Personalisation – the super-power of digital experience

Personalisation has become a buzzword in the digital world, and for good reason. It has the power to transform the way businesses engage with their customers, resulting in a more meaningful, relevant and satisfying experience. With the tools readily available to digital marketers today, we can harness data, connected systems and even AI, meaning that personalisation has the potential to go beyond recognising a customer’s name or presenting relevant products and content based on their previous browsing.

Today, businesses have the ability to create an individualised experience for each customer, based on their behaviour, preferences, and real-time interactions.

Gone are the days when customers had to settle for generic, one-size-fits-all experiences. The bar is high for B2B and B2B brands and personalisation has become a crucial aspect of enhancing customer experience. 

Personalisation has been found to increase customer loyalty by up to 40% (Gartner).

By delivering personalised experiences, companies can stand out in a crowded market and create meaningful connections and make customers feel valued, heard and understood, leading to increased customer satisfaction and loyalty – and boosting business outcomes.

Personalisation can also help companies to better understand their visitors across digital and non digital channels. By collecting data on customer behaviour and preferences, companies can gain valuable insights into their customers' needs and preferences. This information can then be used to improve product offerings and marketing efforts, leading to increased customer engagement and loyalty.

What do we need for personalisation?

To implement a successful personalisation strategy, you will need to collect data on your users, such as their browsing history, location, and preferences. You can use cookies, tracking pixels, and analytics to collect this data. Once you have this information, you can use it to tailor your website content and experiences to each individual user. 

However, collecting the data is one thing, surfacing and making sense of it is the real key here. Connecting online behaviour with information you have on groups of customers or individuals via other data sources around your organisation will be key – integration with you CRM and other sources of customer insights.

A key consideration is the underlying technology driving your digital experiences. Your web platform needs to provide robust personalisation features. A DXP that provides the ability to easily and efficiently segment audiences, dynamically serve content based on user behaviour and characteristics, and perform A/B testing will help you deliver highly personalized experiences at scale. On the other hand, a more basic CMS with limited personalisation capabilities may make it more difficult to execute advanced personalisation strategies. In order to achieve your personalization goals, it's important to choose a platform that has the right feature set and is flexible enough to adapt and scale to your evolving needs.

Adopting a personalisation also comes with its own set of challenges - the vast amount of data collected by businesses can be overwhelming, and it can be difficult to turn that data into meaningful insights that drive personalisation. Additionally, businesses must be mindful of privacy concerns and ensure that they are using customer data in a responsible and ethical manner.

Ultimately, personalisation is a powerful tool for businesses looking to create meaningful and engaging experiences for their customers. By understanding your customers' behaviour and preferences, you can create a unique and personalised experience that builds trust, drives engagement and ultimately, boosts business outcomes. But it is not just about technology and delivering a customised experience, but also about the human touch and building meaningful relationships with your customers.

So how do we get started?

It doesn’t need to feel like rocket science– in fact you are probably already doing it. A few recommendations for getting started with implementing a personalisation strategy are:

• Show personalised product or content recommendations based on the user's browsing history, purchase history, or demographic information.
• Create custom landing pages for different user segments based on their location, interests, or past interactions with your website.
• Use dynamic content to show different content to different users based on their preferences and behaviour. For example, displaying different offers and content to first-time visitors and returning visitors.
• Apply behavioural targeting to target users with personalised ads based on previous interactions with your website, such as pages they visited or products view.
• Use chatbots to provide personalised customer service and support, answering frequently asked questions and guiding users through the buying process.

Without personalisation, you are delivering the same digital experience to all your users – and missing out on one of the ‘superpowers’ of digital experience.

As the digital landscape continues to evolve, personalisation will become increasingly important and business that embrace personalisation as a core part of their customer experience strategy will be well-positioned to thrive in the digital age.

At Netcel, our team of digital experience specialists are on hand to help with all aspects of your digital strategy, including personalisation.

Source: Gartner "The Power of Personalization." (2017)