When today’s shoppers have so many different buying choices, it is important for businesses to make personalized customer experiences a top priority.
In fact, according to a report done by LawnStarter, 90 percent of customers are willing to spend more with companies who personalize their customer service.
Consumers want to be treated as individuals by the brands they choose to do business with. Learning customers’ names, preferences, shopping patterns, and other important details like this can make the difference between a sale or a loss.
What Is a Customer Personalization Strategy?
Customer experience personalization refers to brand marketers using data analysis and technology to personalize messaging and product offerings for their customers.
This technology allows businesses to identify and sort consumers into segments with similar interests or needs in order to create a targeted experience just for them.
Why Do Personalized Customer Experiences Matter?
The modern shopper has dozens of different product offerings and brand discounts being offered to them every day. What makes your brand stand out from the crowd? This is where personalized experiences come into play.
Ultimately, the ideal result of creating personalized shopping experiences is a smooth and seamless customer journey.
The easier you make it to buy from your brand, the more likely customers are to return and share their positive interactions with others. Personalization can be extremely effective at creating long-term customer relationships.
Brands should be meeting consumers where they’re most comfortable, which can often mean being available on multiple different social media channels as well as making sure that support teams are knowledgeable and can provide whatever expertise is necessary for customer success.
Personalized Customer Experience Strategy: An Example
As one of the most successful online retailers to date, it’s no surprise that Amazon has an impressive customer personalization strategy in place.
Amazon uses its sophisticated analytics technology to create a personalization program that involves showing a customer products that are similar or related to items from their browsing or purchasing history. This allows shoppers to see only products that they have already shown a previous interest in, increasing the chances of a sale.
These offerings often include bundles and additional item recommendations that are meant to increase the dollar amount of the shopper’s cart, but only with items they need.
On top of this, Amazon continues to innovate in the field of personalization with the addition of Amazon Prime Wardrobe.
With this feature, shoppers are asked to take a quiz on their sizing and style preferences, Then, this information is given to a dedicated Amazon team that makes product recommendations related to their answers, all of which can be found right there on the site, and thereby creating a completely customized shopping experience for the customer.
As a retail giant, Amazon will likely continue to lead the way with its personalized customer experience strategies, but there’s room for smaller businesses as well. Any brand can create surveys, gather data, and learn from their shoppers’ behavior.
Ultimately, the ideal result of creating personalized shopping experiences is a smooth and seamless customer journey.
How to Personalize the Customer Experience
By now, most brands have realized that personalized marketing plays a major role in creating successful, long-term customer relationships and landing the sale.
The problem is: how do you create a personalized experience for everyone when thousands of different shoppers are interacting with your brand every day?
No. 1: Gather and Analyze Your Data
Before you can delve deep into creating your strategy, you need to focus on gathering as much data on your customers as possible. It’s important that you gain a deep understanding of who is shopping with you.
There are a few ways you can go about gathering this information:
- Send out customer surveys and opinion polls via email
- Track your brand mentions on social media to see who’s talking about you
- Utilize website analytics technology to find demographics and other user data
- Encourage shoppers to create customer profiles on your website
Any of these can help you get started with your customer analysis.
No. 2: Segment Your Customers
It’s impossible for brands to create a completely individual experience for every single customer. This is where segmentation comes in.
By creating different segments of like shoppers who have similar interests, incomes, geographic locations, shopping habits, and ages or genders, you can ensure that each group is receiving only marketing that applies to them. Generally, people view emails as spam if they contain offers that don’t apply to them or products that they have no interest in. Spammy emails can have a negative impact on your open rates and your sales.
Therefore, targeted and relevant marketing will be a big help to your business.
No. 3: Create an Omnichannel Experience
To stay relevant with today’s customers, it’s important for brands to offer services across multiple channels. Shoppers don’t want to have any trouble finding or contacting your business, and often expect to find customer service at whichever channel is most convenient for them. This can include in-person, email, phone, chat, and multiple social media platforms.
Using your customer segmentation data, you can determine which groups prefer one method of communication over another, which can help with targeted marketing ads. Some shoppers may respond better to marketing on Instagram rather than email if they are spending more time on one platform over another. Knowing this increases your brand’s chances of a click-through and a sale.
No. 4: Create a Seamless Customer Journey
Getting a customer to place items in their cart is definitely a win, but it’s far from the end of the customer journey. In fact, according to the Baymard Institute, nearly 70 percent of shoppers abandon their online shopping carts. But there are ways to combat this.
Many brands implement shopping cart reminder emails or notifications that inform the shopper of any items that they’ve left in their cart and perhaps forgot to purchase.
Brands should be targeting their shoppers with personalized messaging at every step in their buying journey. This starts with a personalized ad, incentives, and recommendations when they begin to browse, and ends with a request for product reviews from their recent purchases. Then the cycle begins again.
No. 5: Gather Feedback & Reevaluate Your Strategies
Implementing a systematic approach to gathering shopper feedback can be a great way to stay up to date with consumer opinions. This is where you can see what’s working and what needs to be improved upon within your personalized customer experience strategy.
Using this data, you can optimize your customer service to ensure that it addresses the shopper as an individual and is as customized as possible. Have a customer’s preferences shifted? Is their profile current with their location and age?
It’s important that you consistently check in with customers and gather feedback at every possible avenue to ensure your data stays relevant.
After purchases have been finalized is also the time to look at your technologies and strategies to ensure they are all functioning properly and determine if they can be improved upon.
All this information will help ensure that shoppers are having the best possible experiences with your brand.
If you’re looking for a way to stay informed about your shoppers, consider Wiser’s Consumer Experience Solution. Acquire insights into how customers are interacting with your brand and gain visibility into the shopper experience to see your brand how shoppers see it.
Visit Wiser.com to get started today.
