Excellent customer service plays a vital role in your customers’ shopping experience, even helping determine if customers come back or not. However, customer experience is more than just attending to your customers and getting them what they need. Beyond recognizing them,you need to develop an individual relationship with each customer. Consumers nowadays expect a personalized experience from the brands they patronize.
Customers expect retailers to know their shopping habits and needs and give them tailored offers and services. With the wide differences between customers’ likes, dislikes, shopping habits, and needs, how do you provide them with a personalized experience? Here’s a guide to help you get started:
- Identify Your Challenges In Giving Personalized Experiences
Before you think of delivering personalized shopping experiences to your customers, identify anything that may be standing in your way. Also, you need to understand that giving a customized shopping experience is a process and not a one-time for all solution. Put a strategy in place that can grow and evolve with your customers’ needs and preferences.
The first challenge you need to deal with is optimizing your website. It needs to be a platform that will allow consumers to interact with your business efficiently. You can get a professional eCommerce website done by an eCommerce agency Melbourne or any other reputable service provider near you. In optimizing your website, put yourself in your customers’ shoes and walk their journey. Try to identify any aspect of your site where there may be gaps that create obstacles in their shopping experience.
Some of the issues you may notice in your current strategy include a lack of customer or product data collected, your website or other platform failing to serve its purpose well, or poor social media integration. Identifying these areas of concern is essential in helping you improve your strategy. If you don’t take the time to identify the challenges that may be holding you back, it’ll be difficult for you to improve your efforts in delivering personalized customer experiences.
- Use Data To Create Customer Profiles
The foundation of personalization lies in the habits your customers display when they interact with your business. This data is stored on the web analytics page of your eCommerce website. Here, you can track the behavior of your web visitors and what they do, including products they look at the most, features, chats, carts, and more.
This gives you a good picture of who your customer is, their intentions, and their previous relations with your business. Collecting quality data is crucial in knowing your customers well enough to create a way to meet their individual needs. You may even be able to predict their future shopping habits as you move forward.
- Use Every Channel To Get Customer Data
To provide a comprehensive customer experience, you need to collect data from all customer touch points. You need as much information as you can get from customer care representatives, sales, marketing, and social media teams. Each department needs to provide all the customer data available to them to help you develop a proper strategy. This should be a collaborative effort between teams.
If you implement strategies for personalization based on a single channel, it can cause inconsistencies in communication. The social media group could be sending a customer one message while the email and SMS marketing teams deliver a completely different message. Having a unified approach to the delivery of personalized shopping experiences provides more effective results.
The best practice is to create a data model that puts all the relevant customer data on a single platform.
- Focus On Relevance
In personalizing the customer experience, the aim is to deliver relevance by explicitly dealing with a customer’s needs. The benefit of this is it makes the purchase process quicker for customers, which may cause them to expand their orders. On the other hand, a generalized experience takes longer since the customer needs to sift through numerous products to find the one they need.
The result of irrelevance is frustration, which can increase the bounce rates of your site and the loss of potential customers. You may have collected enough data, but you still need to interpret that data correctly. Here are ways you can use the information you’ve collected to deliver a personalized shopping experience:
- Use a customer’s purchase pattern, co-purchase, and predictions to determine the most suitable recommendations.
- Use the purchase history to find discount preferences
- Look at the time a customer engages most with your business to optimize the send times for your offers
Sending personalized, timely offers and messages in a language directed at a customer’s preferences increases the likelihood of meeting the customer’s needs and promoting brand loyalty.
- Enable Personalization On Each Touchpoint
Now that you know the gaps you need to fill in enhancing the customer’s journey and have all the data you need from all channels, it’s time to ensure that each customer touchpoint focuses on personalization. While you’re at it, continue to learn more about your customers, as their shopping needs and habits can change.
For instance, the needs of a customer buying baby products will change with time as the child grows. Moreover, personalizing each touch point builds consistency that creates trust for your brand. With this in mind, you’ll develop an evolving strategy that caters to customers at an individual level each time.
Takeaway
Personalization is an essential quality that your business should strive to deliver. For instance, one of the benefits of developing a personalized experience for your customers isthat it can reduce your customer acquisition and retention marketing costs. Keep these tips in mind so your customers will feel your care and concern for them and they’ll remain loyal to the business.
