You may have heard this before – personalizing your message to individuals is a surefire way to boost conversions. But what does that actually mean? What are some easy ways you can leverage personalization for your marketing campaigns?
In this blog post, I’ll be covering all of these topics- the effects of personalized messages, best practices for implementing them, and suggestions for integrating custom imagery into your social media outreach. By the end of this article you’ll know how to start personalizing your outreach and why it works!
What’s the big deal about personalization?
Personalization is when we tailor our marketing messages to individuals. Using their name, their email address, firmographic data, their hobbies, and values they associate with us are all examples of personalizing our interactions with them. Doing so allows us to better connect with them on a more personal level and raise the likelihood that they’ll choose to buy what we’re selling.
Not only that, but personalized messages can also have a positive effect on our emotional states, which can lead to higher conversion rates. For example, Mark Schaefer (an internationally-acclaimed speaker, author and college educator. His other books include “The Content Code” “Return On Influence”) has found that when he sends out personalized emails asking customers for feedback , he often receives one-third more responses than non-personalized emails .
In his bestselling book “The Digital Marketer: An Online Marketing Approach that Works”, Tom Keatinge, an Affiliate Manager at Commission Factory, found that when he sent out personalized emails he received 25% more clicks on the links within those emails and a 50% increase in click-through rate.
Why should YOU incorporate custom imagery into your outreach?
Personalization isn’t just limited to text, infact the majority of us are visual learners, so using a custom image in our outreach can be even more effective that personalized text. If you’re not familiar with what this is, it’s basically any type of image that reflects a prospect or customer.
Hyperise integrates with 100s of platforms so no matter who your email service provider is you can add personalization to your outreach very easily with a simple copy and paste.
The first reason why every marketer should be incorporating this is because it can increase conversion rates. When your customers see an image that relate to them and the products you offer, they’ll often be more likely to respond in some way, whether that means clicking on an email link or purchasing a product. A custom image can also helps increase engagement and interaction with your audience. It shows them that you care about who they are as a person and want to connect with them on a deeper level.
What is personalized imagery and how does it work?
If you are targeting individuals who love hiking then feature a picture of someone going on a hike with their dog alongside some text about how great it feels when they get back from one.
Using merge tags from your email service provider, we can use these to dynamically pass data to the image, just as we would with a text mail merge email campaign.
A personalized image reflects the personality of the target audience. Personalized imagery can be used in many places such as: email and linkedin outreach, video intros/outros, presentations, blog post articles , infographics and on social media platforms.
Personalization make your company seem more down to earth by showing off personalities instead of just logos or brands. Reach out to potential customers through an email campaign with customized imagery for them!
Personalized images are more persuasive than generic marketing images
One study found that personalized images are more persuasive than generic marketing pictures. The study looked at a large number of email recipients who received the same message, but with different types of imagery: personalized and not personalized (generic). They looked for how likely they were to click on an offer in the email based on which type of image was used.
The results showed that those whom had been sent emails containing a personalized image opened it 50% more often than those who had emailed messages without attachments or branded content!
This is because people like seeing themselves in visual formats. It makes them feel as if their voice has been heard and acknowledged by your company instead of just being another faceless customer number on a spreadsheet somewhere.
Using custom image in your email and linkedin outreach.
No one likes feeling like they’re just another number. Personalizing images with people’s faces increases engagement rates by 50%. This will help make them feel more important to your company; as if their voice is being heard for once instead of it fading into obscurity among all those other customer numbers on spreadsheets somewhere.
So what are some ways that you can personalize these images? Let me give you five suggestions below:
- Visualise your call to action; for example if you want to talk about the prospects website share a picture of your team around a laptop and on the laptop screen add a picture of the prospects website.
- Show an aspirational image; for example if your product is SEO have an analytics chart that shows the number of impressions to the site increasing over the period and then brand it to your prospect.
- Diagrammatic pictures are a great way of showing a process for a customer adding in their brand or thermographic data really helps speak to them.
Moving images draw the eye so using GIFs and adding personalized layers is a great way of driving further engagement. - Show the future; personalise your product to your prospect adding in their profile image or firmographic data such as their business name or logo to your product dashboard image, triggering FOMO – fear of missing out.
The benefits of using personalized imagery for conversions
Customizing the image you use in your outreach emails and on LinkedIn will not only increase conversions but also give readers an idea of how they might fit into your company culture.
- Personalized imagery has been shown to decrease cart abandonment rates by 17%, boost clickthrough rates by 150% and improve conversion rates by 200%.
- The key is to personalize it with a customer’s first name from their email address, their age if known or other unique information about them so that people can see themselves as part of the story you are telling in addition to being interested enough in what you offer for sale.
- Surveys have shown, that using personalization around the call to action on landing pages drive more than a 2X improvement in conversions .
- The biggest misconception about customizing pictures is that it takes a huge chunk of time and labor. However, many tools like Hyperise allow you to create beautiful custom graphics in minutes at super low cost!
- You’ve probably heard before that a picture is worth 1000 words. But when you consider the importance of personalized imagery for your marketing strategy, it might be more accurate to say that an image can speak volumes about who you are and what you stand for. When you incorporate a personal image into your marketing campaigns, not only will customers relate better with your brand but they may also see themselves in their own future as being part of the company culture too!
The science behind personalized images and how they can influence conversion rates
As 65% of the world population are visual learners, graphics play a role in every part of life. They especially matter when it comes to engaging new prospects and educating about your product and services.
Visuals can help summarize and simplify content, making it easier to process and remember. A picture or animated gif can also elicit stronger emotional responses than words alone, boosting engagement levels.
How to create your own, high-quality customized images without expensive software or design skills
There are many free resource great free resources online to find images that you can personalise for example GIPHY.com is a great source to find gif images.
With Hyperise we provide over 80 different templates ready to use, in-addition to that we also have an image library chock-full of stock images you can add to your image templates.
Our favourite for free stock images is unsplash.com here you can find thousands of images based on your search preferences download these and add them to your high price account to add personalise layers directly to them.
Examples of businesses who have seen success with custom imagery
Here at Hyperise we see thousands of great examples of customers using personalization in their outreach, below are just a few examples of how this can work for you.
Starbucks are famous worldwide for putting names on cups and so is a very clever move of them in their loyalty program outreach engagement to use that same famous imager, dynamically putting clients names on cups to entice them back into the loyalty program.
Intercom.com use website personalisation, personalising images with business details and industry visuals on their landing pages and achieve 300% conversion uplift.
Neil Patel uses personalise images to re-engage people to remind them to attend his webinars when he started to do this he achieved a 22% uplift in attendees to his webinar.- G2.com extend their product, taking product screenshots and personalising those to each prospect, to show the value of their product and how using G2 will help the prospect.
Starbucks are famous worldwide for putting names on cups and so is a very clever move of them in their loyalty program outreach engagement to use that same famous imager, dynamically putting clients names on cups to entice them back into the loyalty program.
Intercom.com use website personalisation, personalising images with business details and industry visuals on their landing pages and achieve 300% conversion uplift.
Neil Patel uses personalise images to re-engage people to remind them to attend his webinars when he started to do this he achieved a 22% uplift in attendees to his webinar.Tips for using personalization in order to increase conversions on your site (text, layout, colors)
There are many tips and tricks for using personalisation in your outreach and in your images. Obvious ones such as logos and other firmographic data but also more subtle things such as using brand colors.
Changing the header text color or the background color of your image based on the primary colors of the brand you’re reaching out to can have a subtle but very significant impact at getting your prospects attention.
What are the potential drawbacks of using personalization and what can you do about them.
We’ve heard many times customers query about the impact of using images in outreach negatively, for example is there a spam penalty for using an image?
We tested this theory with many email spam filers to verify this and what we can see is whilst there is a very very small penalty for having an image in your email but this is far outweighed by the benefit you will receive.
For example https://www.mail-tester.com/ presents scores from 0 to 10 with higher scores indicating a better chance of your email being delivered.
Of course we included a personalized image in the email but still scored 8.8, which is considered to be almost perfect and as you can see from their findings, there is little impact on delivery rates for an image included in emails.
In other words: don’t be afraid to use personalization!
Tips on how you can use customized imagery in your own business’ marketing campaign
We often mention using personalise imagery in email, this is because email is such a commonly used channel but there are many other channels and ways we can use personalise images in our business marketing campaigns.
- LinkedIn is often said to be the biggest and best business social network so if you want to reach out to business professionals using LinkedIn is a great place. Using personalized imagery in your LinkedIn messages has proven to more than 2X engagement and therefore people taking your CTA.
- Chatbots or conversational commerce, as it’s sometimes referred to is another great way and channel to use personalised pics. Using those to reply to prospects inputs and responding with a visualised answer to accompany the text is a great way of driving engagement in this channel.
- Using direct mail such as personalise postcards is a great way of delivering personalized visualisation in a different way from typical digital channels. Imagine a personalized postcard landing on your doorstep or on your desk, it will be impossible to miss and of course 100% open rate.
- Personalising your landing pages or blog articles with text and pictures is a great way of doubling your website conversions. A recent survey by HubSpot of over 300,000 websites found more than a 2X uplift when personalisation was used around the CTA.
What the benefits of using customized imagery are and why it is so effective at increasing conversions
Customized imagery is all about the customer, and it can be personalized based on what they are likely to find most appealing. This makes your marketing more effective because you’re tailoring what’s being shown in order for them to feel like their needs matter. It also helps marketers send a message of authenticity that speaks volumes with customers who may have been burned by expectations set out before hand without any input from themselves first.
In Summary
We’ve learned a lot in this article about the science behind personalized images and how they can have an impact on conversion rates.
If you are looking to explore some of these ideas further, I recommend reading “The Science Behind Personalized Images And How They Can Influence Conversion Rates.”
To learn more or if you would like help incorporating any of these principles into your marketing strategy, please don’t hesitate to contact us!