Why Effective Personalization Isn’t Just About Your Website And What You Need To Do

Why Effective Personalization Isn't Just About Your Website And What You Need To Do

In today’s competitive market, delivering contextual customer experiences is a must to have.

Customers today are inclined toward brands that feel like they hear them, appreciate them, and pay attention to their certain needs and desires.

That’s when personalization comes into the role.

Personalization is transforming the way your website looks in a way that offers to customers’ special interests.

80% of customers are more likely to purchase a product or service from a brand that provides personalized experiences. (smarter HQ)

You can take personalization as an evolution from marketing communications to digital conversations, with data as the starting point. 

Customers expect businesses to approach them with value propositions that are ‘relevant’ to them. 

For instance, they no longer want to read the list of features your product offers. They prefer a good read on how those features will add more value to them in their day-to-day lives and why they should choose it over the other options available.

Personalization tends to be believed as a crucial power for marketing, but it must become the core driver of how eCommerce brands do marketing.

However, according to Social Times, almost 36% of eCommerce marketers assess personalization across the various digital channels as a huge challenge for their business. They also expect it to continue being one of their top challenges for another year or so.

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But according to Social Times, almost 36% of marketers consider personalization across the various digital channels a big challenge for their business. They also expect it to continue being one of their top challenges for another year or so.

The top 3 personalization challenges being lack of internal resources, lack of technology that enables personalization, and inaccurate or redundant market data.

personalization challenges

While the challenges continue to pertain, marketers seem to have found their way out to personalize their efforts for business growth – or let’s just say, that’s what they think.

A lot of marketers today are focusing on personalizing the experience a business website has to offer. Right from the kind of content that the visitor has previously shown interest in, to tailored offers and more – almost the way Amazon personalizes their online store experience.

But the truth is, personalization isn’t just about your website. It is about seamlessly communicating with your audience across multiple digital channels with real-time contextual messages.

To reiterate, personalization refers to the marketing tactic that makes use of consumer data across the internet to create relevant, contextual, one-to-one communication. But often do we move beyond creating the initial segments for our personas?

Here’s taking a look at the other aspects that businesses need to implement personalization in, apart from their website and landing pages:

Customer Journey

While your target audience can be defined by general demographics, it is impossible to make them all like the same thing and convert on the same value proposition. Each of your consumers in the various target segments of your audience has different needs that need to be dealt with different communication.

If you want them to convert, you need to ensure that their journey to becoming your customer is highly personalized. Using data like their previous interactions, purchases, purchase triggers, and more, you can implement a journey that is tailor-made to suit 1:1 interests.

personalized customer journey

This only goes to say, that marketers create holistic customer personas for their businesses. Since it is difficult to collate data points from multiple channels while doing so, a good idea is for Wigzo to do the same. This removes the manual error, redundant data, and also ensures there no loss of data when it comes to knowing your customers.

Social Outreach

Just like the customer journey, you also need to ensure that your outreach to your audience on social media is as personalized. Identifying who your target audience is, what they do, where they are the most active, the kind of conversations they are indulging in, and the type of ads that they tend to convert on the most, personalize your value proposition.

social media personalization

It is important to note here, that while targeting your audience on social media, you need to maintain a contextual approach. So tap into their data points to understand them better (in this case, use the holistic personas you just created in the step above), and target them with messages that they relate to the most.

Also, running retargeting campaigns for those who have visited your business website or have interacted with you before is a great way to personalize your social outreach. So before you start executing your social media campaigns, ensure you have a data-backed strategy well in place.

Weekly Newsletters

Email marketing continues to be one of the most effective channels for businesses to communicate with their existing and potential customers. The weekly, biweekly, or monthly newsletters play an important part in these email campaigns.

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But there are nearly 60% of marketers who struggle to personalize their content and other collaterals for their target audience in real-time. But 77% of these marketers believe that real-time personalization is crucial because even the newsletter needs to take into account the reader’s current interests to get a high open and click-through rate. (adobe)

But you can’t possibly imagine a marketer sitting down to create individual newsletters for all your subscribers!

This is where companies like Wigzo come in.

Wigzo offers tools powered by machine learning to analyze and identify the changing market trends as well as interests of the users and sync them with the previous interactions he has made on the business website. The tool then helps you auto-populate newsletters that are tailored to suit every individual’s interest to the t!

Personalization on a 1:1 basis is guaranteed to get your newsletters a higher click-through rate. The higher the CTR, the better are your business conversions – for all the emails you use to touch base with your audience.

Cross Channel Communication

A typical internet user is active on multiple digital channels and expects businesses to reach out to them in the way they expect on all the channels. They want the interaction to be absolutely seamless – irrespective of the platform they choose. This preference has led to the movement from a single channel to omnichannel communication.

cross channel personalization

But to create a personalized cross channel or omnichannel experience, businesses need to take a strategical approach. Instead of trying to implement it all together, marketers should focus on taking a step-by-step approach instead.

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Brands using Personalization for Effective Marketing

Bitmoji

Snapchat in 2016 launched an app called Bitmoji which enables users to design animated avatars of themselves that can also be featured as their Snapchat profile picture.

Heretofore, Snapchat has also undertaken an auto-generated daily Story in its Discover feed, called “Bitmoji Stories.”

When you click on that Bitmoji Story, you can discover a series of comic-book-like images that tell a story about your own Bitmoji avatar.

For example, If you’ve recently spoken to a friend with a Bitmoji attached to the app, you can also see your friends pop up in your daily Story.

Outcome

As Bitmoji Stories appear in Discover, with all the other branded content and advertisements on Snapchat, the app company has found an incredible way to entice people to this particular area of the app — even if they aren’t interested in seeing branded content. 

While audiences are on this Discover page, they might find a brand or content that catches their attention and further interact with feed.

This is an outstanding example of how an app creatively used personalization to bring traffic from one area of its app to another. 

Spotify

Adam Pasick in 2015 composed a story for Quartz illustrating the “magic” behind Spotify’s “Discover Weekly”: A curated playlist of tracks that it assumes an existing user will like. It’s carried out, like many other personalization and recommendation platforms, primarily with the help of an algorithm that determines a user’s “taste profile,” based on listening behavior and the most popular playlists among the entire Spotify audience.

Outcome

Not all personalization thoughts are going to be perfect. Even with a considerable algorithm, they are, at best, very educated guesses as to what’s going to be applicable to your customers. For that reason, it might be best to take a mindful approach to your recommendations, particularly in the initial stages of any personalization efforts you make.

However, when you want to try out a personalization project or algorithm, determine your most active users, and invite them to pilot out the technology. Take notice of the feedback good or bad and see what you can do to make it better.

Netflix

Netflix is a streaming giant that does personalization in the best way and it all comes down to being completely data-driven.

According to the latest entertainment report, currently, Netflix is the top preference for video streaming in all the global regions.

Reason? 

Because no two Netflix homepages look similar, owing to the tracking and algorithms used by the service.

It doesn’t look at traditionally important demographic data such as age or gender. Instead, it all comes down to behaviors.

“If you click play nowadays in the streaming world, it tells volumes more information that is a lot less superficial than getting someone’s gender and age,says Todd Yellin, VP of Product at Netflix.

Outcomes 

To make the most of this data, the brand uses extensive A/B testing, shows a number of different product images for each title, recommends titles based on viewing history, and experiments with the timings of its recommendations.

The success and fame of Netflix’s personalization lie in identifying and providing the content and experience its users want and that may look different to everyone who uses the service.

Final Thoughts

Lately, customer expectations hold a lot of value. People know what they want, and they expect to get it whenever they want and wherever they are. 

To fulfill such demands, eCommerce brands must create intensely personal, specifically curated communications, offers, and experiences, without making it creepy.

Personalization is a great asset for marketers but can also be a challenging task, assessing the increasing number of digital platforms and the fast-changing needs of the consumer market. 

Companies don’t just need a well-documented strategy for acquiring their customers, but also robust tools that will help them simplify yet not lose out on customer data that unravels market opportunities for them.

If you want to enhance your customer journey with Omnichannel personalization and share well-timed, relevant, and contextual messages for each customer, then try our robust platform Wigzo.

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Rashi Kundra

Rashi Kundra

Rashi is a literature graduate from Delhi University. She is a content writer at Wigzo. In her spare time, you will find her meditating while grooving on EDM beats.

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