What’s in this article:
- Strategies your brand can use to personalize the customer journey across various touchpoints and deliver optimal experiences to your customers
In a world where consumers want brands to honor their individuality, delivering a personalized experience is non-negotiable. In fact, 87% of consumers indicate an interest in a personalized and consistent experience across channels.
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Responding to consumer needs for personalized experiences has great benefits. Brands that personalize the customer experience improve their revenue and improve their net promoter score.
However, delivering a personalized shopping experience that encourages consumers to make a purchase starts with personalizing the customer journey.
In this article, we put together some strategies you can use to personalize the customer journey across various touchpoints.
Make Your Website Personal
Your website is a critical touchpoint in your customer journey and consumers expect a tailor-made web experience. Personalizing your website not only allows you to deliver a relevant experience to individual visitors at scale but also drives conversion.
According to Washington Post, electronics retailer Best Buy saw a 7% increase in sales after making its website more personalized. Use these tips to help you personalize your website for customers as they move through their journey.
Offer Relevant Product Recommendations
Ask new visitors to create customer profiles to enable you to gather data to make personalized recommendations. Offer a mix of collaborative (“Those who bought this also bought that”) and attribute-based recommendations (based on what consumers view) to introduce products to new customers.
Direct returning customers to homepages filled with personalized product and content recommendations that are based on what they browse and their purchase history.
Use Cookies
Use cookies to track visitor behavior so that you can provide them with targeted content once they return.
First time visitors at ASOS are presented with a page directing them to either ‘shop women’ or ‘shop men’.
If the visitor selects “shop women”, from then on, the visitor is directed to the homepage focused on womenswear whenever they visit the ASOS website.
Additionally, use customer preference cookies to remember customer preferences like their language or location, to make the shopping experience seamless and more personal.
Go Local
Recommend products to customers based on what’s trending in their area, show them local shopping hours and allow them to check local in-store inventory.
Get up close and personal by contextualizing areas of your website, such as the homepage banners, based on your customer’s local climate conditions.
Go Beyond First Name Emails
With 59% of consumers making a purchase based on emails, email remains an important part of the customer journey. To deliver a true one-one experience that influences consumers to shop with you, you need to go beyond first name subject lines.
Just 8% of consumers are encouraged to engage with a retail brand if they addressed them by their first name. Here are some tips to help you personalize your emails.
Send Triggered Emails: Use triggered emails like back in stock and abandoned cart messages to send customers relevant content and offers based on their actions.
This email from Sephora encourages customers who have only browsed their website to make a purchase:
Personalize triggered emails based on factors such as your customer’s location, interests, and online and offline behavior. Include personalized product recommendations, and shopping cart links in your emails to convert customers faster.
Personalize Emails at Open Time
Open time personalization allows you to show customers the most up-to-date content at the time they open your email. To nail this strategy, leverage customer data platforms to show recommendations, pricing and inventory to customers based on their recent behavior across channels. Ensure you use the most current data from customers to inform your interaction.
Let Subscribers Take Control
Recent data shows that 69% of consumers want control over their email frequency. Have a preference center to allow customers to determine the frequency of their emails and use analytics tools within your communications platforms to identify your customers’ preferred timing.
Digitalize The In-Store Experience
Brick and mortar stores are still an important part of the customer journey and customers expect a personalized in-store experience.
Windstream Enterprise found that 79% of customers indicate that personalized service is an important factor in determining at which store they choose to shop.
Don’t know where to begin personalizing your in-store experience? Get started with the strategies below.
Know What Customers Have Been Up To
Equip store associates with technologies such as mobile POS so they can be informed of the customer’s buying journey and offer them the right recommendations. Use artificial intelligence to see customers’ search history on your website and pair them with the right store associate when they walk into your store.
Have an In-Store App Component
Include an in-store mode in your app to help shoppers with product discovery and navigation. Your in-store mode should include features like barcode scanners, store maps, and allow shoppers to look up in-store inventory using voice and image search.
Power your app with location data so your app can automatically switch to in-store mode when customers walk into your store.
Send Real-Time Offers
Use technology such as in-store beacons and Wi-Fi to identify customers as they enter your store and send them targeted offers through their phones. Segment your customers and personalize offers based on their buying history across all touchpoints, conversion data, and predicted purchasing behavior.
Deliver Value with Mobile Apps
From helping consumers find their next purchase to saving time at checkout, mobile apps play a big role in the customer journey. 53% of consumers use mobile apps to find products and 40% to find coupons and discounts. Here are some ways you can create personalized experiences and value as consumers engage your mobile app.
Enable Discovery
Present products to app users based on their behavior and interest profiles and ensure your app has customizable filters to help users find products easily. Allow consumers check product availability and compare prices via the app.
Help Them Decide
To make purchasing decisions easier for customers that are ready to buy, consider including augmented reality features into your app to help them try on products. Also, give customers access to personalized advice from experts on purchases, display product reviews and include a price checker in your app so consumers can compare prices.
Make Checkout Easy
Allow consumers to purchase directly from your app in a few steps and provide alternative payment options to customers like local wallets and country-specific options based on their geographical location.
Connect With Social Media
Social media channels play important roles in customer journeys and provide new ways to connect and engage with customers. 74% of consumers are influenced by social media when making buying decisions.
While personalizing your customer journey on social media can seem difficult, these three tips should help you out:
- Leverage Retargeted Ads: Use social media retargeted ads to encourage consumers who have visited your website to make a purchase. Segment audiences into interest-based groups to create messages and ad creative that specifically appeal to each group. Have a mobile-optimized site before launching your ad campaigns, to make it easy for customers to complete a desired action.
- Offer Personalized Support: During their customer journey, customers are likely to have questions or complaints and will turn to social media to reach you. Use social CRM to access conversation histories and provide personalized responses to customer requests. Personalize your response to consumers by addressing them by name and have customer service team members signing off responses with their names or initials.
- Drop Personalized Content: Use data to understand your customers on a granular level. This will help you to produce content that relates to their lifestyles and connects with them on an emotional level. Create awareness about your brand with entertaining and inspirational posts and nudge consumers into the consideration stage with information about new product offerings, discounts, and sales.
Conclusion
As consumers continue to demand tailored experiences, personalizing your customer journey at each touchpoint is key to remaining in business. To nail this strategy, make sure you have the right data, find the balance between personalization and privacy, and continuously test the entire user journey to deliver optimal experiences to your customers.