How to use personalisation to drive loyalty

These days, to build long-term relationships with your customers, you need to do more than just add their first name in an email. Customers expect a personalized experience from the brands they buy from. Research conducted by McKinsey¹ confirms this. It showed that 71% of customers expect personalisation and 76% get frustrated when they don’t find it!

There’s big money to be made when you get it right. The same report showed that brands that go beyond ‘know me’ and can demonstrate ‘understand me’ generate 40%¹ more revenue than those that don’t.

With access to so much data, and the platforms and channels to connect with customers, how can you introduce it in your business to good effect?

Start by collecting customer data

Customers are drawn to companies that make them feel like their interests and preferences are not only being considered but are understood. They appreciate the personal recommendations, offers and content that resonates with their needs and wants. It makes them feel valued. And that’s the key to creating a loyal customer.

Whether you operate an online store or bricks-and-mortar shopfront (or both), you’re collecting data on your customers every time they interact with you. The more information you collect, the richer each customer story becomes. And that gives you more to work with.

Over time, you’ll start to build up a library of intel on your customers’ shopping behaviours, preferences, preferred times to shop, channels they engage with, and so on. This data is gold. You can leverage it to build tailored offers and experiences for your customers that are based on their individual preferences and shopping history.

There are plenty of sources for capturing your customers’ data—transaction records, surveys, competitions, activity on your website and socials, subscriptions, inbound and outbound calls, in store conversations—the list is massive.

The real challenge is not how to capture the data, but how to access it so you can use it. That’s where a customer data platform can help. It pulls data from different sources, like your website, socials, and POS system, into a centralized database and creates detailed profiles for each customer.

Platforms like Insider, Klaviyo, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, SAP Emarsys HubSpot and Optimove can take care of this for you. They each offer different services depending on what you need and your budget.

How to make it personal

Once you have the insights on your customers, you can start to make personal recommendations that are tied to their individual profile. They’ll love you for suggesting something that is relevant to them. 78%¹ of customers said personalized content made them more likely to repurchase. Here are a few examples of how you can do personalization in your business

Use an upsell feature

Amazon’s ‘Frequently bought together’ is an automatic upsell feature that’s based on the browsing and purchasing behaviours of its customers. It’s designed to get customers to add more items to their order. And it works.

Imagine you’re searching for a new TV on Amazon. You find the one you want and add it to your cart. When you do, immediately below your chosen item will be a range of related items that other customers bought, such as a wall mount bracket, DVDs, HDMI cables and so on. Showing these related items others bought not only acts as a form of social proof, giving customers added confidence to buy, but it can increase order size.

While most businesses don’t have access to the algorithms and AI technology that Amazon has, it does offer you a clue on how you can market to your customers.

Knowing what your customers are buying and then sharing that information with other customers who have a similar profile, through emails or on your product pages, can help you drive more sales and repeat purchases.

Apps like ReConvert Upsell & Cross and Frequently Bought Together can help you deliver a more personalized experience and increase your conversion rates.

Create a personalised web experience

Using cookies on your site means you can save your customers’ preferences. Next time they visit your online store, you can serve up relevant offers, products or services that are based on their previous interests and behaviours. So, rather than them landing on your generic home page and navigating to where they want to go, you can take them straight there. That means a better shopping experience for them and potentially higher sales for you.

Ecommerce personalization tools you can use include HubSpot, Google Optimize, Adobe Target, Personyze and Klaviyo. There are literally hundreds to choose from, so you should have no trouble finding one that meets your needs and budget.

Show recently viewed items

As a customer browses through your online store and clicks on items they like, you can capture this information and display it both in real time and next time they return to your store. Not only does this make it easier for your customers to find those items again, but it acts as a reminder that could prompt them to make a purchase.

Make it personal in your emails

One of the easiest ways to do personalization is through your emails. Simple things like including their first name in the subject line is a great way to make the email feel more personal.

Celebrating milestones with your customers, like their birthday or an anniversary of when they signed up with you, is another effective way to make a personal connection. Consider sending them a special offer or incentive to mark the occasion, like 10% off a haircut on their birthday or free shipping to celebrate an anniversary.

Creating personalized experiences for your customers, based on their preferences and behaviours, is a great way to build trust in your brand, drive repeat purchases and foster loyalty.

Source:

The value of getting personalization right—or wrong—is multiplying, McKinsey & Company, 12 November 2021.

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