What do you do when you receive generic emails?
Do you just glimpse over them, or do you not even open them?
Well, your email subscribers might do the same if you don’t personalize your campaign specifically for them.
Of course, it’s not feasible to write an individual email to each subscriber. That would take ages, but thankfully there is a much more efficient way to make emails feel personal.
Personalization at scale means using a marketing automation solution to leverage data to easily deliver 1-to-1 experiences to a large number of contacts.
If you are using the right personalization tool, you can potentially increase customer outcomes, driving 40% more revenue just by tailoring your campaigns.
Ready to learn how your organization can implement this strategy? Let’s dive in.
How Personalization at Scale Works
All of the biggest marketing automation platforms offer this feature but in very different ways. Here’s a quick rundown:
- HubSpot – Focuses on contacts and visitors. It’s simple to use, yet limited.
- Marketo – Offers a robust way to collect data and create segments, but you need an intermediate level of technical knowledge.
- Salesforce – Hones in on the customer journey creation and real-time interaction management with customers and prospects.
- Pardot – Provides lots of options for branching logic and creating complex rules, but the data collection is pretty limited.
With the help of a certified MA/CRM consultant, you’ll be able to select the platform that best fits your strategy. You can count on them to personalize and configure the tools according to your needs.
Now, let’s take a deeper look at how personalization works with each one of these platforms.
HubSpot’s Personalization Tokens
HubSpot uses data from contacts and visitors. For visitors, HubSpot uses browser cookies to analyze behavior and create tokens.
If a visitor doesn’t have any cookies or decides to delete them, they will be considered a new visitor and assigned a new cookie.
In short, the data is used to customize:
- Website Pages – You can use smart content to show relevant information on your homepage and site pages or change your Call-to-Action (CTA).
- Landing Pages – The CTA can also be changed according to data.
- Emails – You can personalize the subject line, CTA, and email text (based on the membership or lifecycle stage).
The platform allows you to manually create snippets—which are short personalized messages. They can be inserted into personalized content according to your configuration.
Also, you can use personalization tokens inside these snippets. For example, you can design a message that changes depending on the ticket record, deal, contact, and other variables.
Marketo Engage’s Scale Code
Marketo’s level of data collection and customization is impressive.
It also uses tokens, which comprise data from custom objects. You decide what you want to collect from your contacts. You can also create segmentations by location, area, needs, behavior, and more.
All that information can be used to personalize emails, landing pages, or snippets.
For example, you can create a snippet and insert tokens that personalize it according to the contact’s cycle stage, geo-location, and more.
Dynamic content, on the other hand, allows users to segment leads based on any criteria they like, and then customize sections of emails for that particular audience. Better yet, you can use multiple segmentations for each email. For instance, perhaps a section of the email you want to present differently based on industry (for instance, feature a healthcare image, vs. a financial services image). Later on, perhaps it makes sense to feature an event which is local to the prospect – so you want to segment by city. Dynamic content makes this easy! The result is hundreds of variations of an email being created in just a few minutes. Cool right?
You can leverage Adobe’s Gen AI-powered tools for content creation to instantly generate many variations to cater to different channels. This advanced tool also automatically changes the scripts as data tokens are being collected.
Salesforce’s Marketing Personalization Scale
Salesforce shines when it comes to personalizing customer journeys.
However, it requires knowledge of a scripting language called AMPscript when it comes to personalization. This often makes it essential to have a specialized team configure it for you.
First, Salesforce captures data from the website, landing pages, data extension, or an external source. You are free to decide the number of form fields and data collected.
Salesforce allows the creation of marketing assets according to subscriber information. You are the one who determines which variations are displayed based on contact information.
Another tool is Journey Builder, and here is its biggest differential: you are completely free to create journeys using SalesCloud data. You can split decisions, test functionalities, and more.
Combine it with Salesforce’s Interaction Studio to create the ideal plan. This is a real-time interaction manager that gives you the ability to promote services and products specifically and uniquely for each contact.
Pardot’s Unique Approach to Prospects
The approach here is pretty different: Pardot allows for more branching logic and complex rules to get more granular with contacts.
This isn’t surprising, since Pardot itself is focused on a more customized approach to each prospect.
In practice, it pulls data from your prospects’ interactions with emails, landing pages, forms, email signatures, and dynamic content. This is done progressively, which means the personalization feature becomes more complete as prospects keep engaging via form submissions.
With this information, you can create marketing asset variations. In practice, you assign the data values that determine which variations should be shown.
That said, Pardot may be limited in terms of data collecting, which makes it easier to integrate a third-party system.
How Can I Choose the Ideal Platform for My Strategy?
The personalization approach varies a lot between platforms.
If your strategy focuses on personalizing content for your visitors, HubSpot is your ideal option.
Now, while HubSpot is easier and quicker, it falls behind the level of customization possible with Marketo and Salesforce—but with the benefit of greater customization comes a steeper learning curve and need for technical know-how.
On the other hand, Salesforce excels with its customization of complex maps your client is going to navigate. Finally, Pardot’s biggest differential is its progressive personalization, deepening the individuality of your marketing pieces over time.
If you are using more than one automation tool, ensure they work together. For instance, if you use Salesforce for a sales campaign and HubSpot for marketing, you need to use an API to make them talk to each other. With this, sales can use data from Hubspot to further personalize their approach.
Need Help Personalizing Communications at Scale? MAC is Your Strategic Partner!
Our certified MA/CRM consultants offer specialized services that bridge the gap between your marketing automation needs and the technological complexities involved.
We can help you choose the right automation solution for your organization—or if you already have one, we’ll make sure you’re leveraging its features to their fullest potential.
In 2024, your audience expects to receive messages that are personalized to them. No more irrelevant emails or texts. You can trust our team to help you personalize these messages at scale and take your marketing automation strategy to the next level!
Contact us to learn how we can help you maximize your conversion rate—and your revenue!
