According to a recent study by McKinsey, 71% of consumers expect personalization, and 76% get frustrated when their digital experiences are not personalized. Frustrated consumers are more likely to explore competitor products and switch to another brand, which really shows that personalized customer experiences are becoming the default. Brands everywhere are exploring personalization strategies, and turning to technology to help them deliver for consumers. In order to keep consumers engaged, your brand must deliver experiences that are relevant, delightful and timely.
What is a personalized customer experience?
A personalized customer experience is an experience that is catered to an individual customer's needs and preferences. In the digital world, companies use first party data to understand consumers, and provide them with personalized experiences across various channels like website, SMS, email, and app. Data is an important foundation of personalization. In order to effectively deliver personalization, brands must leverage different types of data in real time, including behavioral, contextual, and historical consumer data.
How do you provide personalized customer experiences?
The foundation of delivering effective personalization is collecting and efficiently organizing data. Once you’ve done this, personalization can be implemented across channels through a variety of use cases. The best personalized experiences are the ones that are timely, relevant, but at the same time don’t feel intrusive. These are some examples of personalization in action:
Omnichannel optimization
Engaging with your brand online should feel cohesive and natural like flexing a muscle: we’re not particularly aware of all the impulses and synapses that were fired off to make it happen; it just happens when we want it to and ideally it feels the same as it did the last time. Omnichannel optimization creates this sense of continuity in the buyer’s journey by ensuring that the messages people are getting on your channels are in line with their habits as well as the story of their engagement with your brand. Email should pick up where web and social leave off, and in-person customer experiences should feel like a continuation of the online research phase of the transaction.
Micro-segmentation
Long ago, it used to be enough to know that your customer was in a certain age range or preferred dogs to cats. Now, it’s vital to understand whether they have a pet, what kind, whether it’s their first pet or not, whether they have looked into pet-sitting services, and more. These kinds of details enable hyper-personalized campaigns that make the consumer feel like an individual. Based on in-depth insights, brands can target their base with personalized customer experiences that provide value beyond the point of sale. A pet care company can notice that a customer is looking at surveillance equipment and automatic feeders and promote a bundle that was created just for the benefit of that consumer.
Artificial intelligence
The most efficient way to create personalized customer experiences is to enlist in AI marketing tools to see the patterns and act on insights that marketing teams can’t. This isn’t meant to replace the expertise of a marketing team, but rather empower them to turn their attention to things that cannot be automated. Artificial intelligence generates in-depth insights at a faster rate than a marketing team can, impacting ROI five- to ten-fold. It can also create campaigns based on these insights without being held up by the cross-functional bottleneck that impacts most campaigns at companies of any size. Imagine being able to act on a viral trend in minutes versus waiting days for approval and bandwidth from other departments to prominently feature a product on your site. The possibilities are endless when artificial intelligence plays a role in creating personalized customer experiences for your brand.
78% of consumers are more likely to repurchase from brands that personalize. The people have spoken, and it’s become clear that personalized customer experiences make your brand worth remembering. Start capitalizing on this new norm by investing in the right tools and strategies for your brand to create meaningful personalization at scale.