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What Is Personalized Marketing? The Ultimate Guide [2024]

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Julia Szatar
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July 29, 2024
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Today’s consumers live in a world oversaturated with marketing messages. Businesses striving to stand out among the noise and connect with their target audience on a deeper level have been flocking toward personalized marketing. 

It’s no longer enough to merely address a customer by their first name in an email. To truly captivate and convert, you need to offer a unique experience that treats each viewer as the main character in your brand’s narrative. 

This level of personalization might sound extreme, but it has tangible results. When you transform that email to include truly personalized content, you can boost your conversions by 500%. And with AI entering the marketing scene, the possibilities for personalization are more accessible than ever. 

But before you go searching for the best AI video generator tool to kickstart your personalization efforts, let’s delve deep into the basics.

Read on to explore the world of personalized marketing, including its importance, examples, best practices, benefits, and challenges, in order to best discover how to revolutionize your marketing efforts.

What is Personalized Marketing?

Personalized marketing goes far beyond the surface-level familiarity of an email that uses your customer’s first name. We’re talking about tailoring your marketing efforts to each individual’s behaviors and needs. 

Why Is Personalized Marketing Important? 

In the era of information overload and dwindling attention spans, personalized marketing has a few crucial benefits:

1. Improved Engagement: Personalization captures your audience’s attention, keeping them engaged with your content.

2. Higher Conversions: When customers feel seen and understood, they are more likely to take the desired action, be it making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, or sharing your content. In fact, personalized videos can boost conversions by 500%.

3. Enhanced Brand Loyalty: Personalization makes customers feel like they are a part of your brand’s story, fostering loyalty and even advocacy.

4. Increased Customer Retention: Providing personalized experiences can foster loyalty, as customers are more likely to return where they feel most valued. 

Personalized Marketing Examples

When you think of personalized marketing, think big. AI paves the way for endless possibilities in the marketing world. Let’s take a look at a few.

Personalized Videos

personalized video message

Personalized videos have taken the marketing world by storm, offering an immersive and tailored experience to viewers that leads to a 16 times higher click-to-open rate than generic videos and personalized videos are 35% more likely to retain viewers than non-personalized videos.

Imagine receiving a video of a human being who addresses you by name and speaks directly to your interests and preferences. When the recipient hears their own name or sees their own image on the screen, create a feeling of uniqueness and relevance. Personalization leads to a stronger emotional connection with the brand, which can result in increased brand loyalty and trust.

Of course, creating personalized videos is time consuming. You have to write scripts custom to each recipient and then record them (and ideally not have to rerecord). If you have more than five or ten emails to send out…then you suddenly don’t have time for anything. 

Fortunately, advancement in AI allow ambitious marketers to scale their personalized outreach.  One pioneering solution in this space is Tavus, a generative AI video platform that redefines personalized video content creation. 

With Tavus, users can record a single video, create a template script with variables for personalization, and generate as many videos as needed, tailored for different viewers. The advanced AI technology, HD audio engine and lip syncing, and real media blending means every recipient gets a completely genuine, engaging video that looks and sounds exactly like you. 

Custom Products

customized coke product

Remember when Coca-Cola printed people’s names on their bottles? This is another example of personalized marketing. By allowing customers to personalize their product, Coca-Cola created a buzz and emotional connection with consumers. 

Personalization can go beyond the digital experience and even encompass physical products. The goal is to create memorable moments for your customer that ultimately drives them to return.

Personalized Emails

Personalized marketing example with Emails

You’ve been warned: using a customer’s first name is just not enough! However, there are still a myriad of ways in which personalized emails can achieve significant personalization. Consider sending milestone updates or usage statistics. 

Companies like Grammarly and National Grid have mastered this by providing customers with valuable information specific to their usage patterns and milestones. 

Want to boost your success even more? Try adding personalized videos. Adding a video to an email can boost clicks by 300%. That’s why effective marketers embed personalized videos into their emails, thereby leveraging two tried and true strategies. 

Once you know how to send a video through email, you can ensure that your personalized emails not only grab attention but also provide relevant content to each and every customer.

Product Recommendations

personalized marketing example with product recommendation

E-commerce giants like Amazon have long been leveraging product recommendations based on a customer’s browsing and purchasing history. This practice not only simplifies the shopping experience but also increases the chances of upselling and cross-selling. 

Nearly half of customers claim that they made purchases they weren’t planning to buy due to personalized recommendations. By suggesting products relevant to a customer’s interests, businesses can boost sales and enhance customer satisfaction. We call that a win.

We’ll say it again: these personalized product recommendations will see a lot higher conversions if they’re sent with a personalized video. Customize it with their name, the recommended products, and the reason you’re suggesting them (Did they purchase something similar? Have they had it in their cart before? Is there a sale?)

Personalized Marketing Best Practices 

To execute personalized marketing with finesse, you need the right tools, strategies, and a keen understanding of your audience. Consider these best practices:

1. Use the right personalized marketing tools

It can feel overwhelming to select the right tools to kickstart your personalized marketing campaign. We’ve broken it into a few categories to get you started:

  • Customer Relationship Management (CRM): A robust CRM system is the backbone of your personalized marketing. This is how you’ll gather and manage customer data, understand their behaviors, and track interactions. With a CRM, you can understand your audience effectively to ensure that your marketing messages are truly tailored to each group.
  • Data Analysis Tools: Data is the lifeblood of personalized marketing. Utilizing the right data analysis tools lets you glean valuable insights from customer interactions, website behavior, and purchase history. This is how you identify trends and anticipate future needs.
  • AI Personalization Tools: AI personalization tools that use artificial intelligence  and machine learning algorithms to tailor content, recommendations, experiences, or services to individual users based on their preferences, behaviors, and interactions. 

Tools like Tavus, the generative AI video platform, allow you to keep the human touch while leveraging AI to spread your personalized video message far and wide. With Tavus, you can create personalized videos at scale by recording a single video of a real human and then inputting variables for personalization. 

From there, you can generate as many personalized videos as you need with ease, empowering your team to succeed on a grand scale.

2. Anticipate Future Needs

Once you have the right set of tools, you’ll understand your audience’s preferences and behaviors. However, understanding your customers now is only half of the equation. To truly stand out, you need to be able to anticipate what your customers will want next. 

Stay ahead of the curve by meeting your customer’s needs before they even realize they have them. For example, if you notice a growing interest in eco-friendly products among your customer base, you might begin developing sustainable offerings in advance, positioning your brand as a leader in this area.

Understanding your customers’ future needs is just as crucial as addressing their current preferences. By analyzing data and trends, you can stay ahead of the curve and tailor your marketing strategies accordingly.

3. Prioritize one-to-one personalization

True one-to-one personalization means reaching each customer using the precise timing, messaging, and channel that is most effective for them. This is different from traditional approaches to personalization, which rely on segmenting customers into A and B groups, and then testing out a “personalized” marketing strategy on an entire segment. 

One-to-one personalization tailors the communication to each individual customer. This type of marketing thrives on the premise that each customer is distinct, and truly reaching them requires deeply understanding their behaviors, preferences, and past interactions with your brand. 

For example, products like Tavus help you achieve this by allowing you to leverage generative AI to create highly personalized videos that cut through the noise and engage each individual customer. Tavus takes single recorded video and uses best-in-class AI to voice clone and lip sync, creating hundreds or even a million personalized variations of your video that look and sound just like you.

This makes one-to-one personalization scalable–so you can see quick ROI. 

Personalized Marketing Benefits

Now that you’ve got a better understanding of the importance of personalized marketing and its best practices, let’s delve into some of the benefits you can reap from adopting these strategies.

Higher Engagement, Conversions, & Retention

Personalized marketing strategies are proven to result in higher levels of customer engagement, which, in turn, leads to increased conversion rates. When customers feel like your brand understands them, they are more likely to stay loyal. In fact, marketers see an immediate 20% increase in sales when using personalization. 

Higher engagement rates are a natural byproduct of personalized marketing. When customers feel emotionally connected to the brand, they are more likely to interact with your content, whether it means opening an email, clicking a link, or watching a video. 

Understanding the emotional impact of a video, in particular, will allow you to unlock the unique ability to connect with viewers on a deeper level, driving engagement. The more personalized the content is, the more likely the customer will stick around, resulting in higher conversion and retention rates.

Better Customer Experiences

One of the undeniable benefits of personalized marketing is that it creates a better customer experience. Customers expect tailored interactions and personalized marketing strives to surpass those expectations. 

A staggering 99% of marketers believe that personalization improves their customer relationships, underscoring the significance of providing the best possible experience. When a customer feels that the brand truly understands their needs and preferences, they are more likely to engage and stay loyal. 

Whether it’s sending personalized emails or offering product recommendations or embedding highly personalized videos, the goal is the same: ease the customer experience and make them feel valued and understood.

Improved Marketing ROI 

By reaching the right audience with the right message, you can expect a significant improvement in your marketing return on investment (ROI). Personalized marketing ensures that your resources are allocated efficiently and effectively, making your marketing dollars work smarter, not harder. 

More than 90% of marketers proudly report positive ROI on their video content, with 51% declaring that video has the most favorable ROI when compared to other content types. 

Personalized video messaging allows you to deliver content that speaks directly to each viewer’s interests, preferences, and needs. When your audience feels that your message is tailored specifically to them, they are more likely to engage and convert. 

This heightened engagement, combined with the cost-effective production and delivery of personalized video content using tools like Tavus, contributes to an impressive uptick in your marketing ROI.

Personalized Marketing Challenges

Personalized marketing offers many benefits, but it’s not without challenges. Let’s explore some common obstacles and how, with the right tools, you can surmount them.

Limits to Personalization 

It’s natural to be thinking that there are limits to how far personalization can go. The conventional approach has often been limited to merely addressing a customer by their first name in an email or recommending products based on their browsing history. This gives the illusion of personalization, but it’s only scratching the surface of what’s possible. 

You might be wondering how you could possibly add substantial personalization without straddling yourself with an unfeasible amount of labor-intensive work. However, the remarkable advancements in technology, especially in the realm of generative AI, have shattered the traditional constraints of personalization. 

Today, personalization can and should be boundless. Imagine a completely personalized video that not only addresses the recipient by name but also delves into specifics about their preferences, behaviors, and past interactions with your brand. The more layers of personalization you add, the more profound an impact on your audience. 

Tools like Tavus, which leverage the remarkable possibilities of generative AI in personalized video, allow you to break past the traditional limits and embrace the limitless potential of personalization.

Customer Privacy 

Personalization requires collecting and utilizing customer data in a way that might have your alarm bells ringing. There is a delicate balance between providing a tailored experience and respecting your customer’s privacy. 

In an era marked by a heightened awareness of data privacy, this challenge demands our careful consideration. Concerns about data misuse need not drive you away from personalization. 

There is a way to strike the right balance so that your customers feel their data is handled with the utmost care and respect, reinforcing trust in your brand. Follow regulations, obtain explicit consent for data collection and use, ensure that your data is secure, and always allow customers to opt out of personalized experiences. 

The balance lies in delivering a level of personalization that adds value to your customers’ lives, so that they willingly consent and do not feel like their privacy is invaded. 

Most advanced personalization tools like Tavus are designed with privacy in mind. Tavus allows you to deliver personalized content without compromising customer data. By adhering to stringent data protection practices and giving customers control over their information, you can navigate the challenges of privacy while still reaping the benefits of personalized marketing.

Time & Resource Limitations 

You might be wondering how you could deploy the time and resources to create thousands of personalized messages. Personalization can seem overwhelming, especially when dealing with a vast audience and an ever-growing quantity of data. 

It’s true that the traditional approach to personalization involved manually tailoring messages and content, which required a tremendous amount of manpower, making it impossible for large-scale campaigns. 

But this is where generative AI enters the scene. With the right tools like Tavus, you can record a single video and then use Tavus’s generative AI to personalize that video for hundreds of thousands of clients. This level of automation significantly reduces the time and resource constraints that we traditionally associate with personalization. 

Just like that, the ability to scale your personalization efforts are virtually limitless.

Scale Your Personalized Marketing Campaigns

The world of marketing is rapidly changing, and personalized marketing has emerged as the key to capturing and retaining your audience’s attention. By understanding its importance, as well as the best practices, benefits, and challenges, you can take your marketing efforts to the next level.

Let Tavus, the generative AI video platform, help! Tavus allows you to achieve personalized marketing success by empowering brands to create highly personalized video content at scale, engaging with each member of their audience on an intimate level. 

Treat each viewer as the main character in your brand’s story, ensuring that your marketing never gets old. Discover the power of personalized marketing with Tavus and take your brand’s engagement and conversion rates to new heights. 

Connect with your audience like never before, and watch your brand soar in the world of personalized marketing. 

Get started with Tavus.

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