Real-World Personalization That Converts (Without the Creep Factor)

How do you make your audience feel truly seen—and not just served a templated “Hi, {First Name}”? In this episode of Kids, Chaos, and Killer Campaigns, Eden Reid explores the real meaning of personalization in marketing.

With stories from the snack-time trenches and tips from the B2B frontlines, you’ll learn:

• Why relevance beats recognition every time
• How to build personas your team will actually use
• The difference between personalization that clicks and personalization that creeps
• Tactical wins across email, LinkedIn, websites, and ads
• How to segment smarter—by role, lifecycle stage, and behavior
• The one-question rule to test whether your message is “human enough”

You’ll walk away with actionable strategies (and relatable parenting metaphors) to sharpen your segmentation, simplify your message, and increase ROI—without sacrificing authenticity.

👶 Snack-packing moms and spreadsheet-loving marketers alike, this one’s for you.

🔗 Subscribe, review, and share it with a marketing friend who could use a little personalization in their life.

Transcript

Eden Reid (00:11)

Welcome back to Kids, Chaos, and Killer Campaigns, the podcast for marketers who can toggle from customer journeys to potty training in a matter of minutes.

Today, we're talking about the marketing super skill that makes inboxes light up. Personalization.

Spoiler alert, typing hi first name into your emails does not qualify. That's mail merge, not personalization.

True personalization is about relevance, making someone feel seen. The way my oldest lit up when I surprised her with a pink glittery notebook covered in unicorns. exactly the way she likes it. So let's dig in.

First, let's talk about why personalization works and why relevance beats recognition.

both of my girls need breakfast every morning, right? But one wants pancakes with frosting and sprinkles and something drawn on top. And the other one wants lime yogurt, but in a very specific red bowl with a very specific grownup spoon.

I have the same goal for both, feeding them. They have similar needs, eating breakfast, but it's a totally different delivery.

your audience works the same way. And that's why one-size-fits-all messaging completely misses the mark.

Here's a marketing stat for you to consider. Personalized emails, on average, have 20 % higher open rates and six times higher conversion than those without it, but only when the content matches the person's pain points or intent.

Let's talk about personas. Not the dusty slide buried somewhere deep in your brand guide, but the real living, breathing version of your buyer.

Personas are crucial because the key to great marketing isn't louder messaging. It's smarter messaging.

And Smarter starts with understanding who you're talking to.

If you're a mom, you already get this. You know your kid's quirks, cravings, and meltdown triggers better than anyone. I know that my five-year-old will fall apart if her socks feel scratchy, and that my three-year-old will only eat her lime yogurt if it's in the red bowl with her grown-up spoon. You quickly learn that similar goals, like feed the kids, still require very personalized strategies.

Your buyers are no different. Similar roles? Maybe. But identical? Never. You need to know them. Like, really know them. And so here's what goes into building a useful persona.

The first is their buyer's pains and priorities. What keeps them up at 2

they worrying about ransomware attacks, juggling staff shortages, or feeling pressure from a board or council to do more with less? This is your entry point. If your message doesn't acknowledge what they're actually struggling with, it won't land.

Next, you have to understand their decision drivers. What motivates them to act or to say no? Are they the budget owner? Are they just an influencer? Have they been burned by too many vendors in the past and they're hyper cautious? This tells you how to approach them. Some want bullet points and pricing, while others need to feel more emotionally safe with your brand and build a true relationship before moving forward.

Once you understand those pain points and decision drivers, next you really have to wrap your head around tone and texture.

Does your audience respond to dashboards or do they prefer storytelling? Some people light up at a spreadsheet and other clients want a story that mirrors their own chaos before they can really feel seen. Tone matters just as much as content.

For me, I know my toddler's tantrum triggers the same way I know a harried IT manager's. Like the poor guy who's juggling password resets with cyber insurance renewals and then gets another demo in 15 email. We both already know that's a hard no.

One of my favorite moments using personas like these was when I pitched a new nurture campaign internally. Everyone was stretched thin and I knew a traditional slide deck wasn't going to hit the mark. So I stood up and really became the persona. Hi, meet Karen. She's the city hall jack of all trades, juggling 12 different roles and managing too many projects with not enough time.

or budget. She doesn't need bells and whistles. She needs a big red button that says, fix this.

That one story, not stats, not projections, got my team nodding their head. They really got it. And just like that, well, almost just like that. We had the approvals we needed to move forward.

Your takeaway? Don't just build personas because your marketing plan says to do it. Build them because empathy wins attention, budget, and trust. Personas help you stop writing for everyone and start speaking directly to someone the way you'd pick exactly the right snack for each of your kids.

Let's be honest, moms are expert segmenters. We may not always call it that, but trust me, we are doing it every single day. The home version. In our house, we have park shoes, they're easy to wipe off, school shoes, they're durable but cute, and we have the super sparkly but very non-functional shoes, AKA the meltdown shoes we put on if we have to tell the girls no to something else.

We don't just toss any pair of shoes on our kids. We choose the shoes based on context, activity, and the meltdown risk.

And in marketing, it's the exact same principle. You can't speak to your entire audience the same way. A finance director isn't reading your content the same way an IT director is.

And a brand new subscriber certainly doesn't need the same information as a sales qualified lead who's viewed your pricing page three different times.

So here's how to break it down.

One, by job role. A city manager wants high-level outcomes, think productivity, cost savings, ease of use. on the other hand, an IT director wants technical details. How it works, how secure is it, how fast support responds. It's the same service, but you're giving two completely different messages.

You can segment by life cycle stage. A new subscriber is in discovery mode. A sales qualified lead needs urgency and proof. And your current customers, they're looking for nurture and upsell opportunities. Make sure you tailor your messaging to where your buyers are in their journey.

Or you can segment by behavior triggers. Did someone open your last three emails? Did they visit your request a quote page twice in one day? Or did they start a form and not finish it? These moments are gold mines for timely, relevant follow-up in your messaging.

My hack for personalization and segmentation is don't personalize everything. Pick one thing to personalize that will actually move the needle. It could be your subject line, your hero image on your landing page, or even your call to action button text.

That one intentional detail can be the difference between a click and a pass.

Think of it like packing your kids lunch for school. I don't customize every single snack every day,

But I do make sure that my five year old gets grapes and my three year old gets strawberries because one doesn't like strawberries and the other doesn't like grapes.

Those small things help me prevent major meltdowns for my kiddos.

Start with segmentation that will help you show up with the right message to the right person at the right time. Just like how you wouldn't hand your toddler glitter shoes for a muddy playground visit, don't send a book a demo now CTA to someone who signed up for your newsletter yesterday.

Now here are a few personalization tactics that you can prep during nap time. We're gonna talk through channels, quick wins, and the tools or tricks to get the job done. So first, for your email. A quick win is a dynamic first sentence that mirrors a last visited page. So if someone's been on your pricing page, you could hit them with a dynamic sentence such as still comparing pricing options, and for us, we use.

HubSpot Smart Content to do that.

Now on your website, think of swapping your Hero case study based on industry. To do this, you would want to use your CMS SmartRules, but this allows you to show relevant proof points to a relevant audience.

If you're reaching out using LinkedIn DMs, try to reference a post they shared or even liked last week. Sales Navigator helps give you insights to your target audience so that you can share those relevant details when you reach out.

In your paid ads, try using city-level geo-targeting. Something like, hey San Diego marketers, so your audience knows that you are speaking directly to them. you can use meta-location targeting to accomplish that.

We've talked about all the what to do's for personalization, but now let's dive into the dark side of personalization, when it goes too far and is just plain wrong.

There's a fine line between thoughtful personalization and creepy stalker vibes. We've all gotten that email that makes us pause and wonder, how did you even know that about me? So here's the golden rule. Never use data you wouldn't be comfortable bringing up in a real conversation.

If you wouldn't say, hey, happy birthday, saw it on Facebook, to a prospect that you never met in person, don't do it in your emails either.

birthdays, kids' names, recent vacations, unless your relationship is warm, that's cold email overreach.

and don't get me started on merge field fails. Things like, hi first name, but it's the wrong first name. Or, hope things are great at company name, but the wrong company name. Those errors are your digital equivalent to calling your kids by the wrong name and more than that, by your dog's name.

Make sure you QA all of your personalization tokens the same way you check your toddler's backpack before sending them to school to make sure that they do indeed have a snack pack and didn't take it out to fit in their toy dinosaur.

The key takeaway here, great personalization respects the line between helpful and invasive. so you should ask yourself, would I say this to someone face to face? Is my data accurate? And am I giving my audience control? Because when it's done right, personalization builds trust. But when it's done wrong, it builds spam.

So you might be asking yourself, how do I know if my personalization is working? And this is where it's important to measure the metrics that matter.

Look at your segment level, open and click through trends. This will show you resonance by audience and not list wide vanity metrics. Check your conversion rate per buyer's persona. That will help you confirm if.

the tailored path you created actually converts.

measure influenced revenue. Tie smart content back to deals that have closed. Your budget's best friend.

And lastly, make sure you check your unsubscribe and spam rates because they're an instant signal that you've crossed the line from helpful to creepy.

So let's bring it home. Today, we covered the four layers of meaningful personalization.

First, build solid personas, just like you know your kids' food preferences.

the same way you organize snacks and shoes with purpose.

Third, prepare your personalization in advance. Batch those subject lines, CTAs, and nurture messages. And finally, watch your metrics. But don't forget, there's a human on the other end.

Your challenge this week, take one upcoming message and add an email, a landing page, whatever you're working on,

and add just one layer of real world relevance.

It could be a subject line that names their actual pain point, a case study swap that reflects their industry, or a city callout that reminds them you're not just guessing.

then publish it, track it, and learn from it.

Ask yourself what performed better, what felt more human, what got that reply or that click or that you get me moment you were striving.

And hey, just like my kids don't need Pinterest perfect lunches, they just need snacks they'll actually eat, your audience doesn't want fancy stuff. They want to feel seen, and they want to feel like you understand them.

That is personalization done right.

Thank you so much for checking out this podcast. I'd love to hear the topics you want to hear discussed, so please drop them in the comments or shoot me a line on LinkedIn. I encourage you to subscribe to the podcast, leave it a review, and share it with a marketer who could use a little personalization in their life. I'd love to connect on LinkedIn to stay in touch this journey. My LinkedIn will be dropped in the show notes, so click there and shoot me that connect request.

Next week, we're going to be talking about handling the unexpected, crisis management in marketing and parenthood.

In the meantime, enjoy the kids, enjoy the chaos, and I'm wishing you all killer campaigns.