It’s no secret that personalization is a key demand for the modern consumer, as it is a central goal for the modern B2C company.
And it’s not hard to understand why, either.
Personalization gives customers exactly what they need, when they need it, and in the most effective and convenient way possible. Companies that can provide such personalization will likely experience increased engagement, retention, and advocacy.
However, there’s a misconception about what personalization actually looks like in the real world. In many instances, it’s not uncommon for personalized content to be the main—if not sole—focus of a brand’s personalization efforts.
Take, for example, this quote from an article entitled Reinventing Personalization For Customer Experience: “(Forty-eight percent) of consumers spend more when their experience is personalized, while 74% of people hate being shown irrelevant content.”
In this statement, “irrelevant content” and “personalized experience” are discussed as if they are polar opposites—which certainly isn’t the case. While it’s true that delivering relevant content is necessary in order to provide a personalized experience, there’s much more to it than that.
In this article, we’ll look at the key factors to consider when aiming to create a truly personalized experience for your customers.
But first, let’s talk for a moment about “partial” personalization—and why this approach simply won’t cut it by today’s standards.
The Fallacy of Partial Personalization
Here’s another stat from a study by Sailthru that, though technically accurate, is a bit misleading: “75% of marketers believe that segmenting an audience fulfills the bare minimum requirements for personalization.”
Unfortunately, this statement is only accurate in that segmenting your audience is pretty much the least you can do in terms of personalizing your customer experience. To be sure, this “bare minimum” isn’t going to do all that much to improve an audience’s perception of your brand.
What’s more, the mere mention of “bare minimum requirements for personalization” is misleading in itself. There’s no gauge of what’s considered an acceptable amount of personalization—and there definitely isn’t any “personalization police” to tell you whether you’ve reached this non-existent threshold, either.
The point is, your customers aren’t going to give you partial credit for taking a “bare minimum” approach to personalization. If you don’t meet or exceed their expectations, any personalization you do offer won’t likely have much of an impact on their experience with your brand.
When it comes to personalization, you need to go all in.
4 Tips to Providing a Truly Personalized Customer Experience
How exactly do you go all in with personalization?
Well, there are four areas you need to consider:
- The quality and type of content you deliver
- The channels and platforms you use to engage with your customers
- The promotions you present to your audience members
- The unique services and experiences you provide
Let’s take a closer look at each.
Delivering Highly Relevant Content
As we said earlier, it certainly is important to implement personalization into your content creation initiatives.
Case in point:
- 63% say their perception of a brand improves when given personalized content
- 78% of consumers say personalized content increases their purchasing intent
- This intent to purchase can increase by up to 40% due to delivery of personalized content
Now, delivering personalized content looks a lot different in 2020 than it did three to five years ago. It’s no longer sufficient to deliver “content you may like” based on high level, segment-wide interests.
Instead, you need to take a strategic approach that focuses on the individual customer at all times.
This goes for:
- The actual content you create
- The formats you use to deliver your content
- The content journey you create for your customers
First and foremost, your content library needs to cover all bases with regard to your audience. Your library of content should always be expanding with content revolving around your audience’s interests, as well as their purpose for engaging with your brand.
For example, Dick’s Sporting Goods provides informational content on a variety of topics, from home workout tips to equipment setup and maintenance:
Make sure to publish your content in multiple formats—again, according to your audience’s needs and expectations. This will allow your audience to engage with your content in multiple ways, depending on which is most convenient.
(Repurposing your content can also allow you to deliver certain information more efficiently. For example, Dick’s team might create a video that demonstrates proper running form to complement the blog entitled “Running Tips for Beginners.”)
No matter your niche, your content library should consist of various types of content, such as:
- Product updates to keep your customers in the know
- Onboarding materials to get your new customers up to speed
- Tutorials and how-to guides to elevate your customers to “power user” status
- Success stories to nudge your prospective customers toward conversion
In turn, you can then create content funnels and dynamic customer journeys that present the right information at the right time to keep your individual customers fully engaged with your brand. Ideally, these content drips will be triggered by specific actions taken by the individual customer.
More than just providing surface level content recommendations based on broadly defined interests and behaviors, your goal should be to always deliver the exactly on-point content at any given moment. The more relevant your content is to the target’s specific circumstances, the more likely they’ll continue doing business with you.
Using the Right Channels and Platforms
Despite all this, creating highly relevant content won’t make much of a difference if you don’t deliver it in an optimal manner, and this depends on a few different factors:
- The customer’s preferences
- The message or content being delivered
- Your purpose for reaching out to the customer
That’s right: personalization isn’t just about giving the customer what they want.
Though this is part of the equation, personalization is more about engaging with your individual customers in the most effective and efficient way possible given current circumstances. This allows you to get your message across more clearly, and increases the individual customer’s likelihood of engaging further with your brand.
This is why omnichannel operations are so crucial. In “going omnichannel,” your customers will always be able to pick up right where they left off during their last engagement. You’ll also be able to leverage their preferred channel to spur engagement—then point them to the channel that allows you to communicate your message most effectively.
A common example is using paid search and remarketing strategies to catch the consumer’s attention and nudge them toward a relevant landing page.
While you probably already use a number of channels to engage with your audience, it’s important to understand the role these channels play in providing a personalized experience to your customers.
Though your customers all use the same channels, they use them in their own way. Keep this in mind as you assess and improve your personalization efforts.
Tailoring Promotions to the Individual Customer
A 2018 study by SheerID and Kelton Global confirms what we’ve known for a while now:
The modern consumer yearns for personalized offers and promotions.
As the report shows, more than two-thirds of consumers say offers presented specifically to them stand out more, and are seen as more important than general offers. What’s more, a whopping 94% of respondents said they would likely take advantage of a highly personalized offer.
Now, this doesn’t necessarily mean you have to create unique promo campaigns and offers for every single one of your customers. But you do have to develop offers that resonate with your various audience members in some way—making the individual customer feel as if the offer was created just for them.
As one example, you might deliver offers based on your customer’s purchase history, as Starbucks does with its loyalty program:
Or, you can send them personalized offers based on their average order value. Here, you might provide a 10% discount to low-value shoppers for spending $50 or more in a single order, while your higher-value customers could get a 20% discount for spending over $300 at one time.
Another way to personalize your promotions is to focus on the life events of your individual customers. You can take the easy route here, presenting discount and freebie offers on their birthdays and brand anniversaries:
Or, you could dive deeper into the nuances of your customers’ histories with your brand.
Here, you’ll want to ask yourself questions such as:
- Do they purchase similarly-themed products (e.g., anniversary gifts, birthday presents, etc.) at certain times of the year?
- What milestones do they experience in life and with your brand?
- Will there come a time when they outgrow some of your products, and move on to others just as a matter of course?
While you do want to tread lightly when providing offers based on predictions and projections, getting it right will lead to an ultra-personalized experience your customers likely never anticipated.
Providing Unique Services and Experiences
So far, we’ve discussed a number of ways to inject personalization into your customer experience. Here, let’s focus on the importance of building new experiences that revolve entirely around personalization from the get-go.
More often, we’re seeing personalization take center stage as a selling point for new and existing brands alike.
For example, Stitchfix’s subscription service exists solely on the premise of providing highly-tailored fashion recommendations to its customers on an ongoing basis.
As we’ve discussed before, Nike’s new concept stores provide an immersive and personalized brick-and-mortar experience in a variety of ways. This includes a Stitch Fix-like service, in which customers scan their feet and provide additional information, and are then presented with tailored sneaker recommendations for the best fit possible.
Finally, it’s worth mentioning the importance of going above and beyond for the individual customer whenever possible, and certainly whenever necessary.
Yes, personalization by design is vital to the success of your business moving forward. In addition to breaking this down to a science, you should also prepare your team to personalize your customers’ experiences organically as well. Whether this means making a special delivery to a customer in need, sending a fully-customized product to a fan, or providing any other low-cost personalized service on the fly, your team should be looking to add a personal touch to the experience during every interaction with your customers.
It’s simple:
If you can always do what the customer needs at any given moment—and do so efficiently—you’ll never have to worry about them heading for greener pastures. After all, what could be better than receiving truly personalized service?