December 18, 2023
When we think about a memorable brand experience, the key thing that you will remember is how personal it felt to you and how they made a lasting impression. Personalisation matters more now than ever since there is a surge in digital behaviour. A research done by Epsilon in 2018 indicated that 80% of customers are more likely to make a purchase when offered a personalised experience. Now these numbers were from pre-Covid era and it mattered then, imagine how much more it matters now.
It is not just a way to do business but to also boost customer satisfaction and build brand loyalty. As customer expectations continue to shift, you need to invest time and effort into personalisation and creating value thus bridging the gap to conversion. With that said, here are some personalisation sales techniques from Ben Bagg.
Firstly, if you have no idea how to start incorporating personalisation into your sales process, start with emails. But how do we personalise emails? Well, you’ve got to do your research. By doing research, you’re finding information and reasons to reach out to somebody. There are multiple platforms online that you can do your research upon such as LinkedIn, Sales Navigator, Owler, Google Alerts and Google News. You should look out for self authored contents, contents shared by prospects, their hobbies and their personas. This is to give you a general idea of what they’re into and ideas on how to approach them. The research should be done at a maximum of within 1 minute, anything more than that is just overdoing it. Personalisation in emails is to help you get the prospects to be comfortable with you not to come across as stalkerish, so let’s avoid that at all cost.
Once research is done, think of an attractive message to send. Remember, it’s about them not you. You may think that it isn’t that hard to write a message but oftentimes messages come across as clickbait, irrelevant or too long to read. So here are a few factors you need to incorporate when writing an email to prospects:
Noticeability - Don’t do clickbaits. Use good subject lines to start.
Prospect-centric - Focus discussion on prospects and not your products.
Pain-centric - Talk about the pains you alleviate, not the pleasures you add.
Pride Aversive - Be a fan of your prospects and talk about them, their work.
Relevance - Ensure the email is relevant to them.
Brevity - Keep it short and simple. Do not indulge in long lengthy essays.
Fluidity - Connecting the premise and body of your email with your CTA, context has to be clear and paragraphs should correlate.
Now that you’ve mastered personalisation, it’s time to scale it or as Ben would call it “Sprinkle Time”. Basically the personalised emails are going to be sent out in large amounts to large number of prospects and sometimes all at once. There are many automation softwares available such as Yesware, HubSpot, Mailchimp etc. With that said, it is still easy to drown in digital chaos even with personalisation. So it’s crucial for you to have a detailed approach in the first emails and then adding more touch points along the way.
When you integrate all these into your sales processes, keep in mind that it is a combination of personalisation, having the right attitude as well as the right timing.
