Personalizing the Customer Experience: How to Delight Customers with Personalization

Personalizing the customer experience is now a necessity for any company that wants to thrive in a competitive market. Consumers have grown accustomed to highly engaging, relevant, and bespoke experiences offered by major brands like Netflix, Amazon, and Nike. If all you can offer is a one-size-fits-all experience, you’re going to fall behind the competition.

McKinsey research shows that not only do 71% of customers expect personalized experiences, but the companies that excel at personalization, and earn more than their competitors. 

The question is, how exactly do you deliver a personalized experience that goes beyond simply using your customer’s name in an email or SMS message?

Personalizing the Customer Experience: What it Means

Personalizing the customer experience means tuning every interaction with your customers on every touchpoint to their specific needs, goals, preferences, and expectations. It involves using data, insights, and direct feedback to treat every customer as an individual.

Notably, although many companies have experimented with personalization for a while, many still aren’t using personalization effectively. They frequently use basic techniques, like adding a customer’s name to an email, but fail to consider the whole customer journey.

True personalization requires a holistic approach. Fortunately, technology is emerging that allows organizations to embed personalization into multiple touchpoints throughout the buyer journey.

The Benefits of Personalizing the Customer Experience

Effectively personalizing the customer experience has a direct impact on your company’s success. Research shows that investing in personalization can lead to a 10-15% revenue boost for a business, as well as increased customer satisfaction and loyalty. 

Customers want to receive personalized recommendations and messages from companies, with 67% saying they prefer to receive offers based on their individual spending habits. Leveraging personalization also helps you to:

• Retain customer loyalty: Personalization builds trust with customers, showing them you care about helping them find the right products and services to them. It also builds rapport, making your customers feel like you understand them. This helps to increase customer loyalty and boost retention rates, turning one-time buyers into lifelong advocates.
• Increase sales: Customers are far more likely to buy something they feel was tailored-made to address their needs and pain points. When you personalize each step in the customer journey, you’re more likely to attract the attention and engagement of your customers, which increases your conversion rates. For instance, just look at the fact that personalized emails boast a 139% increase in click-through rates. 
• Improve marketing ROI: While it might take more effort initially to implement personalization into your marketing and sales strategies, the long-term results are worthwhile. Customers that develop a stronger connection with your company are more likely to recommend you to other consumers, giving you access to more traffic and leads.

How to Personalize the Customer Experience: Step by Step

Personalizing the customer experience might seem difficult, but all you really need is a few things: the right customer data, intuitive technology, and a strategy. Here’s your step-by-step guide to personalizing the customer experience, and increasing your sales. 

Step 1: Collect, Analyze and Segment Customer Data

First, personalizing the customer experience starts with getting to know your customers. You need to understand who they are, what they want, and what challenges they must overcome. Creating customer personas is a good place to start, as these will give you a good insight into the demographic, psychographic, and behavioral characteristics of your target audience. 

Specifically, you’ll want to fill your personas with the following data:

• Who your customers are: Their demographic data (age, gender, location), their names, and any contact information you might have. 
• How they interact with your brand: Which channels do they use to connect with companies like yours? What times of the day or week do they engage with companies?
• Their goals and pain points: What do they want to accomplish with the products or services you offer? What kind of challenges do they need to overcome?

You can collect customer data in a variety of ways. Market research can give you some basic insights into demographics relevant to your industry. Customer surveys, and social listening tools can help you dive deeper into customer preferences and behavioral traits. It’s also worth assessing your competitors, for any insights they can give you into your customers.

Once you have your customer data, segment it into different groups based on factors like location, purchasing history, age range, and purchasing power. 

Step 2: Map the Customer Journey and Identify Key Touchpoints

Now you know who your customers are and what they want, the next step is to figure out how you’re going to connect with them throughout the customer journey. Today’s average customer journey isn’t linear. Consumers interact with companies in-store, online, through their mobile devices, and more.

Identify the key stages your customers go through when purchasing a product like yours. Do they look for solutions to problems by reading blogs and articles online? Do they check for influencer recommendations on social media – and which social channels do they use?

When they interact with your brand directly, is it through a mobile app, email, live chat, messaging application, or in person? 

Once you identify your key touchpoints, ask yourself how you can personalize the experience for your customer in each of these environments. For instance, if your customers navigate most of their purchasing journey through their mobile, can you send them alerts based on their geographical location to let them know when a nearby store has a sale?

If your customers interact with you mostly through email, how can you ensure you’re sending them messages specific to their interests? 

Step 3: Invest in the Right Technology

As mentioned above, technology is a critical tool for personalizing the customer experience at scale. You need the right technology, not only to collect and organize data effectively, but also to deliver personalized experiences across multiple channels. 

Some of the most important tools to invest in include:

• AI and market research tools: Artificial Intelligence and market research tools will simplify the process of collecting data about your target audience. AI systems can scan through hundreds of data points at once, helping you to learn more about common buyer behaviors, preferences, trends, and potential pain points.
• CRM and CDP software: CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and CDP (Customer Data Platform) software help you to collect, organize, and segment customer data. They’re crucial for tracking and optimizing each stage of the customer journey. 
• Marketing automation software: Marketing automation software is how you ensure you can deliver personalized experiences to customers at scale. Tools that allow you to send emails, SMS message, and other notifications to customer segments will help you to nurture audiences throughout the customer journey.
• Experience building platforms: Experience building platforms are essential for personalizing the customer experience. Solutions like GENESISX, for instance, allow you to create unique mobile journeys and shopping experiences for customers with dynamic, personalized content and AI. 

Step 4: Craft Assets for Your Personalized Experiences

Once you have all the right data, and the right technology, you can get to work on building personalized experiences for your customers. Start by looking at all of your audience segments, and the touchpoints you’re going to be interacting with customers through. 

Identify the core assets you can use to personalize the experience for each customer on every channel. For instance, with email marketing, you may have different templates you use for different customer groups, or you could use dynamic content blocks to tailor parts of your message to specific groups. 

Some email automation tools even allow you to include a customer’s name or images of previous purchases in the campaigns you send. 

With content marketing, you might create different types of content targeting specific user groups, or create dynamic content experiences for each user using AI solutions like SHOWCASE AI. 

On your website, you can use intelligent tools to serve pop-ups, product recommendations, and other content to customers based on their browsing history, previous purchases, or the pages they visit on your website. You could even take the personalization experience a step further, by using print-on-demand tools to allow customers to customize their orders. 

You can even create personalized campaigns on social media, testing different paid ads targeted at specific groups, or creating dedicated accounts for different segments. For instance, Microsoft has different social accounts for Microsoft Teams, Windows, Xbox, and more.

Step 5: Measure the Results and Optimize

Finally, no large scale approach to personalizing the customer experience is ever “finished”. You should always see your strategy as a work in progress, constantly collecting insights to help you improve your results. Start by deciding which metrics you should be tracking. 

Metrics like conversion rates (across all channels), customer lifetime value, customer effort score, net promoter score, and referral rates will help you identify how well you’re connecting with your customers and earning their loyalty. 

Tracking engagement metrics, such as page visits and time spent on pages on your website, as well as likes, comments, and shares on social media will help you identify how well your personalized marketing strategies are resonating with customers. 

Direct feedback and qualitative data can be extremely valuable too. Send surveys to customers, asking them to rate the quality of service they received, or share their satisfaction score. Read reviews and testimonials shared by your customers, and use social listening tools to identify what they’re saying about your company on other channels.

As you gather more data, gradually make changes to your personalization strategies. A/B test different methods of personalization, and be open to experimenting with new programs and ideas.

The Impact of Personalizing the Customer Experience

It isn’t just statistics and industry reports that prove the value of personalizing the customer experience. Countless companies have achieved incredible results just by investing in the power of personalization. Here are some great examples of companies reaping the benefits of personalization.

1. Iams

Leading pet food company, Iams, knows how important a personalized experience is to pet owners. After all, every animal has its own specific dietary requirements and needs. When the company launched its “Advanced” portfolio of products, it implemented a strategy to increase awareness of its products among specific pet parents who shop for products at Walmart speciality stores. 

Working with the GENESISX platform, Iams created a hyper-targeted and personalized marketing campaign, focused on delivering marketing messages to customers within just a few miles of specific store locations. Local customers received a unique barcode offer to assess the new product, and more than 43% of the targeted customers took advantage of the deal.

2. Oreo

Oreo, one of the biggest snack food brands worldwide, has leveraged personalization in multiple marketing campaigns and sales strategies over the years. One excellent example, implemented with the help of Google Ads, is the Eye on the Clock campaign. 

With this campaign, dynamic banners were served to customers with different messages based on the time of day, and the audience segments. For instance, young professionals received messages like “Working late? Have a Cookie.” While parents in the US got messages like “Nap time equals snack time.” The campaign drove 40% more clicks than standard display ads to Oreo’s ecommerce channels. Plus, it reduced the time spent on creative production by 25%. 

3. Amazon

For a broader insight into how companies can start personalizing the customer experience at scale, Amazon is an incredible example. Often cited as one of the leaders in online customer experience personalization, Amazon consistently leverages customer shopper data and analytics to deliver detailed product recommendations to customers. 

Every Amazon experience benefits from the same level of personalization, whether you’re shopping via the online marketplace, using Amazon Music, or experimenting with Amazon Prime Video. Over the years, Amazon’s approach to personalization has significantly increased its sales and customer loyalty rates, making it one of the most profitable companies in the world. 

Unlock the Power of Personalization for Business Growth

Ultimately, personalizing the customer experience should be a priority for every company today – large or small. If you’re not delivering a comprehensive, bespoke experience to your customers across every touch point, they’ll abandon your business for a competitor that does.

Fortunately, personalizing the customer experience doesn’t have to be as complex as it seems. With the right strategy, and technology, any company can optimize the customer journey.

Contact the GENESISX team today to learn how you can use our intelligent, AI-powered platform to create data-driven, personalized experiences for customers throughout their shopping journey.  

Feature Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay