On February 4, we presented a webinar to share how to elevate your approach to personalization. With Michael Klein from Adobe, we explored how industry leaders are achieving world-class personalization at scale. Watch the on-demand webinar here. Below are some of the key takeaways:
Personalizing the customer experience (CX) is its own journey. To provide worth-while brand interactions for your customers, you must put in the time and effort to get to know them. Utilizing first-party data informed by customer identity allows you to provide customized experiences as you build more robust profiles of your customers. However, customers are not the only ones who benefit from personalization. Brands who deliver personalized CX typically have an improved organizational model with strong leadership, a unified customer understanding through integrated data, and they see continuous improvement through feedback loop learning.
So, what do you need understand before you can master personalization?
Personalization is a feature.
Focus efforts on the right kinds of interactions and spark engagement at key moments through the customer journey. For example, right after a customer buys, offer them a valuable upgrade. At the peak of their engagement, make the next move to drive loyalty through positive experiences.
Brand reputation and loyalty are increasingly top of mind in a consumer’s decision to buy or interact with a brand. Loyalty increases when a customer feels like their needs are being addressed and consumers are willing to pay more for personalization they enjoy.
Personalization requires a strong data foundation.
Consumers want to be addressed as more than a data point. However, collecting the right data allows you to know more about your customers and personalize brand interactions. Data isn’t just data to the customer i.e., where they live, their passions and hobbies, their email address, and their favorite place to buy clothes. This information, while invaluable to a brand, ultimately makes up a consumer’s life. For both parties, the data is precious. This is where trust factors in. With first-party data, your customer is trusting you with a part of who they are. Personalization means using that data to make the customer’s experience better. If your brand fails to deliver a tailored experience, customers won’t give away their information for free.
Personalization benefits the brand.
Successful personalized CX unlocks marketing capabilities. The acquisition of shoppers is more efficient and effective. If you know your audience well, you can draw them in and keep them coming back through a value exchange; when customers provide data, you provide tailored experiences.
Recognize the customer, her context and objectives, and you’ll be able to deliver more relevant messages. Keep in mind, the value exchange is more than a transaction. Move towards building lifetime value with brand loyalty. Once you gain your customer’s trust, keep it, and you’ll have a customer for life. The more you personalize your CX, the more data you’ll receive to pass to your marketers for activation.
Your journey will have roadblocks.
Most organizations run into roadblocks that prevent personalization at scale. The top challenges are the inability to build business cases and ROI, siloed data, limited in-house resources, scaling personalization across channels, and slow action on recommendations.
Where do you start?
It all comes back to data strategy. Take command of your customer data with these steps:
- Assess the current state of your tech infrastructure, data dependencies, and operating environment. What is your vision for data management?
- Assess your impact and readiness. What would a business case look like that estimates the ROI and payoff period of capability improvements?
- Build a roadmap for technical development. What kind of investment do you want to make for a scalable and phased adoption alignment?
Download the How to Win at Customer Experience Infographic to learn more.
