While companies are struggling with ways to revive businesses, personalized marketing can help them make the move to re-launch themselves.

It has been a couple of months since companies have resumed their operations, and businesses have started breathing. However, things have changed drastically, and as a result, they shall be facing a new set of challenges due to the diseased market of COVID-19. Hence they will surely need to acclimatize themselves with these newfound changes and make decisions to power through the altered supply-demand condition and begin to rebuild themselves. For this, they can have a kick start by understanding how the preferences and priorities of their target audience have changed with times. While they might be having access to the old data set, yet those have been rendered useless due to the COVID pandemic. Some places customers may have defined interests, whereas, in other areas, they are struggling to identify how to cope up with the stressed times nor focus on things they need.

Leaders of several companies, too, are plagued by the thought on how to proceed further, months after lockdown that had halted the organization operations. As they keep themselves busy trying to understand the possible growth and transformation opportunities, one thing is sure that personalized marketing is need of the hour to reach as many people as possible, through various touchpoints and resuscitate the business.

Personalized marketing may sound like a fancy term, yet it is not new. Many e-commerce and OTT platforms have already been using this to attract customers and retain them. The attribute that has changed after COVID-19 is the attention it receives now. Through this, business brands can understand who their customers are, recognize users’ interests, discover what brand traits appeal to the customers the most, and how they identify with the brands. Through the collection of such relevant data in a real-time and regular basis, businesses can comprehend how their services and products fare in the market and how they can deliver better versions of existing offerings. Personalized marketing further helps to create unique personas for each and every customer. To achieve this magnitude of specificity, companies need to devise special tools like AI, Machine Learning, Big Data analytics, and many more for accurate and efficient outcomes. And to pull this off, business companies also need to adapt and transform themselves accordingly.

Unfortunately, only a handful have been successful in cross the barrier of digital transformation. In reality, many companies claim about having personalized marketing as a marketing gimmick to keep up with the trends. Meanwhile, others don’t have adequate knowledge about where to begin. Therefore, business leaders first need to plan a strategy, collect data, compare it with how they are currently performing, and find out the ways to enhance the brand services and act on the decided goals. Although the whole process sounds simple, there are additional features that can be considered too. For instance, when they start with data, they need to remember the more the services can be tailored. E.g., Starbuck’s reward system. Let us illustrate how brands can look for new approaches through more such examples.

The main objective is the generation of unique personas. When Snapchat launched Bitmoji in 2016, users had a chance to design cartoonish avatars of themselves that can be featured as their Snapchat profile picture and or on the Snap Map, if permitted. Then it launched an auto-generated daily Story called Bitmoji Stories. Through Bitmoji Stories, the app company has found a great way to bring people to this particular area of the app. This example also illustrates how personalization can be used to drive traffic from one area of an app to another. Another similar example is Instagram’s Boomerang and IGTV features.

Another interesting example is ‘Share a Coke’ campaign, by Coca Cola first launched in Australia in 2011, still retains its title as one of the most original examples of personalized marketing to date. Though the initial idea was to reach millennials, in which each bottle contained one of the most popular first names assigned to that generation, the campaign helped the company grow sales for the first time in 10 years. Another recent example is the Lays’ name tag campaign. So yes, personalization can boost up sales too and not just a tactic for building brand trust. It gives a face to the brand too.

A personalized marketing strategy should also focus on building stronger and more personal relationships with customers. By simply sending an email wishing for their birthday, or sending a thank you email on the anniversary of joining your email list can go miles to showcase that you actually care. When Hubspot tested email opt-in response messages against those personalized with account representatives’ information, the personalized emails, saw the click-through rate increase to 0.96 percent and generate 292 more clicks in comparison to company emails that fetched only a click-through rate of 0.73 percent.

Then we have Spotify’s personalized playlist that is unique for each user. The music streaming giant took things further in 2016 their “Thanks 2016. It’s been weird” campaign. In November 2016, Spotify used the incredible amounts of data it collected to target consumers and took to the streets to use the incredible amounts of data; it collected with a unique twist. Each billboard included a funny message personalized to individual users, like “Dear 3,749 people who streamed ‘It’s the End of the World as We Know It’ the day of the Brexit vote, hang in there” or “Dear person who played ‘Sorry’ 42 times on Valentine’s day, What did you do?” Other brands that offer such experience are Amazon’s e-commerce app and Netflix recommendations.

Further, it also pays when brands consistently develop their approach and get creative with customer data. This makes brands more humanistic and relatable with the customers while building long term relations. So, in the end, one can say COVID-19 is just another roadblock. Business brands just need to find a way to reach out and connect with customers.