey. If you want to personalize your visitors’ path towards subscribing to, buying from, staying with and advocating for your brand, you should clearly investigate the path so that you can personalize it.
- See which funnel is working and which is failing.
- See top-performing locations, referral sources, landing pages, subscription channels and products on your website at a glance.
- Look at specific locations, sources, landing pages, subscription channels or specific products to see what your traffic is doing within those funnels.
- What routes do customers take to critical conversion actions in their journey (e.g. sign-up, purchase, form submission, etc.)? What pages do they visit before conversion? What landing pages drive the most bounces?
- What are the purchase frequency patterns across different products?
The answers to these questions will give you your first clues about personalizing a complete experience for your customers.
Tools like Behavior Flow in Google Analytics might help a bit by showing the flow of users within sessions across different pages. With the Growmatik customer journey feature, you can narrow down journeys up to the point of conversion. Growmatik’s customer journey offers 5 dimensions from which to examine your website: location, source, landing page, subscription channel and product. You can set one or more dimensions to narrow down journeys in various directions. In the example below, we chose landing page X as the dimension and the involved journeys were revealed accordingly:
People who have landed on page X are mostly from Austria and Germany and they were mostly referred by Google and Yelp websites. 30 people have subscribed and nobody has purchased anything.
What personalization takeaways does this research provide?
- Create a custom landing page in German for visitors from these locations.
- Provide exclusive offers (freebies or discounts) to Austrian and German customers.
- Run Google Adwords and sponsored listings in Yelp for Germany and Austria sounds like a good investment.
In another example below, USB-C adapters are mostly purchased through cross-selling email campaigns.
This means:
- Email campaigns work best with your accessories category. How about including more related items in your cross-selling emails?
- Your share of search traffic to USB-C adapters is good. How about creating an SEO-optimized landing page with special content about this item?
2- Collect customer data across all channels
Marketing is a contest for attention relevancy. If we agree on this paradigm shift, then the whole point of focus in our sales pitch should change from product to customer. Our marketing campaigns should be driven by customer needs and fueled by as much information about their attributes, problems and challenges as we can gather.
However, users do not provide this information in ready-to-use statements. They leave you clues whenever they interact with any of the touchpoints with your brand. When they arrive on your landing page, browse through different inner pages, interact with your popups, they give you information. More information can be found in their reaction to your emails, what they buy and don’t buy, the offers they welcome and reject and more.
Our mission is to collect these clues across all channels of interaction, unify them, analyze them and put them to good use.
Below is some of the key information that you need to collect in order to drive meaningful personalization:
| Referral details | Website activity | Email activity | Shopping activity |
|---|---|---|---|
| Referring location | Landing exit pages | Total number of campaigns sent | Average days before converting (subscribing, first purchase) |
| Referring source website or campaign | First and last visit dates | Date of last opened and clicked emails | Purchase frequency |
| Visiting time of the day | Total number of visits | Number of opened, unopened, clicked and unclicked campaigns | Product category |
| Top weekday activity | Total number of viewed pages | Last opened and clicked on email | Top purchased item |
| Device and browser used | Visited pages | Abandoned cart | |
| Average time spent per visit | Total number of orders, purchased items and order value | ||
| Total time spent on your website | Number of coupons used | ||
| First and last order dates | |||
These clues are spread across different channels. If we use separate marketing tools, plugins and services for each of the touchpoints, it will be difficult to collect all the pieces of the puzzle and turn them into meaningful and actionable insights. Unifying such large amounts of fragmented information requires a cross-channel solution that collects this information and gives you the possibility to analyze data, create behavioral segments, craft unique personalized automations for each segment and finally assess the performance of each automation.
Growmatik collects and unifies all this information from your customers’ activity on your website, emails and more. When a user first arrives at your website, a user profile is formed for them and enriched over time based on their behavior across all channels. In the People section, you can play with a long range of 50+ behavioral filters for different user types and create simple or sophisticated segments.
3- Create meaningful customer segments to target
With the comprehensive data we have at hand, we should now be able to divide customers into meaningful groups, groups that drive value or have the potential to drive value to your business. Who is your ideal customer? Are you targeting a specific geolocation? Does the size of orders or the number of orders matter? How frequently do you expect customers to visit?
Many e-commerce businesses measure the value of a customer by RFM values (recency, frequency, monetary). In the People section we can use filters to create a segment for our ideal customers based on the RFM values, allowing us to later serve them personalized campaigns to amplify their activity even further (with VIP exclusive offers, for example):
With relative time selectors such as ‘not on’ and ‘more than’, we can target the people who do not meet our RFM expectations and serve them a reactivation campaign to increase their activity.
There are two important elements that many forget when creating customer segments: the leading/lagging segmentation and the quality of segments.
Create both lagging and leading segments
Personalization at scale constitutes a holistic approach throughout the customer journey covering both leading and lagging segmentation.
- Lagging segmentation deals with past activity. It involves considering the behavioral records collected from a user over their lifetime, with metrics on in-site activity and shopping history, such as last visit date, last purchase date & count, number of campaigns sent and executing specific campaigns for them.
- Leading segmentation deals with present and future activity. It involves being ready to personalize user experience the moment a visitor arrives, using metrics on referral details such as referring location & timezone, referring website source, referring device, first landing page and so forth.
Personalization at scale means being prepared to personalize experiences for both existing and future users.
Your personalization tool should be capable of personalization at these two levels. Using the automation dashboard in Growmatik, you can create personalized automations that are triggered immediately when a user arrives on your website. One example involves displaying an H1 text in the hero section that includes the name of the city from which a user is visiting, a UTM value included in the URL or a greeting message based on the time of the day in their timezone.
Segmentation is about quality, not quantity
One of the pitfalls of lean marketing is analysis paralysis. This is when you focus too much on statistical analysis without getting good actionable insight out of it. The same holds true for personalization at scale when you swamp yourself with making segments without paying attention to whether they matter to your business or not. Creating just too many segments may give us a false image of being customer-centric and on the right path to personalization at scale. But what matters when creating segments is not the number of segments we create but how effective they are.
Our goal should be to create segments of customers based on the potential we see in them and the value we think they will bring if we personalize our marketing for them. Think twice before creating segments that seem shallow or just not founded on strong enough hypotheses. Think about what defines the value you expect from your customers. If you run an ecommerce business, RFM segmentation may be useful for your business and features such as a loyalty program in WooCommerce or Shopify may be a good personalization option. If you’re involved in SaaS you may consider a customer’s lifetime value and think of ways to amplify it.
Target a small but valuable group instead of a large group without potential
4- Orchestrate personalization across all channels
This is the most important and probably the most challenging step for many marketers and business owners when practicing personalization at scale. Move on to this step once you have done all the research about your website funnels, defined your ideal customer and shaped your potential valuable segments. Now you are ready to build personalization campaigns that target each segment based on their status, needs and preferences. The biggest challenge is finding software that can arrange, execute and maintain automations at this scale across all channels from a single dashboard.
Based on the factors that we mentioned earlier in the section What is personalization at scale?, the software you choose should be capable of:
- Collecting and unifying customer data from all customer touchpoints and enriching the profile over time
- Offering a rich filtering criteria covering all attributional and behavioral filters to create segments
- Creating personalized content (e.g. image and textual content, product lists, blog lists, keywords and more) to be used across different channels
- Executing personalized automations for each segment throughout the entire customer journey and within designated touchpoints (such as webpages, email, popups, etc.)
- Providing performance reports for every automation so that you can learn and refine them over time
It is absolutely key that you use a catch-all tool offering all of these features in one place instead of using different tools for each feature.
In the next section I will walk you through the steps needed to create personalized automations in Growmatik. Let’s get down to business!
Orchestration Step 1- Define your segments
In Growmatik’s People section, you can create segments by defining a wide range of personal and behavioral attributes or grouping them together. There are more than 50 filters to choose from in six different categories: personal details, referral details, site activity, email activity, shopping activity and custom attributes.
Just select a user type and add/modify the filters. You can add as many filters as you wish. Each filter has its own custom set of options to make even more specific segments.
You can also use the premade custom segments provided by Growmatik in the sidebar. These include some commonly used segments such as new leads, potential customers, VIP customers and more to save time (don’t forget to check their filters and make sure they match with your interests). While playing with the filtering for your segments, you will notice the results in the user table, which includes user details such as name, email, country, last visit and more.
Orchestration Step 2- Craft personalized automations for each segment
Based on your segment’s specifications, decide on the relevant personalizations and the channels in which they should be served. Automations in Growmatik are built in the form of an “IF … THEN” statement. Every automation has the following:
Defining Condition(s)
A condition defines who will be the subject of your personalization. It is in fact a group of people who have one or more of the attributes or behaviors listed in Table 1.
Defining Action(s)
An action is executed once the condition you set is triggered. It can be:
- Showing a popup,
- Personalizing a webpage
- Sending an email
For ease of use, you can assign any automation to your segment by simply clicking on the Automate Segment button right in the People page. You can assign automations to your segment in any of the touchpoints. Just choose the relevant action(s) for your automation (email, webpages, popups and more):
This is the most important capability a holistic marketing automation platform should feature to run personalization at scale
Collect information, build segments and create personalization across all channels. All from a single source!
Orchestration Step 3 – Create personalized content for your campaigns
Targets are locked and weapons set, all that’s left is the bullets! We now need to create the material to include in your personalized campaigns. But be careful with what you use to load your weapon. Our weapons won’t accept generic content, only personalized material.
Personalize all visual content when it makes sense
See what your automation tool offers for personalizing content. Growmatik offers a special tool for web page personalization; a simple visual tool to edit existing page content in the frontend layer without touching the source code. You can also drag and drop new elements such as text, image, video, buttons, icons, product lists and blog lists to your personalization from the elements library.
When you choose ‘page personalize’ as an automation action, you will be asked to choose the page that you’d like to personalize and then will be taken to the personalizer environment to apply these changes.
Use personalized keywords
The Growmatik webpage personalizer tool, email builder and popup builder all offer a wide range of dynamic keywords that you can use to personalize your textual content in each campaign. This includes keywords like:
- General info keywords such as date, daytime, weekday, month
- Referral details keywords such as UTM parameters in the URL
- Personal info keywords such as name, city, country
- Behavioral info keywords such as user’s time spent on the website, number of viewed pages, number of clicked and opened emails
- Shopping info keywords such as first and last purchase dates, number of purchases and orders, total order value
Use dynamic keywords at critical touchpoints in the website as well as emails.
Use personalized product and blog lists in your web pages and emails
Include product and blog lists inside your content that reflect your customers’ shopping or reading history. For example, Growmatik allows you to include related products, product categories, abandoned items, related upsells, related cross-sells, related discounted items inside web pages or emails based on the customer’s shopping history.
You can also show related blog posts or blog categories inside pages or emails based on the user’s reading history on your website.
Use personalized offers (coupons) in your popups and emails
Personalization is all about evoking a sense of recognition and privilege. One good way to trigger that psychological effect is to offer exclusive discounts to your users at impactful touchpoints. For example, a few days after they subscribe to your blog, you can send them an email including a personalized discount on their first purchase.
With Growmatik you can generate and include functional coupons inside email and popup content. You can simply define the coupon settings and the functional coupon code will be rendered in the frontend to the user.
Orchestration Step 4 – Measure results to refine or scale
As we discussed earlier, you will need to constantly measure the performance of marketing automation by reviewing the key metrics of your campaign based on the channel used and decide to continue, stop, refine or amplify when necessary. In Growmatik, you can check the report section of your automation to see the relevant metrics for your campaign
Positive performance metrics are a sign of a healthy personalization campaign and can inspire similar campaigns for your segment.
That sums up the 4 main steps of creating personalization at scale with cross-channel marketing automation. Let’s see some examples that show the process in action.
Practical examples of personalization at scale with Growmatik
We will provide example campaigns that cover different key points in a given customer’s journey. These personalized campaigns will run in different channels to facilitate better engagement and conversion at each key point. There are 4 key points to target:
- Acquisition
- Nurturing
- Conversion
- Retention
Below is a list of campaigns we can run across these 4 key points:
| Acquisition campaigns | Nurturing campaigns | Upselling & cross-selling campaigns | Retention campaigns |
|---|---|---|---|
| Personalize your landing page for mobile devices | Display a popup to users who have signed up | Offer exclusive deals or cross-selling pop ups on product pages | Display pop ups to loyal users |
| Show a geolocal landing page | Motivate leads to convert with pop up offers | Send a ‘thanks for your business!’ email with cross-selling items | Personalize your homepage for high-value customers |
| Collect leads with page-end or exit-intent pop ups | Onboard your new subscribers/leads with welcome emails | Personalize your homepage for inactive users | |
| Personalize your homepage for returning visitors based on browsed pages | Send occasional emails | Send reactivation emails to inactive users | |
| Personalize | Personalize greetings | Send personalized cart | |
| your landing page based on referral source | with name, date and time | abandonment follow ups | |
| Personalize your website for cart abandoners |
It’s important to know that these key points do not necessarily need to occur in linear order. Some of them, such as nurturing, conversion and retention, may occur multiple times in a customer’s journey. This is especially true for ecommerce businesses, where a customer can be nurtured and converted for multiple products over their lifetime.
Personalize acquisition campaigns
Many believe that acquisition is the most important point in a customer’s journey. That is why customer acquisition cost is one of the key metrics when assessing a campaign’s success and ROI. You spend lots of resources to grab a potential customer’s attention and draw them to your landing page.
You have a short window of time to impress them with the value you have to offer and lure them towards sign up or purchase. The goal of personalization here is to make this first impression as effective as possible by welcoming them with an experience as personalized as possible.
Personalize your landing page for mobile devices
If one of your landing page funnels involves mobile (which it almost always does!) Optimizing your landing page for mobile will definitely increase engagement and conversion rate for mobile users. Add mobile-only items to your pages such as Whatsapp contact.
In Growmatik, set the following automation rule:
Device is mobile → Personalize landing page
Show a geolocal landing page
You can create a landing page personalized for the country you are targeting. Personalization can vary from redirection to an independent domain, like yourbrand.de, with fully-localized content to sectional personalization on the default landing page (for example, the hero section). Here are a few tips on how to change website content based on visitor country:
- Customize your logo
- Display a regional welcome message
- Localize call-to-actions
- Provide seasonal offers by region
In Growmatik, set the following automation rule:
Location X → Personalize landing page
Once the webpage personalizer tools load, visually personalize your page content. You can also use dynamic keywords such as city name and UTM parameters in your hero heading for a great first impression.
Collect leads with page-end or exit-intent pop ups
These pop ups only appear when visitors have shown interest by scrolling to the end of your webpage. They also appear when a user is trying to exit the page. Such popups can prompt the user to subscribe before they leave with a motivating promise, such as receiving updates about products and services or exclusive deals and offers such as discounts and freebies delivered right to their inbox
In Growmatik, set the following automation rule:
All Guests → Show Popup
Set the action to timepass, scroll amount or exit intent based on your preference.
Personalize your homepage for returning visitors based on browsed pages
One other way to leave a lasting impression on your new visitors is to show a relevant homepage to returning new users based on the pages they browsed during their first visit. For example, if they visited the workout accessories category page on their first visit, they would probably be more interested in a homepage showing those products right away rather than your usual generic sales pitch. In Growmatik, simply set an automation rule in the guest column:
Page visit → Personalize homepage
When setting Page Visit as your condition, select a product category page. When the webpage personalizer tool opens up, replace your homepage banner content with relevant images, slogans and information about that product category. By inserting a product list element from the element box, you can also replace the generic product lists with a product list related to that category.
You can use the same method to replace any other elements in the banner, such as product images. Just select the element and click the plus button to insert a new element. Choose a new element as desired and get rid of the previous element by selecting it and clicking the trash icon.
If you have multiple product categories, it would be ideal to create a personalized home page for each category.
Personalize your landing page based on referral source
If a user is coming from one of your campaigns for ‘Sneakers’, personalize your hero image with a video of your sneakers. You can also dynamically display that word (UTM_source) in your hero section heading.
In Growmatik, set the following automation rule:
All Guests → Personalize homepage
In the webpage personalizer, you can find UTM parameters in the settings for the text element. Utilizing dynamic personalized keywords is very effective when you want to personalize landing pages for ads.
Personalize nurturing campaigns
If a user has come to this key point, it means you have successfully acquired them as a lead and need to drive them toward the next step by showing them the value they are looking for. This is the step where relevant blogs come in handy and exclusive offers can speed up the process.
Display a popup to users who have signed up
Your leads are your potential customers and should have a positive experience from the moment they sign up. You can present them a pleasant onboarding with popups that:
- Greet them by name as new leads to your website
- Introduce your social media links for more interaction
- Invite them to subscribe to your newsletter for updates and deals
To do this in Growmatik, set the following automation rule:
User behavior > Sign up → Show Popup
Motivate leads to convert with pop up offers
We can use popups to convince leads to place their first order after they sign up. You can include special first-order discounts to motivate them to convert.
In Growmatik, set the following automation rule:
All Leads → Show Popup
Set the action to timepass, scroll amount or exit intent and create its content in the pop up window. You can add the First name dynamic keyword as well as a discount element to personalize it.
Onboard your new subscribers/leads with welcome emails
Welcoming new leads will strengthen your relationship with them because they are psychologically ready for it. This can be as simple as a greeting with some helpful links to onboard, a list of blog posts related to their reading history or a list of products they might be interested in buying. You can incorporate a discount coupon as an incentive for their first order as well.
To do this in Growmatik, set the following automation rule:
User behavior > Sign up → Send welcome email
Make sure to use personalized elements such as the first name dynamic keyword, personalized product lists and blog post lists in your email. In the Blog element option, you can choose between recent, popular, related and specific posts or a post category to display to your new subscribers. As a result, your new subscribers will feel welcomed and will get an introduction to some of your blog posts related to their interests.
Send holiday-specific emails
Holiday-specific emails are usually sent on specific calendar occasions, such as Black Friday or Christmas. These emails are highly relevant to the time of the year and are a great way to solidify your relationship with your subscribers or drive direct conversions.
In Growmatik, create the following automation rule:
All Leads → Send Email on Black Friday
When setting the date condition, choose the relevant date and save. When the email builder loads, use the email builder to create attractive content for the calendar occasion you’re targeting and amplify it with personalized keywords and a discount coupon (using the coupon element).
Personalize greetings with name, date and time
It is always a good idea to welcome someone you know differently than you would a stranger! How about greeting your leads by name and based on their local time?
In Growmatik, create the following automation rule:
All Leads → Personalize homepage
In the upcoming webpage personalizer tool, add greeting messages such as Good [afternoon ], [first name]! using dynamic keywords first name and Time in the hero section of your page.
Personalize upselling & cross-selling campaigns
If you’ve come this far, you’re lucky! Thanks to successful lead acquisition and nurturing your user has placed or is very close to placing order(s) on your website. Our goal here should be motivating them to increase their order size. To do this, you can:
Offer exclusive deals or cross-selling pop ups on product pages
You can increase your order bump by using a popup to promote specific products with a deal or discount to increase conversion rate.
In Growmatik, set the following automation rule:
Page/Product Visit → Show Popup
In the upcoming pop up builder area you can use the coupon element, which allows you to offer the visitor a personalized deal.
Send a ‘thanks for your business!’ email with cross-selling items
Normally, post-sale emails include just a ‘thanks’ message and the details of order. But we can turn this into an opportunity for marketing/sales by introducing products related to your customer’s most recent purchase.
In Growmatik, set the following automation rule:
Order placed → Show Popup
In the Growmatik email builder you can place the date and items purchased in the last order as dynamic elements inside your welcome email. You can also insert the Product element and set it to show upselling, cross-selling and discounted items related to the last purchase.
Personalize retention campaigns
The research speaks volumes! Did you know that the top 1% of your customers are worth 18 times more than your run-of-the-mill customer? Securing new customers is also way more expensive than keeping the ones you’ve got, so maintaining and motivating your most loyal customers should be part of any comprehensive marketing strategy.
Display pop ups to loyal users
Time spent on website, total order value, Total count of purchased items and total count of orders can all help measure the loyalty of a customer. Once you’ve segmented customers via this metric, you can offer them pop ups including the following offers as a token of appreciation:
- Exclusive deals
- Freebies
- Review requests
- Links to your social media
- Survey forms
In Growmatik, you can set the simple condition of User behavior > Spent time to target loyal customers based on the total time they’ve spent on your website, or set more complicated criteria in the People section. You can then create a simple automation to target loyal segments with your popup.
Custom VIP segment → Show Popup
Personalize your homepage for high-value customers
Your loyal customers can also enjoy a personalized experience when they visit your homepage, including being greeted by name, viewing personalized product lists and receiving a discount coupon for their next order.
After creating your loyal segment filtering as explained in the previous section, simply set up an automation rule in Growmatik:
Custom VIP segment → Personalize homepage
In the web page personalizer window, click where you want to display your greeting text message and click the plus button. Then, select the text element and use Dynamic tags to add a personalized tone to your messages. Placing your cursor anywhere within the text block and clicking the Dynamic keywords button in the text settings panel will display a complete list of dynamic tags.
You can also use this process to add a product list to your page and set its content as related, cross-sells or discounted products, showing customers a personalized list of products based on their overall or most recent shopping activity.
Personalize homepage for inactive users
Inactive cohorts present a potential goldmine, if you can manage to re-engage them. You can redirect such users to a custom homepage customized for what you think has caused them to be away, their problems and pain points.
In Growmatik, go to Personalizations, click on Create Personalization and choose your homepage. Then edit it with relevant content, for example:
- An engaging greeting, such as “We miss you [first name]!” or “It’s been a while [first name]!”
- Give a glimpse of what they’ve missed while they were away
- Offer exclusive coupons for their next purchase
Once you’ve done this and saved your edits to the duplicate homepage, go to the Automations page and set up the following automation:
User behavior > Away → Personalize homepage
Please note that you can define custom criteria to detect inactive customers in WooCommerce by playing with the filters in the People page.
Now, whenever inactive customers visit your homepage, they’ll be greeted with a warm welcome and the content they’ve been looking for. Maybe that’s what it takes to reactivate them!
Send reactivation emails to inactive users
According to Loren McDonald, 10% to 25% of subscribers disengage from email campaigns every year. This means that your efforts to win back those inactive customers can pay off big time. In Growmatik, you can find inactive customers using RFM segmentation and set up this automation rule:
Custom Inactive segment → Send reactivation email
Start with a truly attention-grabbing subject line and enrich your content with personalized tone, keywords and offers to lure them back to your store. For example, you can insert a product list related to the customer’s previous purchases from the Growmatik email-builder element box. You can also remind them what’s new or what they have missed while away.
Send personalized cart abandonment follow ups
Abandoned cart reminder emails are a great way to increase sales, but you can boost it with even more personalization. In Growmatik, set up this automation rule:
User Behavior > Abandoned Cart → Send reactivation email
In the email builder space, insert a product element and set it to show abandoned items. and coupons to personalize your email. Everyone likes to be galvanized with a bit of incentive. A small reward could make a difference when your cart abandoner makes a decision. Use the email builder coupon element to give them an exclusive discount and increase your chances of reviving that cart.
Personalize your website for cart abandoners
Approaching cart abandoners normally happens in email follow ups, whereas we should try to recover abandoned carts across all channels, so you can personalize their experience on your homepage as well.
In Growmatik, set up this automation rule:
User Behavior > Abandoned Cart → Personalize homepage
In the Growmatik Page Personalizer window, personalize your page by editing the existing content or adding new content by clicking on the + button. Don’t forget to insert a product element and set it to show the abandoned items somewhere at the top of the homepage. This way, instead of showing the usual generic list of products, you remind the customer what they left abandoned and increase the chances of convincing them to complete their purchase.
Parting Thoughts
In this article, we covered the theory behind personalization at scale, how it can address the shortcomings of single channel personalization and benefit your marketing efficiency, engagement rate and resulting growth. We explained the 4 main steps of an ideal personalization strategy: monitoring customer journey funnels, collecting customer data, customer segmentation and creating orchestrations.
We also provided sample personalization campaigns in table 3 that should run in harmony across all key points in a customer journey in order to exert an organized personalization strategy and achieve real personalization at scale.
Setting up a personalization foundation doesn’t need to take a lot of time, but you may need to invest time and resources when you do it the first time to develop hypotheses and prove/disprove them. However, once you’ve built the foundation you won’t need to spend the same amount of time in every iteration. Over time you will come to understand the missing campaigns in critical keypoints, the right segments to target and the best campaigns to use to effectively engage and convert leads. Still, you should always remember that personalization is a long-term marketing strategy that may show rewards over time and requires patience, diligence and lots of iterations.
