41% of consumers have switched the brands they buy from due to poor personalization. The financial implication? A total of $756 billion in lost retail and brand sales in the US and $2.5 trillion globally. But those who master personalization? They’re the winners. Data from the Monetate 2017 Personalization Development study of over 100 companies shows that 79% of companies that “exceed revenue goals have a documented personalization strategy.” found that 93% of companies see an uplift in conversion rates from personalization. Personalization isn’t a ‘nice asset’ but a must have. Check out these three quick ways to use personalization to raise your profit pool.
Treat Customers As Individuals With Your Website
Customers expect to feel understood and be treated as individuals within seconds of landing on your website. Loyalty 360 states that 74% of customers feel frustrated when a website is not personalized. Contrarily, businesses with personalized websites are rewarded with sales growing 19%.
Stuck on how to personalize your website beyond “Hi Jane?” Below are a few ways raise the personalization bar.
Social Proof Notifications: Presenting visitors browsing your site with real-time social proof notifications such as “56 people are shopping this item right now” or “last purchase of this product was 12 minutes ago” is a great way to increase sales, as it verifies the level of approval customers give certain products, and it also adds a layer of credibility.
Put Up User Generated Content: 86% of millennials say that UGC is a good indicator of the brand’s quality and 71% of consumers like personalized ads. Marketing Insider Group’s Michael Brenner argues that the only way to get your target audience to notice and engage with content is to understand what resonates with them, and UGC is an effective way for customers to envision fitting your products into their lives through others’ experiences.
Offer Your Website Content In Multiple Languages: 66% of consumers now shop cross your 80% discount offer written in English won’t make sense to a consumer who speaks Chinese. Take a look at Puma’s website. The athletic brand offers website content in multiple language options; all consumers need to do is pick a country and their preferred language.
Your website may serve as the first place a consumer will connect with your brand. Make them feel at home.
Get Up Close And Personal With Push Notifications
Almost 50% of smartphone users spend more than 5 hours on their mobile devices, and push notifications alone can increase user purchases by up to 9.6X and are responsible for a 16% increase in user spend.
While consumers are more receptive to push notifications than they were in 2015, the key to getting them to addicted to your alerts is through personalization. Results from a LeanPlum analysis of 1.5 billion push notifications show that messages containing personalized content see four times the open rate of generic messages.
A few ways to personalize push notifications:
Use deep links to take consumers to relevant areas within your app instead of loading the app. For instance, you can direct consumers to an abandoned shopping cart or a discount offer page. According to Kahuna, using deep links brought a 66% increase in campaign goal achievement and user.
Sprinkling emojis into your push notifications can also make users consumers smile. As communication is becoming more visual, emojis help personalize your push notifications, give your message more clarity and ultimately increase sales. In an analysis of 11 billion push notifications, Clever Tap’s data science team found that push notifications with emojis saw an average lift in CTR by 124%.
If your push notifications aren’t personalized, you’re a second away from users uninstalling your app. Interested in finding out more about how push notifications can help your business? Check out our in-depth article on push notifications here.
Personalize Your Retargeted Promotions
Website visitors who are retargeted with display ads are 70% more likely to convert to customers and 26% of those customers will return to a site through retargeting.
Now, before you go blasting your audience with promotions, note that the old method of targeting everyone who visits your site isn’t exactly a winning formula. You could end up wasting your resources on people who’ll never buy.
Instead, use these smart tips from Dynamic Yield to personalize your retargeting strategy:
- Use browsing cookies from your site’s user and automatically retarget for products customers have shown interest in. If a user has not completed a transaction for a certain item, offer an exclusive discount to nudge them towards a purchase.
- Onboard offline data from your CRM data and adapt it to targeted online campaigns. This will enable you to re-engage, upsell and cross-sell to an already engaged audience, rather than to visitors with high exit or bounce rates.
- Send promotional emails reminding cart abandoners that they still have items in their carts and offer them special deals upon completing those purchases.
While messages are more effective when repeated, there’s a thin line between convenience and being a nuisance. Use impression caps to stop targeting customers once they’ve been exposed to a specific ad a certain number of times.
If you don’t have a personalized retargeting strategy, now is the time to develop one.
Customers have more choices than ever before don’t want cookie-cutter experiences. To stand out, continuously show your customers you know what they want and need by presenting the right content and messaging at key moments and touch points.]
Brands that will remain profitable, earn customer loyalty and stay relevant are those that create personalized experiences. So, treat consumers as individuals on your website, get up close and personal with push notifications and invest in retargeting.