Content personalization acts as a powerful refinement for content marketing. It is geared towards delivering the most appropriate material to users based on their user data or what they’ve shown an interest in – but it can go further than that.

“It should make them feel valued and better about themselves,” suggested Nunwood director David Conroy. The aim is to provide a more comprehensive user experience, so that content personalization can improve the customer retention rate.

Focus On Customer Retention

A simple refocusing of investment can help keep customers. The benefits of encouraging customer loyalty can be profound. Marketing Metrics reported that: “the probability of selling to an existing customer is 60-70%. The probability of selling to a new prospect is 5-20%.”

This lines up roughly with the traditional marketing adage that 80 percent of future revenue will come from 20 percent of current customers.

Relevant Content Will Boost Engagement

So, how does personalized content improve customer engagement and help retail? We can see an effect when something is too generic. The Meaningful Brands report by Havas found that 60% of content produced by brands was regarded by respondents as “poor, irrelevant or failing to deliver.”

In this era of increasing automation, it’s easy to slip into pretending to care about customers while hiding behind technology – the equivalent of call centre queue messages which allege that “your call is important to us” while people hang on the line for ages. However, technology can provide genuine advantages.

Unified data about customers from first, second and third-party sources will yield meaningful insights, which can be matched to the most relevant content. For e-commerce, this can make it easier for shoppers to find what they want online, whether they are buying right away or simply doing their research.

The ability to almost “read” a customer’s mind as they browse is one of the ways e-commerce can recreate the in-store experience of talking to well-informed staff-member or a local shopkeeper who knows their customers personally.

It also contributes to what marketer Aaron Agius described as: “A reason to keep coming back to your website.” Relevant content fulfils a valuable need for your customers.

Earning Loyalty

The next step is to earn so much genuine loyalty from shoppers that they will evangelize about your brand to their network of family, friends and social media followers because of a superior experience.

“Brand evangelists have incredible networks on social media,” wrote marketing author Rick Ramos. “A single tweet can bring in hundreds to thousands of clicks to your website. Even people with smaller networks might be a great fit if they’re in your specific niche.”

User-generated content is a cost-effective way of spreading word of mouth and eliciting a personal, emotional response. It’s even worked for big brands that can (and do) spend millions on making ads but who still experiment by taking a DIY route via social media (for example Coca-Cola’s “The AHH Effect” TV campaign from 2014 that used fan-submitted video clips).

The key takeaway is that personalization of digital content helps your customers avoid a generic, unengaging experience and will keep them coming back for more.

Knexus platform automatically transforms UGC, influencer & brand owned assets into hyper personalized, shoppable content for ecommerce. Move visitors through inspiration to buying! Request a demo to find out how we can help your brand.