Powering personalization: Opportunities for organizations to connect emotionally with customers

Imagine visiting your favorite restaurant. For ten years, you have been ordering the lasagna. This evening, your server has brought your order early – and now he’s bringing you fusilli pasta. You’re baffled.

Recreate this experience with millions of consumers, and you get the idea of the customer challenge for consumer-facing brands today. Organizations that fail to display that they know their customers and their purchasing preference risk losing their business to competitors who are inclined towards their customers want.

People today expect personalization.

When it comes to personalization – tailoring an experience, product, or service to a specific consumer segment – several brands are already focusing on this area and reaping the rewards. When appropriately implemented, marketing personalization can drive a massive revenue impact.

From personalized product offerings and recommendations to dynamic pricing and personalized webpages, all these tap into the power of customer-centricity to promote better customer loyalty and retention. Customers expect organizations to know their interests and anticipate their needs. This highlights the vital role marketing leaders hope it to have in the future.

This blog explores a quick introduction to designing personalization to help brands recognize the critical opportunities to power up their efforts.

Moving Beyond the Normal: Using Marketing Personalization to Gain Competitive Advantage

It should be a no-brainer that personalization is quickly becoming an integral part in several key aspects of marketing. Most of the growth brands now see it as table stakes, for instance, in search advertising, email marketing, and print marketing – brands are personalizing their activities in that area; otherwise, there’s a risk of losing customers.

In a real sense, these key areas are the starting points for brands that have lagged in the realm of personalization. They must quickly nail down these capabilities to move to a more innovative personalization technique to get real competitive advantages. For example, some of the higher-order activities to initiate are – personalized web experiences, including greeting customers with personalized home pages, personalized mobile apps, and personalized pricing strategies.

The many benefits of embracing marketing personalization –

• Dynamic content and personalized service/product recommendations help in fostering better customer experience
• Real time messaging to the right person helps in achieving a higher conversion rate
• Marketing Personalization technology leverages what you already know about your customers in real-time and offers them relevant information

Level Up Marketing Personalization by Thinking in Multiple Dimensions

Here are some of the proven ways to achieve meaningful personalization –

Staying on Top of Data – Data and data analytics are known as one of the best ways to personalize customer interactions. Data is important for creating buyer personas to develop better and targeted ad content. It is useful for sourcing and balancing traditional and behavioral data to discover tangible insights about customers (such as their preferences, interests, and needs). The significant variety and volume of data available today enables brands to better understand their consumer. However, brands still need to be careful of how they utilize that data.

Create Customer Personas – Once the brand has collected enough data, it is time to segment audience based on a wide range of factors such as age, gender, location, interests, pain points, and purchasing behavior. Truly understand the customer’s needs and challenges to create a clear roadmap of how your brand is going to bridge the gap.

Map Out Content – The next step is content mapping which is one of the powerful tools for personalized marketing. It enables you to evaluate your existing content assets and plan for new content catering to the specific interests and needs of each persona. This means connecting each piece of content you create to the customer journey your target audience goes through.

Create Personalized Content – This allows brands to deliver on the primary objective: offering personalized content. It uses specific information about customers to create a unique experience between an individual and your brand. This enables your algorithms to intuitively know who is visiting your social media or website or receiving an email from you.

Content Distribution – This is the last mile of personalization. A solid system will utilize the customer and prospect scores to trigger landing pages and personalized ads, and allocate specific experiences, offers, or content across several channels. For instance, a telco brand can personalize the bundle for anonymous website visitors depended on the type of car they drive, or the stores they frequently visit.

For instance, Sitecore is known for its strong focus on the potential benefits of the personalization. The features of Sitecore allows marketers to keep up with the evolving customer demand by pushing the right content in real time to bring trustworthy results.

Failing to Make Marketing Personalization a Key Priority May Prove Costly

Did you know 47% of the brands currently make the most of personalized communications across all channels?

While this may sound encouraging, there is an ample number of opportunities for several brands losing out the benefits they can have. Many of these benefits exist beyond marketing, spanning from personalizing human and customized call center interactions and in-person and web experiences.

Brands have observed an average increase of 56% in sales when they utilized personalized experiences across all their channels. To be sure, brands must devote their personalization effort and make them important to elevate their marketing initiatives. For example, using data analytics to optimize your campaign outreach strategies, in other words, delivering the right offer to the right customers at the right time. There is a significant value in scaling personalization to drive loyalty and revenue.

Moving Forward with Marketing Personalization

Growth brands that wish to remain competitive in this new world of personalization have several opportunities to refocus their capabilities in this realm and elevate the customer experience. People expect it. And competitors that are already executing it are seeing tangible benefits from their investments in personalization.

Ready to learn new methodologies for prioritizing and engaging personalization for your company? If you need more specific guidance, please consider scheduling an inquiry.

—

Paul Miser is the Chief Strategy Officer of Icreon, a digital solutions agency and Acceleration Studio. He is also the author of Digital Transformation: The Infinite Loop – Building Experience Brands for the Journey Economy.

To add to this article or start a conversation, join our forum to share your opinions with other readers. For stories of this sort and more, do well to log on to www.jbklutse.com or visit us on Facebook.

source https://www.jbklutse.com/opportunities-for-organizations-to-connect-emotionally-with-customers/