Impactful Personalized Marketing Examples You Can Implement Today

Ask any marketer what the ultimate goal of marketing is and they’ll likely all have the same answer: a personalized experience for every customer. 

It’s a ubiquitous goal for every player in the marketing game. It’s something every business wants and every modern customer demands, but not every marketer can achieve. 

To reach this gold standard of modern marketing, you need to understand what personalized marketing really is — what it means for your customers, what it takes to make personalization possible, and how you can implement personalized campaigns that elevate your customer experience to the next level.

That’s exactly what we’ll break down in this blog. Keep reading to learn everything you need to know about personalized marketing, as well as some specific examples of how you can incorporate personalization into your customer journeys.

What Is Personalized Marketing?

Personalized marketing is a marketing strategy that aims to responsibly craft marketing efforts that speak directly to your customers’ specific interests, preferences, and needs. 

The goal of personalized marketing is to create measurable journeys that engage and lead customers through every stage of the customer lifecycle, from brand awareness to product discovery to repeat purchases. 

This strategy is crucial for any modern business, but it’s especially important in ecommerce, where customer attention and engagement are challenging metrics that require a personalized and comprehensive approach. 

Ecommerce personalization can be applied to the entire customer experience, spanning cross-channel, on-site, and in-app. It encompasses anonymous, first-time, and existing customers, and includes personalized messages, content, site layouts, products, and much more. 

You can see this kind of marketing strategy everywhere in the online landscape — Netflix personalizes the TV and movie recommendations it shows you in-app. Amazon finishes your search queries with likely keywords and terms based on your unique buying behavior. Your favorite clothing brand may send you individualized emails that offer deals on brands you love, or serve you targeted ads on social media featuring items you browsed during your previous session on their site.

All these personalized marketing techniques are fueled by commerce data — the combination of customer data and product data — which every brand needs to strategize and scale winning customer journeys with ecommerce personalization. 

Read This Next: A Marketer’s Guide to Personalization at Scale

What Personalized Marketing Looks Like for Marketers

To the customer, personalization should appear seamless. Their experience with your brand should change and adapt as they engage with your business across any channel.

But for marketers, that seamlessness can be challenging to build. You need the right marketing channels like email, SMS, and mobile app to connect with your customers. You need web personalization to curate their on-site experience and ad targeting capabilities to reengage them. You need analytics that can track all your campaigns, as well as marketing automation and orchestration tools that build lasting customer journeys. 

It takes an omnichannel marketing approach to make personalization a reality, but all these tools need to be perfectly in sync.

Personalization Starts With Unified Data

Connecting customers to the right products, reaching them on the right channel, and sending campaigns at the right time creates a complicated web of rules, conditions, and integrations. 

For truly personalized marketing, you need every aspect of your ecommerce business to be united and sharing information in real time. However, this can be difficult if you have a martech stack built with separate point solutions.

Siloed data is the biggest challenge with a tech stack consisting of multiple systems. If your channels aren’t seamlessly sharing data, true personalization is a pipe dream. Your emails can’t build on the insights gained from your latest SMS campaigns, your retargeting ads won’t be fueled by your customers’ last on-site shopping session, and so on. 

To create personalized campaigns, you need a unifying center for your marketing solutions that ingests all your data into a single customer view, giving you a complete profile of each of your customers. 

This can only be achieved with a powerful data core like Bloomreach’s customer data engine, which consolidates all your data and integrates all your channels into a cohesive whole. With a customer data engine in place, you have a solid, data-fueled foundation that your entire tech stack can run on.

Why Artificial Intelligence Is Key to Personalized Marketing

With all your data unified and your channels connected, you’ll then need a tool to leverage your data and activate it intelligently across omnichannel campaigns. 

This is where artificial intelligence (AI) comes into play — it's the missing piece that can weave all your systems, channels, and campaigns together to make personalized marketing a reality. 

AI can take all your actionable customer data points (like a shopper’s previous purchases, their preferred product categories, their channel preferences, etc.) and link them to the real-time status of your products (your inventory, your newest products, your latest sale items, etc.) to craft that seamless and engaging experience that your customers expect.

This is the full-scale integration that true personalization runs on, and artificial intelligence brings it all together. You just need the right AI to make incredible customer experiences come to life.

To achieve the personalized marketing experience your customers deserve, you need AI that merges all your marketing solutions and efforts into a coordinated solution. It needs to be trained to drive business growth and integrated so that each touchpoint works toward the same goal. 

In other words, you need AI that’s engineered to create limitless experiences — which is exactly what Loomi, Bloomreach’s AI built for ecommerce, offers. 

Loomi Powers Next-Level Personalization

Loomi is the connective tissue between Bloomreach products, weaving the power of personalization throughout the customer journey. It links all the tools and capabilities offered in Bloomreach Engagement into one comprehensive marketing solution, integrating your data, marketing channels, and orchestration tools to help you deliver hyper-personalized experiences at every touchpoint.

Trained on Bloomreach’s 14+ years of data on how customers shop and search, Loomi makes building seamless customer journeys an intuitive process for marketers. It can learn from your customers, know your products, and help you create campaigns that lay out the perfect path to purchase for any audience, on any channel.

With the power of Loomi, Bloomreach Engagement solves the greatest challenges of personalization, opening the door to limitless customer experiences. All you need to do is dream of your ideal customer journey and you can make it a reality. 

What Personalized Marketing Looks Like in Action

Now that we know what personalized marketing looks like from a customer’s perspective and we understand all the tools that need to be in sync for personalization to be possible, it’s time to see what AI-powered marketing looks like in action.

Basically, it’s not enough to simply outline the big-picture goals and best practices of personalized marketing. To understand just how game-changing an AI-powered marketing solution can be for your business, you need to see how limitless each campaign can be.

Here are a few examples of truly personalized marketing campaigns that you can use to wow your customers using Bloomreach Engagement.

Personalize Emails by Loyalty Tiers

Customer loyalty is one of the most valuable ways to segment your audience. It's also one of the most straightforward ways to personalize campaigns, rewarding your most committed shoppers with a customized experience that shows them how valued they are. 

With an AI-powered platform like Bloomreach Engagement, you can set up different loyalty tiers that segment your audience based on their purchase behavior, campaign engagement, and browsing history. With clearly defined loyalty tiers in place, you can create automatic surprise-and-delight campaigns that are sent when a customer reaches a new level in your loyalty program. 

Not only can you build unique tier-achievement emails, but you can also create unique loyalty-based content within any email campaign based on a customer’s individual tier status. This can be used to personalize email newsletters, follow-up emails, or campaigns targeting customers in danger of churning. 

With the power of AI, content blocks in emails can be customized to display relevant content for each recipient’s loyalty tier. These blocks can fit seamlessly into your campaigns and add a personalized touch to your messaging, dynamically presenting your gold-tier audience with early access to a sale, your silver-tier audience with free shipping, and so on.

See what’s possible with Bloomreach email marketing:

 

This type of personalized email marketing campaign integrates data from every touchpoint that your customers have with your business and crafts individualized content for each shopper across your campaigns, which is only possible with an AI-powered marketing solution. 

By serving individualized messages that prioritize your customer’s experience and incentivizes loyalty, you can show VIPs a unique message that’s relevant to them and foster long-lasting engagement. 

Send Timely Replenishment SMS Campaigns

Repeat purchases are lucrative opportunities for many businesses. If your brand sells items that will routinely need to be replaced (like pet food, personal care items, or office supplies), you should actively work to stay top of mind as a resource that buyers can turn to and purchase from again.

With a frequency-based SMS campaign, you can encourage customers to repurchase products by personalizing their message timing based on frequency data. This makes each message you send as timely as possible, improving customer retention and lifetime value.

This type of personalized marketing message is designed to cater to each customer’s unique shopping experience and engage with them at the most opportune time by using their previous purchase cadence as a guide for triggered messages.

See what’s possible with Bloomreach SMS marketing:

 

With the power of Loomi, marketers can use Bloomreach Engagement to monitor every customer's average purchase frequency and send them an automated message when the date that they are likely to repurchase draws near on the calendar. 

This ensures that every replenishment message you send is aptly timed and tailored to your customer’s specific needs.

Create High-Value Lookalike Audiences for Ad Retargeting

Personalization can start from the very beginning of your relationship with a customer. Even if a shopper hasn’t purchased from your brand before, there are strategies you can use to craft marketing campaigns that speak directly to their wants and needs — like building lookalike audiences, which can be leveraged to personalize the ad experience across social media platforms.

​​With a plug-and-play customer segmentation workflow in Bloomreach Engagement, marketers can aggregate all their customer data and identify which shoppers are the highest value for their  business. With the highest-value customers identified, the common preferences and characteristics stored in their customer profiles can be used as a template to attract like-minded audiences.  

These high-value profiles can be connected to ad platforms like Facebook or Snapchat to build lookalike audiences, helping your ads reach users with attributes, behaviors, and interests similar to your most profitable shoppers.

See what’s possible with Bloomreach ads and retargeting:

 

By targeting audiences built to mirror your most loyal customer base, you can ensure that all your ads are served to users most likely to engage with your brand and make a purchase, which provides a more personalized experience to whoever interacts with your ads. 

The closer your lookalike audiences are to your most high-value and converting customers, the more useful your ads (and your business) can be.

Personalize the Site Experience With Weblayers

Incorporating personalized elements into your on-site experience is vital for any brand. Your website is one of the first places people turn to when they want to interact with your business, and there are so many on-site touchpoints that you can tailor to each individual customer’s journey.

One of the most lucrative weblayer templates that Bloomreach Engagement offers is a personalized free-shipping incentive, which brands can use to entice shoppers to increase their order value during their site experience and through coordinated campaigns across marketing channels.

In our AI-powered platform, you can completely customize where and when a free-shipping weblayer pops up on your customer’s on-site journey. You can set the free-shipping threshold to any amount; remind them of the incentive on category, product, and checkout pages; and highlight how much more they need to spend to hit the free-shipping criteria. 

And once you’ve created this on-site incentive, you can extend the reach of your promotion beyond your current site visitors. Without having to change apps or marketing solutions, you can set up coordinated campaigns that target users in your broader audience who qualify for this promotion. 

See what’s possible with Bloomreach web personalization:

 

You can create a triggered campaign that targets shoppers who added items to their cart in the last month totaling just below the free-shipping threshold amount but ended up abandoning their cart and not completing a purchase.  

By sending this free shipping promotion to any audience members who fit this criteria, you can invite them back to your page to take advantage of the promotion and complete a purchase.

This ensures that every customer who could be enticed to act on a free-shipping incentive is reached, whether they’re shopping in the moment or need to be invited back to engage with your brand. 

Fine-Tune Your Campaigns With Contextual Personalization

Every good marketer’s mantra is “test, test, test.” And for years, A/B testing has been the best tool available to try out different campaign variations and see which one works best. 

But there’s an inherent flaw in traditional A/B testing: The winner takes all. Whichever variant performs the best wins, and the other gets brushed aside. It doesn’t matter if some customers are more partial to the losing variation. 

But with the power of Loomi, you no longer have to rely on one-size-fits-all testing. You can employ contextual personalization to fine-tune your campaigns on an individual level. 

See what’s possible with Bloomreach experiments and testing:

With contextual personalization, you can take each customer’s personal preferences into account for your tests and select the best variant for them based on their individual context. 

A personalized weblayer, SMS campaign, or email campaign in Bloomreach Engagement can test out different purchase incentives, like serving a discount or an upgrade to your customers. You can use contextual personalization to automatically offer a discount to customers who are historically inclined to engage with it, while customers who are more likely to enjoy an upgrade will be served this incentive instead.

All you need to do is create your campaign variants and identify the contextual parameters for your test. For this example, a customer’s purchase history is a defining factor, but you can use contextual personalization to hone in on test audiences with any variables — like the device your audience is using, the time of day they are visiting your site, or any context that’s relevant to your goals.

If a customer has opted for an upgrade with previous purchases, an upgrade incentive is probably the right variant for them. If a customer always shops for the best deal, a discount might appeal to them more. With contextual personalization, you can harness AI to make these nuanced guesses about the success of your campaign variants and hone in on the best results, right from the start of your test. 

Either the customer converts or doesn’t, just like any other A/B test. But with contextual personalization, AI can take this as feedback and learn which kinds of contexts paired with which variants lead to your camping’s goal, and which don’t. 

This takes testing to the next level, giving you a variant winner for each context parameter, not just a one-size-fits-all winner that gets served to every person in your audience despite their preferences.

Plus, Loomi is constantly learning to make even better decisions, helping you personalize your campaigns on a granular level and offer the best experience possible for each customer.

AI-Powered Personalization Is Possible With Bloomreach

For marketers striving for true personalization, an AI-powered solution is the key. Artificial intelligence weaves all your efforts together, helping you give your customers the experiences they expect and build customizable campaigns that adapt to their needs, all in one comprehensive platform.

The examples outlined in this blog highlight only a handful of ways that AI can elevate your personalized marketing efforts, and they just scratch the surface of the incredible capabilities that Bloomreach Engagement offers. 

Our omnichannel automation solution provides marketers with everything they need to deliver real-time personalization across the customer journey. And with the power of Loomi fueling every channel, campaign, and touchpoint, there’s no limit to what your customer experiences can be.  

Interested in learning more about the incredible ways that Loomi can help you with your personalized marketing efforts? Explore more of our Loomi use cases and start harnessing the limitless potential of AI today.