BLOG

4 components to personalised customer experiences

From working with marketers across multiple industries, I often hear, “Well, I know my customer’s preferences in the mobile channel.” But what does this mean for email, social, off-line, etc.? Marketers need to shift their mind-sets from treating customers as if they have ‘separate channel personalities,’ to offering personalised, individual experiences, no matter what the channel. But coordinating customer interactions across all channels to obtain a 360-degree view is a challenge for marketers. And when you add in the personalisation component within each channel, it is a desired strategy that has yet to be fully realised by marketers. Still, an integrated customer view across all touch points with a personalisation strategy is a key component to sustaining loyalty. Achieving this requires technology and services – they go hand in hand. But how do you get started? When planning your personalised marketing campaigns across channels, consider these four components:

Data Insights: Data drives personalisation. Learn about the likes and dislikes of your customers with the power of data. Behavioural attributes of consumers is key in driving the messaging of marketing campaigns. Once you have an understanding of your customer’s behaviour, you know what’s needed to sustain their loyalty. To further augment this, look beyond the data that’s currently in your platform and consider integrating third party data sources into your campaigns.

Consistency: Think about your communication objectives and keep it consistent across all channels. Remember, it’s one campaign, one message regardless of the channel. By focusing on content first, channel second you can ensure consistency across channels. Also, consider how you can integrate real-time messaging into your campaign. Keep communications simple, relevant and timely. The average attention span of a human is less than 4 seconds. Real-time messaging is essential to captivate your audience and it helps to yield loyalty to your brand.

Social Listening: The drivers of customer loyalty are shifting and consumers are now looking to build relationships with brands beyond the transaction. Having the opportunity to learn about your customer’s behaviour (likes and dislikes) in a social setting helps marketers create targeted relational and meaningful offers that go beyond the traditional brand interactions. Understanding your customers in this way takes campaign personalisation to the next level.

Strategy & Analytics: Strategy and analytics help to add a voice of reasoning behind your other marketing efforts. From modelling, scoring and reporting, marketers glean insights which allow them to further understand why consumers act the way they do. Answering the why further helps to drive personalisation.

All of these tips are centred on your technology being well equipped to manage the integration of this data. Ensuring you have one solution – a fused customer experience platform – to guide your loyalty marketing success is essential. Marketers need to transform from the siloed database mind-set to the integrated loyalty solution to obtain the full 360 holistic customer view. And to complement the technology, services are key to strategically implementing the machine-learning for personalisation.