With the digital transformation taking over the business world, personalization is more important than ever before. Customers don’t want to feel like another number in your marketing statistics or website analytics.
So, how can you create personalized experiences that speak to your customers’ individual wants and drive real results for your brand?
When it comes to creating personalized experiences, getting started is easy. However, finding long-term success can be a little bit more difficult. That’s why it’s essential to build a sturdy foundation for your personalization program to grow and succeed. According to Sarah Ohle from Hero Digital, there are four pillars that can help you win at personalization: customer understanding, moments-based experience, privacy and trust, and industry-specific needs.
By leaning into each of these pillars, you can design personalized experiences that speak directly to your consumers’ wants and needs. How? By putting humans at the core of your personalization strategy.
In-depth analysis is the key to understanding not only what your customers want, but also the greater context around their buying journeys. But, with so much first-party data at your fingertips, where do you start?
Simply capturing traffic and data sources isn’t enough to give you a full view of your audience — you need to know how to apply it in order to create a successful personalized experience.
Luckily, there are a few tools to help you make the most out of your data. Digital intelligence tools, for example, help brands go beyond customer interactions through digital touchpoints that align with data streams from other sources. These include sensors, bots, digital assistants, news services, and more. If you want to create a data-driven personalized experience, it may be time to expand your tech stack.
Once you know who your audience is and what they want, you can start to create personalized experiences and content for them — no matter what stage of the customer’s journey they’re in.
However, providing a personalized experience doesn’t just mean producing content for different stages of the journey; the most successful brands should also segment each stage by even smaller criteria, such as the generation of the customer or their level of savviness with technology.
There are a number of creative and automated ways to segment your customers into groups, from email surveys to artificial intelligence tools. But whichever path you take, Adobe’s Christopher Young has one word of advice: make sure to bring your legal and compliance departments along during the process.
Communicating with them from the start will help you build a roadmap that improves customer trust and drives business success.
