A surefire way to get leads to take notice of your company is by creating personalized and targeted campaigns. Targeted marketing and sales campaigns can drive more revenue for your business by directly appealing to your target audience.
But how do you create those personalized marketing campaigns in the first place? In this article, we’re giving you three tips on how to personalize campaigns and effectively target your ideal customers using the customer data in your CRM.
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1. Analyze customer data to create customer segments
Analyzing customer data is a common practice all businesses should engage in, whether they’re trying to create personalized and targeted campaigns or not. By analyzing customer data and creating customer segments through market segmentation, businesses can better understand who they’re marketing to and tailor their campaigns.
Let’s dive into the basics of market segmentation and how you can start creating your own customer segments today.
What is market segmentation?
Market segmentation is a strategy where businesses categorize people into groups that are likely to respond similarly to marketing strategies based on various characteristics. These groups are customer segments.
By creating customer segments, businesses can better understand the people who make up their audience and create marketing and sales campaigns targeting those segments.
Below are the four most common types of customer segments:
Demographic: This entails categorizing customers based on factors like age, gender, race, income, and profession.
Psychographic: This form of segmentation involves categorizing customers based on traits like lifestyle, beliefs and values, and even personality.
Behavioral: With behavioral segmentation, customers are categorized based on how they interact with your company, like visiting a landing page, interacting with an ad, or engaging with your company’s social media accounts.
Geographic: This segmentation type involves grouping customers based on their geographic location, whether it’s by city, state, country, or region.
2. Create a customer journey map
A customer journey map describes the path traveled by a customer as they encounter a company’s touchpoints. Touchpoints are key moments where customers interact with a company, like when a customer engages with an ad or social media post.
By understanding the customer journey, businesses can identify crucial touchpoints and create personalized and targeted campaigns that guide customers through the buying process and to those key touchpoints to increase conversions and encourage more sales.
How to create customer journey maps
Read on for a brief guide on how to create a customer journey map for your business.
1. Set clear goals for your map
The first step in any marketing process like this is to define your goals and objectives. The goals you have for your customer journey map will determine how you create and shape your map. What do you want to accomplish with your customer journey map? Your goals, whether they’re to drive more revenue or increase conversions, should be attainable and include metrics you can track.
2. Create buyer personas
Buyer personas are fictional representations of a business’s ideal customer. Buyer personas are incredibly useful because they help businesses understand how their customers make purchase decisions and the reasoning behind them. Once you’ve created your buyer personas, identify the ones you want to target with your customer journey map.
3. Identify your touchpoints
Here is where your customer journey map begins to take shape. Identify the customer touchpoints you’ll be representing on your map. Remember to include direct touchpoints, like a customer browsing your site, as well as relevant indirect touchpoints, like a customer reading reviews for your brand on a third-party site.
4. Map your current customer journey, then your ideal one
Now it’s time to compare and see where you can make improvements.
Look at your current customer journey—how are people converting from prospective leads to paying customers? Now, look at the ideal journey you want your leads to take to become paying customers. How do those two journeys differ? Identify those differences and see how you can improve your current customer journey.
3. Use customer data in your campaigns
Finally, companies can begin creating personalized and targeted campaigns that increase audience engagement by using customer data from your CRM in their campaigns.
Businesses can use basic customer information like names or purchase histories to personalize marketing campaigns. Below are three ways companies can use customer data to create personalized and targeted campaigns through different mediums and platforms.
Email marketing: Businesses can use customer names in email campaigns to address customers directly or promote products users recently viewed but did not purchase.
Ad targeting: Customer data can be used to run pay-per-click (PPC) ads that target specific customer segments.
Social media targeting: Use behavioral data and your chosen platforms’ targeting features to ensure your social media ads and organic posts are being shown to your target audiences.
Create personalized and targeted campaigns with the help of Nutshell
With all your customer data organized in one place thanks to Nutshell’s all-in-one CRM, creating personalized and targeted campaigns is simple. Get in touch with us to learn more about how Nutshell can help your business grow. Contact us online or try a free trial of Nutshell today.
FAQs about personalized and targeted campaigns
1. How long does it take to see results from personalized campaigns?
Most personalized campaigns show initial engagement metrics within days, but meaningful business results typically take 3-6 months. Email campaigns deliver immediate open and click rates, while relationship-building and revenue impact develop over time. B2B campaigns often need longer due to extended sales cycles. Start tracking early indicators like click-through rates and engagement, then measure conversion rates and customer lifetime value as your campaigns mature.
2. What’s the minimum CRM data needed to start personalizing campaigns?
You can start personalizing with basic contact information: name, email, company name, industry, and purchase or interaction history. This foundational data lets you create simple but effective personalization like addressing customers by name, referencing their company, or recommending products based on past purchases. As you collect more behavioral data—like email engagement, website visits, and content preferences—you can increase personalization depth without overwhelming your team or database.
3. How do you measure the success of personalized campaigns?
Track these key metrics: conversion rate (actions taken after personalized content), click-through rate (engagement with your messaging), average order value (spending per transaction), and customer lifetime value (long-term customer worth). Compare these metrics before and after implementing personalization, and use control groups to isolate personalization’s impact. Focus on metrics that align with your specific goals—if you want more repeat customers, prioritize retention rate and purchase frequency.
4. What’s the difference between segmentation and personalization?
Segmentation groups customers with shared characteristics (like industry or company size) and sends the same message to everyone in that group. Personalization tailors individual experiences based on each customer’s specific behaviors, preferences, and history. Think of segmentation as “one-to-many” and personalization as “one-to-one.” Most successful campaigns use both: segment your audience into relevant groups, then personalize messaging within those segments for maximum impact and efficiency.
5. Can small businesses create personalized campaigns without expensive tools?
Yes. Modern CRMs like Nutshell make personalization accessible for businesses of all sizes. You don’t need enterprise-level budgets to personalize effectively. Start with email personalization using merge fields for names and companies, create targeted campaigns based on customer segments, and use your CRM’s automation features to send timely, relevant messages. Focus on quality over quantity—a few well-personalized campaigns outperform dozens of generic blasts, regardless of your budget.
