The Essential Guide to Personalization

via Monetate
 

Personalization defined: What it is (and isn’t)

 
Personalization has advanced beyond just marketing to personas, segments, and averages. Today’s marketer should be able to:

• Recognize every customer as an individual. Deliver 1-to-1 experiences that feel like one-of-a-kind experience in the hearts and minds of consumers.
• Know the intention behind every interaction. Customers bring a discrete intention to every engagement and it’s important for marketers to understand that intention and serve it in order to help the consumer progress along their journey.
• Own every moment. The future of marketing lies in the battle for micro-moments. Data science and machine learning can help marketers generate and optimize each moment and create real momentum for the brand and the business.

A fully personalized experience is more than:

• Standalone product recommendations. Personalization is more than just putting product recommendation boxes on your product detail pages.
• Greeting visitors by their first name. Just because you greet people like you know them, doesn’t mean the experience will follow through.
• Segmentation. Your customers aren’t static buckets. Don’t treat them that way.

Now you know the kinds of things personalization can do for your business. Next, we’ll bust some of the most persistent myths about personalization.
 

Myth #1: We don’t have the data

 
Wrong. You do have the data. You can create personalized experiences now using contextual, behavioral, and historical data. But you don’t need all three. Just start with what you have—the rest can come later. Any company with a transactional ecommerce site will be able to capture data and personalize now based on:

Context:

• Type of device
• Time of day
• Time and location
• Referral source

Behaviors:

• Recently viewed products and categories
• Items from abandoned carts

History:

• Past purchases
• Member of loyalty program?
• Past email interactions

Myth #2: We already checked off the “personalization” box

 
We don’t think your personalization efforts should be relegated to a little gray box below the product description. To us, personalization happens everywhere. When you bring together relevant messages, images, recommendations, and more—and you deliver them across channels—you’re getting close to what we think true personalization is.

Myth #3: There’s no business case for personalization

 
Personalization drives positive business results. We’ve witnessed the transformative power of ecommerce personalization first-hand, hundreds of times.

Personalization increases engagement:

• Email click-through rates by 72% ¹
• AOV by 53% ²
• Conversion rates by 33% ²

1 MailerMailer, 2014
2 Gartner, 2014

And revenue:

• 40% of U.S. consumers say they buy more when the personalization experience is multichannel
• 39% buy more products when suggested to them based on past purchases
• 73% of consumers prefer to do business with brands that personalize shopping experiences ³

3 Accenture, 2015
 

Myth #4: We don’t have the people power

 
It doesn’t take a whole new team to get your personalization strategy up and running.
You can use the:

• IT resources you have now
• Ecommerce platform you already use
• Creative team you have in place

 
Ready to learn more about personalization for your retail business? Join our upcoming webinar, “Perfecting Personalization Across Channels,” on Wednesday, June 21.

Register here!