Personalized marketing leads to increased email open rates (28%), click-through rates (14%), conversions (10%), and direct mail response (135%) than nonpersonalized offers.
The best way to achieve personalization is through machine learning-driven personas that match consumers with the right product and content at the right time, according to Andy Rossmeissl, CEO and co-founder at Faraday; Hilary Reed, CEO at EmpowerFi; and Kelly Hellickson, president/chief experience officer at EmpowerFi.
They addressed the 2023 CUNA Marketing & Business Development Council Conference Sunday in Orlando.
“Personas drive engagement through relevance, resonance, and relatability,” Hellickson says.
They also allow “hypertargeting to become a big part of your omnichannel strategy,” Reed says.
Understanding personas and how they align with pain points and priorities allows marketers to customize outreach at scale, says Rossmeissl, who warns that the effort “takes some serious time. Make sure you have conviction behind the whole exercise.”
He outlines eight ways to put personas into action:
“People have intuitive ideas about what these personas are—and they’re probably wrong,” Rossmeissl says. “Some of the biggest failures involve internal disputes. People have their own ideas of what the brand is, and they get defensive.”
“Starting small will prove to your colleagues that there’s value in doing this,” he says.
“You should double the lift from the generic message,” he says.