How To Personalize Your Internet Marketing

Whether you’re building a list of subscribers, prospects or customers, you always have to build a relationship with them, based on credibility and trust. While customers already have trusted you with their money, you still have to prove they were right when they took that decision.
You should use your email follow up series for that and you should use personalization in your email messages as I’ve explained in How Do Autoresponders Work?.
There a lots of ways to build trust and credibility (I’ll show you an excellent resource below) and one of them is personalization of your Internet marketing efforts. Thus you are talking to a friend, like in you and me, person to person. Using an good mailing list management (autoresponder) service allows you to do just that and, as I will show you below, it’s quite easy to set up.
I’m using Aweber as an example, because that’s the service I’ve been using for years now, but any other well established service can do the same. Only the names and variables will be different.
Let’s have a look at your sign up form.
At the very least it contains an email address, but, for reason of personalization, you’ll want to include a name too.
When your subscriber clicks on the ‘Send’ button, these values, together with some others like your unique list number and the return page that you want your subscriber to return to, are sent to Aweber and stored in your database, recognized by your unique list number.
The return page can be personalized, because you can have Aweber send the info back to you. It’s an option you have to click when you create the web form. The data is added to the URL of your return page, separated by a question mark.
Personalize Emails
All you have to do now is pick up that information. Therefore you’ll need to change the extension of your return page into .php. Nothing to be afraid of. It works the same as .htm or .html.
Next, all you have to do is extract the name from the variables that were sent back using php. Don’t ask me how it works, as I’m not a PHP programmer, far from that. I only use this code at the very top of my page (before anything else):
Now, anywhere in the page, just right between any content, I can add the following line:
and as a result, it will display the name!
Let’s have a look at my ‘thank-you’ page that comes up after subscribing to me email update notifications (which is a good idea to do right now; look at the right in the navigation top).
Here’s the URL for that page (I’ll have it opened in a new window):
It’s quite standard.
Now let’s add the variables as Aweber sends them back (they’ll send more than shown below, but let’s keep this example simple; it works the same.
See that?
Suddenly my name and my email address show up in that page.
That’s how you personalize your sign up procedure.
Now that your visitor has signed up, you can always use your subscriber’s name in any page that you send her to, as I’ve explained in Advanced Autoresponder Marketing.
Depending on your payment processor, you can do exactly the same after a payment process has completed. Just process a test purchase for $0.10 and look in the URL to see what has been send back after a question mark and catch that information using the PHP code above.
It works with Clickbank and PayPal, so you can have the buyer’s name displayed on your download pages. If you’re using squeeze pages, it’s the same process as above.
And that’s how you integrate personalization into your online marketing efforts.
Easy huh?
By the way, if you want to read more about credibility and trust, you definitely SHOULD read The Last Protégé.
And if you want to integrate personalized Internet marketing into your e-commerce platform, then you should most definitely check out Rapid Action Profits, cause that has it all build in. No more scripts, no more code, just fill in the blanks.
Let me know what you think of personalization. Think it’s useful?
Post your comments below!