How to Perfect Personalised Marketing (With Real Examples)

When a friend gives you a personalised gift for your birthday or a special occasion, it shows they know and care about you.

The same can be said for companies when it comes to personalised marketing. Truly personalised marketing is messaging and offerings tailored to individual customers. If done right, it not only boosts revenue but can also foster loyalty and trust.

In this article, we’ll look at what marketing personalisation means and some examples of it in action.

Personalised marketing ditches the one-size-fits-all approach. Instead, it uses data to craft messages and offers for specific customers. This might include addressing a customer by name in an email, recommending products based on past purchases, or tailoring customer conversations with chatbots powered by artificial intelligence (AI).

We found that, on average, high performing marketing teams fully personalise efforts across six channels, compared with underperformers who only personalise across three.

Maintaining personalisation also requires constant monitoring and adaptation, which can be a challenge for businesses with small marketing teams or outdated technology. Large enterprises often have more data that requires the infrastructure and data analysis capabilities to execute complex personalised marketing.

Small businesses, on the other hand, may rely on simpler tactics to apply customer preferences or offer targeted promotions. While the scale differs, the core idea remains — understanding your audience and tailoring your marketing to resonate with them. But like in real-world relationships, rushing to seal the deal or being overly clingy can backfire.

You may have heard the word ‘personalisation’ used in a business context and wondered if it is the same thing as personalised marketing. In short, personalised marketing is a subset of personalisation, which refers to the broader concept of tailoring products and customer experiences. While you might choose to offer your customers a personalised experience from marketing all the way down to customer support, personalised marketing is just one part of making your customer experience feel personal.

Personalised marketing helps teams strategically apply the principles of personalisation to their campaigns. Key data points for effective personalised marketing include browsing history, past purchases, user interests (often sourced from platforms like Google or Meta), job titles, demographics, and location.

While personalisation can enhance the customer's experience across your business, personalised marketing is one of the key places where tailoring your efforts can drive tangible revenue results for your business.

This definition of personalisation may sound similar to another concept: customisation. However, there is a clear difference. With personalised marketing, a company modifies the experience without any effort from the customer. Customisation, on the other hand, allows the customer to modify the experience themselves.

For example, when you adjust your Gmail settings to indicate the number of messages you want to see per page and add a signature, you are customising your email experience. But when Gmail displays advertisements based on your interests, it personalises your experience for you. In the first example, you’re intentionally changing the interface. In the second, you receive more relevant ads without taking any direct action yourself.

With both personalisation and customisation, the end result is a more relevant experience for the customer. The difference is whether or not the customer does the work themselves.

Most of the channels where customer interactions happen can be personalised. Some of the main personalisation solutions include:

Website personalisation adjusts content, layout, and navigation based on individual user preferences. Showing personalised product recommendations, adjusting the homepage based on browsing history, or customising the navigation menu are all examples of website personalisation.

Personalised email marketing involves sending targeted messages to specific recipients. This can include personalised subject lines, product recommendations, and dynamic content based on user interactions.

Website-hosted apps or SaaS (software as a service) products often can personalise the user's first experience in their free trial by adjusting the tutorial, custom pop-ups, and layouts. For example, if you sign into a CRM, it might show you a different dashboard based on whether you are a marketing professional compared to someone in customer success.

Digital marketing relies on personalisation to get the best return on ad spend (ROAS). If your customers are served a generic ad, it might not stop their scroll or spark their curiosity. However, if they receive an ad that mentions something specific (for example, ‘Sydney marketing professionals’ or ‘Melbourne-based women who love country music’) it will be more likely to pique their interest because it speaks directly to them.

Across all these channels, the key to effective personalisation is having accurate, up-to-date data.

What kind of information can be acted on to tailor the marketing experience of prospects? The answer to this question is anything that contains data. There is almost unlimited information a company can collect to learn more about its customers and prospects. Some of the most common ways of collecting personalisation data that can then be used in marketing include:

• Geolocation: Knowing where a user is helps businesses show content that suits their location, such as local events or popular things nearby.
• Source: Understanding how users arrived (e.g. Google search, ad, or social media) helps businesses tailor messages to match what they’re looking for.
• Firmographic information (B2B): For business-to-business (B2B) interactions, checking details like industry, company size, and the technology they use helps personalise communication.
• Buyer persona: Creating profiles of different customer types allows businesses to suggest products or services that match their interests.
• Buyer status: Distinguishing between new and returning customers helps businesses tailor content, whether it’s encouraging a first purchase or offering an upsell.
• Time of day: Knowing when a user is most likely to engage helps businesses decide the best time to show content.
• Behaviour: Tracking things like how many pages a user visits, how long they stay, or if they log in helps businesses understand what they’re interested in.
• Lifetime value (LTV): Recognising high-value customers allows marketing teams to offer special perks or deals to keep them engaged.

Remember, effective marketing personalisation goes beyond simple name customisation. It’s about understanding user goals and helping them achieve those goals through a tailored experience.

Customers engage more (and for longer) with marketing content they feel speaks directly to their needs and interests, helping them take the next step towards conversion.

When customers feel like a brand understands and talks directly to them, it builds trust and brand loyalty. They are then more likely to feel your product or service will actually help them. Increased trust also leads to higher customer loyalty, as personalised marketing fosters a stronger connection between customers and your brand.

If you want to explore how to apply personalised marketing to your business, check out this free, guided learning resource on Trailhead Interaction Studio Basics.

From e-commerce to education, here are five examples that showcase the power of personalised marketing in action.

The retail and tech giant, Amazon, is known for its advanced marketing personalisation. From customising each customer’s home page so it contains the items they’re most likely to buy, to using algorithms to offer combination purchases (think of the ‘frequently bought together’ feature), Amazon goes above and beyond to make its marketing useful to individuals.

This level of personalisation in their marketing has contributed to Amazon’s success. In this year’s Prime Day event, it recorded a 19% year-on-year growth in Australian sales.

Retail shop Barbeques Galore started using Salesforce to connect with customers through personalised marketing communications. They did this by gathering data from both their online and in-person interactions, which they connected to user profiles within their loyalty program.

Using this data and AI-driven insights, they were able to make every marketing outreach to their customers feel personal and targeted. For example, if they knew a customer had their eye on a given BBQ, they would send them a marketing email letting them know when it was on sale.

This strategy has doubled online sales and developed a smorgasbord of satisfied customers.

Membership-based hospitality group Norths Collective began using Salesforce's Marketing Cloud to deliver personalised marketing to its 68,000 members. They gathered the data they needed to personalise the experience from their POS and sign-in system to create a full 360-degree view of each member.

With this data (and help from AI), they could tailor their marketing communications and send targeted promotions based on the individual's data profile. For example, if a customer frequents their North Sydney restaurant for dinner, they will send a push notification to their app with a dinner deal for that location.

The result of these personalised touches was a 52% higher average spend among app-engaged members and an impressive 12x return on campaign investment.

More than a few people have said that the streaming service’s knowledge of their musical preferences is almost too good. Spotify offers one of the most viral personalised marketing campaigns with its annual ‘Spotify Wrapped’ feature. This in-app experience provides users with a detailed summary of their top artists, songs, genres, and listening habits from the past year. Thanks to its highly shareable format, Wrapped consistently dominates social media, turning Spotify users into brand ambassadors as they share their results across platforms.

Spotify also uses personalised marketing tactics to amplify customer relationships for its advertisers. Salesforce provides a single source of truth for ad inventory and provides advertisers with real-time information to serve up the right ads to the right customers at the right time.

How can you market your product if your headquarters are in one place, and your customers are all over the world? That was the challenge facing OFX, a global money transfers company.

To overcome this, they took a unique approach to personalised marketing. Instead of only targeting prospects based on the currency they needed, OFX included the time zone that person was currently situated in. So instead of sending mass marketing emails between midnight and four in the morning, their communications use a ‘follow the sun’ model.

With the help of Salesforce Marketing Cloud, OFX can market to potential customers all over the world like a friendly local.

There is a lot of room for companies to play in the personalised marketing space. However, there are a few guidelines that will keep you on track. The key is building trust with your audience. Following these six tips will help your personalised marketing cut through to your customers.

Don’t start personalising before you understand your audience’s needs.

Look beyond simple demographics (like country, age, and gender) into past insights from previous interactions to get to know your customers on a more personal level. The key to this process is to make sure you store all your data from different locations in one place so you have full visibility.

There are likely multiple departments that are interacting with your customers — online, on the phone, and in person. Share information. Your customer data should be widely accessible across the business so that your customers can get the best, most personalised marketing experience. This will help your business create deeper connections and anticipate customer needs.

Think of customer data as a two-way street. The more information they share (with clear explanations of how it’s used), the more you can tailor their experience. But remember, it’s a give-and-take. Offer valuable content, discounts, or loyalty rewards in return for their insights.

There’s a fine line between interested and overwhelmed. Using incomplete or inaccurate data can lead to overwhelming customers with irrelevant marketing outreach in hopes that they respond. Techniques like waterfall segmentation and propensity to purchase scores can prioritise truly interested audiences and prevent promotion oversaturation.

Make your customers feel valued with a truly personalised experience in real-time. Offer targeted promotions when they’re most engaged and on the channels they frequent. Imagine getting a discount on that jacket you just browsed, on your phone, while you’re still contemplating the purchase. That’s marketing personalisation done right.

Consistency in marketing is key. Don’t rely on inaccurate or siloed data to give them what they want every now and then. Set the bar high by unifying your customer profiles across all platforms and departments. This ensures your marketing stays consistent across all channels, no matter how a customer interacts with your brand, such as chatting on your website, clicking on an ad, talking to a sales rep, or at a webinar.

Personalised marketing is the practice of tailoring a campaign to an individual's needs or preferences. It can be for a single person or a group of people with shared interests, behaviours, or demographics. Companies gather the insights needed to offer personalised marketing from places like browsing history, cookies, and location.

Personalised marketing software is a tool that helps companies produce targeted content based on customer data. These platforms or add-ons help businesses optimise their offerings by creating a more individualised customer experience. Here’s how it works:

You can collect data that will be useful for your marketing from a number of places, including:

• Website visits
• Clicks on content
• Engagement on marketing emails or ads
• Purchase history
• Search queries on your website
• Products added to or removed from a shopping cart
• Past interactions with customer service or support bots
• App usage, including features accessed and session length
• Social media activity, such as likes, shares, and comments
• Conversations and inquiries with a sales team

The software then segments prospects and customers into different groups based on shared characteristics (e.g., demographics, browsing history, location).

The software tailors marketing content for each customer using the collected data. For example, website personalisation can display relevant product recommendations, blog posts, banners, features, case studies or dynamic pricing.

Send targeted marketing emails with personalised subject lines, product recommendations, and offers. For example, adding a customer's name to the subject line, or offering a discount on products similar to their browsing history.

Trigger personalised lead capture forms based on visitor behaviour (e.g., exit intent or scroll-triggered pop-ups). For example, offer a webinar sign-up form for a topic they have shown interest in.

The key to delivering a personalised marketing experience lies in unified data. With a cohesive view of customer interactions across all channels, you can use customer insights to create tailored marketing experiences, improving engagement, trust, and growing revenue for your business.

That’s where Salesforce Data Cloud comes in. Data Cloud is a powerful data platform designed to unify customer insights from a wide array of sources within your organisation, ranging from website behaviour and CRM interactions to ad performance and beyond.

By bringing this data together in real-time, Data Cloud transforms it into accessible, actionable insights that can be leveraged by your marketing team to get the best return from their efforts.