Want to reach more customers? Consider personalization

In a relentlessly competitive marketplace, knowing what your customers want and promoting your products in the right way, with the right context, and at the right time has never been more important. Today’s marketers already recognize the importance of personalization, but only 72% know how to implement a personalization strategy.

So many businesses across retail are missing out on the benefits of truly personalized customer experiences – namely increased conversion, loyalty, and revenue. This missed opportunity is primarily due to the misconception of what personalization really is and how it can be applied in real terms. Let’s take a closer look at what true personalization means in today’s marketing landscape.

Personalization is about creating unique experiences for each and every customer.

Personalization that truly impacts ROI and engagement is more than just customizing a promotional email or newsletter with each customer’s first name. It’s more than creating a segment that consists of your highest value customers by location. And it’s certainly not just cross-selling a product to a customer because “people who bought the same product also bought related products”. While these elements are important in their own right, true personalization that attracts and keeps customers coming back for your business encompasses these elements and so much more.

Take for example, Majestic Wine, the United Kingdom’s largest retailer of wine by the mixed case. Majestic Wine uses expert product knowledge to automate personalized recommendations. The aim is to replicate the in-store experience and grow sales using their expert knowledge to make alternative and complementary wine suggestions.

Majestic Wine has hundreds of knowledgeable wine experts within its business. In the stores, each customer receives a personal experience with a sales assistant, who, in turn, is learning about the customer’s preferences to guide them to the right kinds of wines and spirits they might like. Using personalization technology, Majestic Wine has replicated this experience on its website by using transparent algorithms and rules, instead of “black box” systems, which decide what content to show without input from their experts. Majestic Wine’s product recommendations are now decided using the collective knowledge of its experts, enabling the website to suggest the perfect bottle of wine, every time.

Personalization is holistic and combines demographics, preferences, past behaviors and real-time behaviors.

Together, all four of these types of data – demographics, preferences, past behaviors, and real-time behaviors – enable your marketing to be relevant and engage each customer. That’s true personalization.

Demographics (such as gender, age or location) remain an important marketing element, but on its own is just static information about your customer. Econsultancy reports that 34% of businesses are able to adapt content using personal data, however this generates the lowest ROI compared to other methods.

Preferences are explicit pieces of information that your customer has shared with you. This may include topics or categories they are interested in or their preferred frequency of communication. When combined with demographic data, this gives you the ability to engage in the beginnings of a basic conversation with customers.

Past behavior relates to transactions or interactions that customers have had with your business previously. This could be products they have browsed or purchased. Again, this is very useful information, but what customers bought yesterday or last week doesn’t necessarily convey all of their interests. There’s much more to customer profiles.

The use of real-time behavior provides that crucial understanding about what your customers are doing right now. It acknowledges that each customer is a continually moving target and this data enables you to continually adapt your marketing accordingly.

Combine all four areas together and marketers will have a more well-rounded view of their customers. Using this data, they will be able to provide their customers with a unique and relevant shopping experience.

Personalization means staying personal across multiple channels.

Consumers continue to find experiences with brands frustratingly inconsistent when interacting across different channels. For example, imagine a customer receives a personalized offer via email, and then clicks through that email to open a window to the retailer’s website. The website should then build on the message and experience they have been promoting. When retailers do not develop their interactions on the journey or the preferences they know about their customers— real-time and past behavior, preferences and demographics – they are spending money starting the same conversations, but never taking them beyond a “Hello”.

In the age of the always-connected consumer, multi-channel marketing is more than just using multiple means to reach a customer, it’s about understanding how your customer interacts with your brand across different channels to deliver a consistent, personalized experience across those channels.

For marketers, this presents a significant challenge. In a Forrester Research report, “The explosion of personal technologies and social network connections has ruptured the formerly linear customer purchase path, disrupting what it means to have a seamless brand experience.”

There’s also a high consumer demand for multi-channel experiences. We know that 40% of consumers state it is very important to be able to purchase from a retailer via different channels, while another 50% said it would be useful, according to the Econsultancy report.

Now more than ever, customers expect relevant and consistent experiences. In fact, more than 90% of marketers say personalization is critical to their future success to drive sales. To succeed, businesses need to implement multi-channel personalization strategies for the long-term with the aim that each customer feels was designed personally for them.

By promoting products and offers to the right customer, marketers who harness the power of personalization see a significant return-on-investment. Businesses that truly personalize their marketing interactions will not only benefit from increased sales and revenue – they will create stronger customer relationships and build long-term loyalty.

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