How to give personalized marketing more impact

These days, however, measures that once worked to get people to notice your business are on the wane, while the demand for their attention is ever increasing. Statistics currently suggest that 10,000 marketing messages bombard your customers every day: Link Their reaction, for the most part, is to block out those messages and protect themselves from the ‘attack’, making your marketing job more difficult.

So you need to get smarter.

This is where personalized marketing steps in: a fast-growing sector that harnesses the data people have given willingly.

If you use this data about your target customer – everything from where they work to what they like to do at weekends – you can tailor specific marketing messages in content, delivery, and frequency: fine-tuning everything to catch their attention and keep it.

But how do you present it?

Relevant messaging, optimized campaigns, a cross-channel approach … these are all very effective tactics, but the look and feel of what your customer ultimately sees hasn’t changed in decades. They still get flat text, overlaid onto stock imagery or video, dropped into their inbox. Or they see pop-up messages from bots pretending to be people, or email automations that don't fool anyone.

The tech behind segmenting customers is clever, but the end presentation is often, well, dull. Weirdly, personalized marketing is sometimes a little impersonal. Herein lies an opportunity. Personalized marketing needs to start a story with your customer at the center. You need to put them in the picture – literally.

Personalized marketing needs to be visually arresting. You must stop your customer in their tracks and wrap the core brand message around who they are.

• If there was a billboard with your name on it, would you stop and look?
• If there was a road sign that told you by name which way Paris was, would you double-take?
• If an email arrived with an image of your name on a greetings card, would you think it was coincidence?

What you need is visually personalized media, using personalized data, done so well that the viewer stops for a second and thinks: “How did they do that?” If you want to see this in action, just take a look.

Alex Hammond

Founder of imagefactory.io

Personalized photos: the next level of marketing personalization.