Many companies are reluctant to offer personalized web experiences for their customers, because they believe that customers feel it is too intrusive. However, recent studies and focus groups show customers actually prefer personalized content. The trick is to use data appropriately, so you can create a better user experience.
Customers Prefer Personalized Content
According to research from IBM, 74% of customers feel frustrated when the content they receive from a website isn’t personalized, while 59% of consumers’ shopping decisions are influenced by personalization.
Therefore, you can see why industry leaders like Starbucks, Amazon, and Netflix are using personalized marketing strategies to give consumers the experience they want. Plenty of smaller companies have started following suit. And by doing so, they’re seeing fantastic results.
For example, personalized messages account for 60% of Netflix’s rental. And 35% of sales on Amazon are attributed to the products that are suggested to an individual based on their unique purchases and behaviors.
So, how are these companies putting their data to good use?
1. Communicating with Customers in Real Time
There is nothing more frustrating than feeling ignored by a brand you are trying to business with. Customers are even less forgiving of negligent brands today, because they understand that new technology makes engagement easier than ever.
For a customer to return to your site or go to your store to make a purchase, it’s vital you’re communicating with them at the right time. Big data and new technologies enable companies to engage with their customers in real time across all digital channels such as social media, on-site customer service interactions and email.
For example, Dickeys Barbecue Pit used real time data to identify lower than expected sales and ribs that needed to be sold before going bad. The company texted a special offer to all customers who were around the location which resulted in an increase in sales and the location selling all the ribs before they went bad.
Equally, data can be used website performance by changing content and messages according to an individual customer’s interests and behavior. When this real-time personalization is added to these campaigns, marketers see a 667% ROI.
2. Creating Personalized Marketing Strategies with Content
To create loyal customers and drive great results, personalized content is the first step. If a company can focus on individual customers rather than a mass audience, they’re able to concentrate on products or services that’ll generate more revenue.
Email marketing platforms, such as Campaign Monitor, can use customer data to automatically trigger email messages based on customers’ present and past interactions with a brand. This delivers personalized messaging on a 1:1 basis at time a customer is ready to purchase. For example, companies can identify customers who has searched for a particular product in the last 30 days but abandoned their shopping cart. They then can automatically send a discount offer for the product to entice the customer to purchase.
By matching a customer’s behavior to products in marketing campaigns, marketers have boosted their revenue by 15%.
Landing pages should also be personalized. This is important if you are targeting returning customers through a retargeting campaign on AdWords, Bing or Facebook.
3. Offering New Trends
Even though you can drive results by targeting a customer’s specific interests, you don’t want to give the impression that their favorite products are all you’ve got to offer them.
Therefore, you can use behavioral data from all your customers to create interesting insights and larger product recommendations. These insights allow you to show customers product combinations that are derived from other customers’ purchasing trends.
These recommendations are still founded by the behavioral data your customers are providing you with, but Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning present you with correlations that, otherwise, you might have missed.
It probably goes without saying that the behavioral data your customers provide you with is an incredibly powerful tool. By using this, you can create personalized marketing strategies that succeed. Because, even though big data can seem overwhelming at first, the advanced technologies and automated software on offer make it easy for you to send the right messages to your customers at the right time.