3 reasons to personalize the digital experience

PERSONALIZE YOUR

CUSTOMERS’ DIGITAL

EXPERIENCEHoward Tiersky

CEO

REASONS TO

Marketers have been personalizing direct mail pieces for decades.

Today, these same techniques are applied on web sites, in apps, via email and in almost every digital marketing channel.

The first step to a good personalization strategy is to be clear on why you are personalizing.

There are three primary marketing outcomes to focus on when creating a personalized digital experience:

MAKE THE CUSTOMER FEEL SPECIALTHE RIGHT MESSAGE AT THE RIGHT TIMEINCREASE CUSTOMER CONVENIENCE

The first reason to personalize is to make the customer feel special.

When Ritz Carlton places a hand-written welcome card in your room before arrival, they do it to make you feel recognized and cared-for.

Subtitle

When a direct mail piece contains the prospect’s name printed in the body copy, it makes the communication feel more personal.

(even though we know it’s done

by automation.)

The primary benefits of these tactics are to heighten brand intimacy.

Heightened brand intimacy creates increased affinity over time.

It also increases the response rate for email marketing and online conversion.

Utilize the prospects name and other data elements, such as home town or gender, to give a sense that you are speaking to them, personally.

And refer to past interactions to indicate you remember them, specifically.

“We hope you enjoyed your flight with us to Ft. Lauderdale last month!”

The second reason to personalize is to deliver the right message at the right time.

By utilizing what we know about the individual customer, we can be more helpful.

(and more persuasive!)

For example: when marketing a vacation experience to a family with small children, you’d emphasize very different product characteristics than when marketing that same experience to twenty-something single men.

To drive customer behavior, you have to first understand the customer.

That way, you can tailor

the sales message

appropriately

Segment customers by key distinctions in their purchase motivations, like interests, geography or age.

Then use customer research to clarify key purchase objections for each type of customer.

Develop and test messaging that zeroes in on targeted

communication by segment.

And consider which triggers in the buying

process indicate a

customer is ready for a

particular message.

The third reason to personalize is to increase customer convenience.

We can use what we know about a customer to reduce their effort level in transacting with our business.

Once a customer enters their credit card information, we can create a more efficient experience by allowing them to re-order a product with one click.

Increased efficiency through personalization doesn’t have to be limited to pre-existing customers.

If you can recognize a specific user from your marketing list when they arrive on your site, you can pre-populate information that you might already have in your database.

Reducing the customer’s

level of effort associated

with saying YES! can

substantially increase

conversion rates.

To gain insight into redundancies in your process and discover which steps involve the highest level of effort, observe customers using digital tools to make purchases.

Are there are places a customer is entering information more than once, or are entering information that you already have?

These are good candidates for improvements!

And is there more you can do to recognize customers when they connect to your digital channels?

Because you can’t personalize a customer’s experience if you don’t know who they are!

Digital allows us to

use all these

tactics in concert…

…and give customers a higher touch experience at alow level of additional effort.

Now you know!

What could you do with the available data to make your customers feel more special?

We’re called FROM because we help companies gets from where they are to where they need to be to win today’s digitally-adept customers.We help our clients create new digital products for shopping, banking, travel and entertainment. We optimize their existing platforms, to make them more engaging and more profitable. And we help them unify their customer experience – online, in store, everywhere they need to be to touch the next generation of digital consumers.More at FROM.DIGITAL