Marketing Automation or Personalization- What to Use where?

Today brands depend upon automation to help them carry out a variety of tasks. More than 70% of marketing companies depend upon at least one type of automation tool. But as automation continues to become popular so does the concern about balancing out the need for Personalization.

But consumers demand more personalized support with the advent of technology and not generic info that just clutters their space. That is why it is most important that businesses find a balance between personalization and automation.

Companies that overuse automation are at risk of coming across generically. And the ones who make it too personalized, give the creeps to customers. So a balance between the automated and personalized relationship that makes your customers feel that they can trust you is most important.

Try some of these ways that will help you to balance out automation and personalization.

Timely and valuable Email Content

Image Source: NotifyVisitors

Email campaigns are a great way to send effective personalized automated messages that are low in cost. Their frequency must be controlled to not choke the recipients’ mailbox offering valuable non-intrusive relevant data.

Most consumers are used to receiving some kind of personalized content after they perform an action as making an online purchase. The message is usually relevant to the purchase and promotes a related service or product that may interest the consumer.

Transactional data can be used to send automated emails as it is an un-intrusive way of sending personalized emails and expected elements of relationships.

Segmentation: Marketers can segment the market geographically by applying data like the customer’s address or zip code to offer discounts for upcoming events. But marketing teams need to be careful so as not to bombard customers with personal messages that intrude on their privacy. So also they need to be careful of sending general messages that create a dislike for the brand.

Have Respect for Customer Privacy: Consumers appreciate if brands know them, but they do not like them to encroach upon their privacy. There is a fine line between tactics that go uncomfortably too far and highly relevant content.

Sending mass emails with the same product offer is not a good idea. You will simply clutter the consumer’s email. Do not send offers to people who are not interested in those particular products. It is better to tap your target audience. Use marketing automation tools to find out your visitor’s interests so you may notify them of the offers they are interested in when those offers are sent out.

Use Web Push Notifications to Reach Target Audience:

Image Source: NotifyVisitors

You can use tools as Web Push Notifications to send appropriate offers to your target audience who are interested in them. Web Push Notifications are sent out to visitors who fill out a quick form when they visit a website regarding their interest in being notified in the future about the product. It usually just asks the name, email interest and to check against the desired option. You can propose the following points regarding the product or service notification:

• Future Sales and Discount
• Schemes
• Update
• Features
• Tips

Use Banner Pop-Ups to grasp the attention of the Right Target Audience

You can further use Banner Ads to NotifyVisitors of upcoming sales, updates, tips, or schemes on relevant pages. We at notififyvisirors.com provide banner ads platforms that allow you to put out different types of banner ads for different requirements.

There are the following types of popup banner ads that are used effectively upon the user interaction-

• Toasts
• Notification Bubbles:
• Desktop Notifications
• Snackbars
• Passive-Popups

How can you use them to catch your Target Audience?

Modal Notifications

A modal message interrupts the current task of the user and draws complete attention to something more important. They freeze your entire web page. They have an opaque background and banner in the center. Only after you click your choice, they go away.

They are effectively used in –

• Exit-Intent Reversed: When the user is about to exit the site, the popup intervenes and prompts to register.
• User Input: When you need information from the user for a signup or login form.

Toast messages:

Toast messages are effectively used to communicate the successful interaction of the user with your app or web interface.

Slider Popup notifications take little space to communicate an important message. They help in marketing promotions, targeted offers, new product launches, etc. They come with options for embedded images, videos, and hyperlinks in the description.

Embedded Popups

They are quiet popups and do not disrupt the visitor or reader. They carry out their function and convert your visitors to customers or subscribers. They are used in journals, newsletters, and websites. They may even include a survey.

Why Do We Use Popup Notifications? 

These popup notifications are used effectively to-

• Gather The Feedback From Customers
• Collect Blog Subscribers
• Convert Abandoning Visitors
• Make Announcements Of Special Deals
• Sell More Service Subscriptions
• Conduct Marketing Research

Use Techniques to Draw Customers and not drive away Users

Most important is how you use these pop-up notifications. You can use different techniques so you attract the right audience and do not bombard the ads on people who are not interested in the first place on that particular product.

Scroll popups:

The scroll popups get triggered as the user scrolls a page. When a reader scrolls the page, it is an indication that the user is showing interest in that particular article or blog. The scroll popups are strategically placed when a visitor has read say, 30% of the page.

So as the user scrolls the banner ad slides in immediately. At this point, it is important to use the banner ad that further sells a product or service that is relevant to the article. You can even ask them to subscribe to your newsletter. The scroll popup is especially helpful in converting the users who come upon your page organically. At the least, they become email-subscribers if not customers.

Delayed popups:

Delayed popups do not come in front of the page when the reader lands upon a certain page. Instead, they appear after a preset time delay after the visitor lands on the page. After the visitor has spent a certain amount of time on the page, the delayed pop-up appears. You must ensure to keep the timing perfect. It should neither enter too soon nor too late as it may be of no use. If it appears as soon as the visitors enter the page, it may annoy, and they may leave. Or, if the timing is too delayed, the visitor may leave and never get to it. So only place them after the visitors have read a certain part of the content, as at this point they would want to know about special offers. You can set the timing anywhere between 10 to 30 seconds.

Interaction based popups:

Interaction based popups are great at creating personalized experiences. They only pop up when a visitor clicks on a link or places the mouse over specific content or image on the page. You can create personalized experiences for your visitors. They only appear when a specific action takes place. You can use the Interaction based popups to catch a certain user category. Certain links that are related to certain words or images will appeal to a segment of users, and certain. Similarly, certain other individuals or sets of images and words may appeal to yet another segment of users. You can hence reach that user-category with appropriate offers or messages.

Improve Customer Experience

Personalizing your Home Page

Conversion begins at the home page. You create leads out of visitors. Your homepage is the primary step to micro-conversion. Users don’t just land at a website with the intention to purchase. They have to take many steps before reaching the point of purchase. Your homepage should offer these steps. Micro conversions include CTA Call to Action like email signup, newsletter subscription, or adding services or product to cart. It is not considered as macro-conversion which is actually purchasing but it leads to it.

The interest that your homepage generates in visitors to perform all the micro-conversions, transforms the visitors to leads. When the leads buy, they get transformed to customers- that is when macro conversion takes place.

What makes a visitor click a button is where personalization comes in to play. Personalization is responsible for putting the most appropriate info at the forefront.

Heatmaps

Image Source: NotifyVisitors

Heatmaps are graphical or visual representations of data of user interaction presented with the help of colors. You can categorize all elements on your webpage as effective and unpopular. The popular are marked in red and unpopular in blue. The range from hot to cold is marked from red to blue.

Heatmaps breakdown user interaction with your page with statistics of aggregated clicks, hovers, and scrolls. Having insight and understanding of this data, you can better plan and optimize your webpages and drastically improve your conversion rates.

With heatmaps, you can understand how visitors interact with any page on your website on the basis of aggregated clicks, scrolls, and hovers. Armed with all this data and insights, you can make data-backed decisions on optimizing your webpages, thereby improving your conversion rates.

Marketers spend their time to get a better grasp of customer behavior, understand why drop-off rates happen, and in improving the customer experience. Heat Maps help you to achieve your goals. Whereas data analytics gives you a macro synopsis of customer complaints, heat maps pinpoint the exact point in sales and where the customers are facing a problem. You can combine heatmaps and traditional analytics to give you an insight into the shape of metrics.

Types of Heat-Maps

Three types of heat maps that are most commonly include:

CLICK MAPS: The click maps give you an insight where all the clicks are made on your page. Not necessarily customers click only on buttons or links, they many times click on static elements. You will get an insight into all clicks made.

SCROLL MAPS: The scroll maps show what percentage of people scroll through the page to any point of the page. This reveals how engaging the visitors are finding the content of the page. This will help you to better place your CTA Call for action or your slider Banners.

HOVER MAPS: Hover or move maps give insight into how visitors navigate a page. Hotspots show the places where the visitor’s pause.

So you can effectively use heatmaps to enhance your webpages with an in-depth understanding of user interaction. This will enable you to create your visitors to Leads and Customers.

How many Websites are effectively using personalization to give an oomph to their business?

The eCommerce business thrives on personalization. Customers appreciate if you can save their time on searches and help them make decisions or faster decisions. But they hate to view irrelevant suggestions and content.

Segmentation really helps to personalize appropriately. You should be able to segment your visitors into new or returning categories. Which location they are coming from, what devices they use, and how they interact and what is their behavior helps you to display appropriate offers for them.

Personalization should aim at:

• Meeting the Needs of Users
• Avoid poor recommendations that turn off your visitors
• Use sparingly where you know it will be effective and there is potential for returns

Let’s take a look at a few sites that are using personalization effectively:

Using Personalization sensitive to weather

Since about 72% of GDP gets affected by weather worldwide it makes sense for eCommerce sites that sell clothing worldwide to showcase appropriate clothing for better sales.

Site visitors hit by sudden cold waves are more likely to shop for warm clothing as gloves and scarves than T-Shirts. The online retailers who can adapt their e-merchandising to better suit the weather conditions sell better. They not only meet the online customer’s demands but also the customers are able to catch the special sales online. So if there is a sudden change in weather conditions as a sharp drop in temperature decisions of customers thrive on current needs.

You can use segmentation to identify the visitor’s geographic location and then call upon services on the web to throw light on current weather conditions.

You can effectively use these functions built-in your platform and help your business with the visitor to customer conversion.

You can avail of AB testing before making changes to your eCommerce site. Along with weather segmentation, you can look into other criteria as device usage, traffic source, browsing behavior. You can thereon decide how to use the weather differentiation category. Either by temperature min to max or use weather by sunny, rainy, cold, etc.

So you can use weather conditions to sell your in-season and off-season merchandise to an appropriate target audience and increase your sales multifold.

Navigation adjusted to Interest of the Visitor- Go Dynamic if you please

You can change your homepage, navigation, or CTAs as per user. The website will automatically open the page that you had the visitor had looked at before. AMAZON and ASOS use navigation effectively with the help of cookie retargeting.

If a first time user visits your site your page can provide contact info and after-sale, it can display info on customer support. You can opt to go Dynamic instead of making multiple landing pages for different users. Your landing page can adapt to visitors in real-time. NotifyVisitors provides a platform that uses user data from multiple sources and personalized tools as A/B testing, dynamic recommendations, pop up promotions for targeted users, Visual editor enabling style and content and display options based on time and events will help you tailor landing pages around visitors.

Segment users into Category for displaying Discount Coupons

While creating discount coupons, you can ensure that they reach the right visitor by categorizing your visitors in different groups or segments. Here is Macy’s coupon for visitors who surf the dresses category.

You can go product-specific messaging like Inc. Stores who increased their list by 300%.

So you can increase your business multifold, expand your lists, tap markets globally, but with proper usage of personalization tools and tricks.