Not only are today’s consumers smarter than ever before, but they also have access to more products and services.

As a business owner, personalized marketing is one of the best ways to form a deep connection with your target audience. By combining personalization and a data-driven approach, you’re positioning your company for success.

This leads to an important question: what’s the best way to personalize your marketing plan?

While there is no right or wrong answer – as it’s based largely on what works best for you and your audience –some strategies have been proven more successful than others.

Here are three ways to personalize your marketing plan in 2019 and beyond:

1. Data Analysis

The data associated with your customers can tell you a lot about how to best reach them.

For example, you may find that your most frequent customers live in a particular part of your city, thus allowing you to heavily target that market with future efforts (such as mailers).

Not sure if it’ll work for you? This case study, published by Wired, shows how Point Defiance Zoo & Aquarium is using personalized marketing to more efficiently connect with and serve their audience. Here’s an interesting excerpt from the piece:

With the help of Avnet Services, a consulting firm, and IBM, we added Cognos 10 to connect the data in our point of sale and admissions control systems. So, instead of relying on our best guesses and intuition to decide how many employees or supplies to bring in on any given day, we’re now using data and analytics to guide those decisions.

You don’t have to go to this extreme to achieve similar results. You simply need to devote more resources to data analysis.

2. Email Marketing

How are you using your email list of current and past customers? Are you taking full advantage, or have you overlooked its true powers?

Thanks to the ability to segment your list, email marketing provides a high level of personalization.

For instance, you can send one email to people who have purchased a product or service over the past month, and another to those who haven’t contacted you in the last six months.

The more you experiment with email marketing personalization the better you’ll understand the best way to engage different segments of your audience.

3. Let History Guide You in the Future

Amazon is one of the best examples of a company using a customer’s purchase history to recommend products.

You may never have access to the same resources as Amazon, but that doesn’t mean you can’t use this form of personalized marketing.

Even if you don’t yet have an advanced algorithm in place to do the work for you, it’s still possible to use a customer’s purchase history to make suggestions on what to buy next.

For more insights on marketing strategy that actually works for small business, connect with Jay Bean, Founder of FreshLime and Small Business Marketing Expert on LinkedIn and Twitter. If any of these tips have helped you or if you have anything to add, please comment below. We’d love to hear from you!