Despite the benefits of personalization in marketing becoming more apparent over the years, the approach isn’t actually anything new. In fact, it’s been around since the 1870s – when businesses would handwrite letters to grow their bottom line. Thanks to new technology and customer expectations evolving, personalized marketing is once again a hot topic. And today, it’s much more than using names and locations.

In this article, we talk about some of the key benefits of personalization in marketing, as well as some of the current challenges that marketers face. That way, you can decide if your brand is in the position to adopt personalization tactics now, or in the future.

• Boost engagement across your website
• Grow your conversion rates
• Keep your customers coming back
• Strengthen emotional connections
• Create consistency across channels and devices
• Does personalization really face a looming deadline
• Marketers are struggling to prove ROI
• The perils of customer data management
• Disconnected and disorganized content
• The future of personalization

Boost engagement across your website

The longer someone spends on a site, the more likely they are to become a customer. Personalization enables you to create on-site experiences that resonate with segments of your audience or even as individuals – resulting in more time spent on your website. 

But why – psychologically speaking – do we prefer personalized content? 

Simple. It’s more relevant. As human beings, we’re naturally more inclined to engage with information that we find relevant to our needs and personally interesting to our character. The science behind this is that it all has to do with your brain’s reticular activating system (RAS) – which is the gateway that information passes through to reach your brain. Your RAS filters through information so you know what to pay attention to. Have you ever missed parts of sentences? Or misheard someone speak entirely? That’s “selective attention” or “selective hearing” – the ability to focus on one element while ignoring additional information at the same time. And it’s controlled by your RAS.

“Due to the way RAS works, we naturally orient to information or ideas that we are invested in,” says psychologist Dr. Rachna Jain

“The trick is that it needs to be relevant, meaningful, and usable. Don’t be afraid to get specific and target your audience tightly – the more relevant you are to a specific group of people, the greater attention you will receive.”

In fact, other research has demonstrated shoppers perceive greater media enjoyment when exposed to a personalized online experience than that of a standard, static one. What’s more, adult learning theory states that people are much more interested in content that addresses a specific problem they are having at the time. Personalized marketing across your website is therefore key to improving engagement. By combining customer data and content intelligence, you can create more relevant experiences that keep your visitors active on your website for longer.

For example:

You can target offers based on products or brands that a person has clicked on. You can educate him or her on topics related to the products being explored. And you can better engage returning visitors, improving their experience with each visit. That’s not all though. Website personalization enables you to go one step further, by responding to an active visitor’s behavior to influence his or her actions.

For instance, triggering messages based on the length of time he or she has spent on a particular page, interacting with a product, or if his or her mouse goes to close the tab.

Grow your conversion rates

Naturally, personalized marketing leads to better conversion rates.

In fact, a recent report from Econsultancy found that:

• 94% of brands see more sales after website personalization
• 93% of brands see more sales after search engine personalization
• 92% of brands see more sales after email personalization>

It’s clear that providing personalized experiences can boost customer acquisition.For example, when a shopper visits your website for the first time, personalization offers a small but significant step towards a one-to-one buying experience. If you can identify the source that led the visitor to your site or their location, then you can deliver a welcome message that is much more in tune with their needs. Personalization techniques can also engage a first-time visitor in real time with a compelling call-to-action, such as a ‘deal of the day’ or relevant newsletter offer.

Another financial benefit of personalized marketing is the ability to increase your average order value through upselling or cross-selling activities. By personalizing your cross-selling approach based on a customer’s purchase history, you can gently nudge them into buying more than one item. Equally important is how much more effectively you can upsell your products. While shoppers tend to be open to the idea of purchasing more items, to do so successfully requires hitting them with the right message at the right time. Personalization paves the way for brands to achieve this. For example, recommending relevant accessories enables your customers to benefit from the natural synergies between your products without them having to navigate through many different areas of your website. And these recommendations work much better if they’re personal.

Research from Accenture finds 75% of shoppers are more likely to buy from a brand:

• That knows their purchase history
• Recommends products based on their purchase history
• Addresses them by name

Keep customers coming back

One of the many benefits of personalization in marketing is boosting retention rates. Not only is the cost of attracting previous shoppers to your website much lower than acquisition-based campaigns, but these customers are also likely to spend more. After all, personalization requires the collection of customer data to work successfully. And the two cornerstones of customer retention are relationship and familiarity. Through the collection of customer data, personalized marketing enables you to build strong relationships with your existing customers while creating familiarity. But, as brands collect more data, shoppers develop greater expectations.

According to Bond Brand Loyalty’s Report, only 25% of 68,000 people surveyed are ‘very satisfied’ with the level of personalization they see from loyalty programs. What’s more, brands that fail to meet customer expectations for relevance and value are at risk of losing their customer base to brands that can deliver. In fact, many marketers struggle to get personalization right because they collect a lot of data they don’t use, and rely too heavily on product-based tactics. Personalized marketing has become too purchase obsessed, with brands focusing on next-best offers and product recommendations. In order to retain customers today, brands need to broaden their delivery of personalization to ensure relevance, build resonance, and show restraint.

“Good personalization means talking to the customer about what they want to talk about; you have to be relevant in the places that are important to them,” says Emily Rudin, Chief Customer Officer at CrowdTwist.

Presenting content or providing an experience that taps into a deeper understanding of who an individual customer may be – rather than just based on their purchasing history – is essential to fostering loyalty and retention.

Strengthen emotional connections

Purchasing decisions rarely come from rational mental processes. Instead, they are driven by our emotions and how we feel at a given moment in time. As a result, content personalization can be used as a differentiation strategy to attract, engage, and retain customers for your brand. In fact, if emotionally charged content is already striking a chord with your target audience, then the impact can be amplified by integrating a layer of data-driven optimization and personalization.

Traditionally, marketers have segmented their audiences based on traits such as age, gender, and location, which has allowed them to tailor their messaging and engage customers on a slightly more personal level. But effective personalization today has moved beyond this. Better customer data and new technology makes it possible for marketers to analyze patterns and journeys to paint a more detailed – and personalized – picture of each customer.

Create consistency across your channel

Your customers interact with your brand across a myriad of different channels. Whether that’s on your website, social media, email, mobile, or somewhere else entirely – and sometimes, they’ll jump between channels multiple times in a day. So, it’s more important than ever to create consistency between them. A shopper’s experience on your website should match up with what they see on social media, which should match up with what they get from you through email, and so on.

As, you may know, the success of your brand depends on planning and aligning your content around your customers. Creating layers of consistency not only improves the customer experience, but drives business performance and boosts revenue too. So, how exactly can you achieve this? Through developing a 360-degree view of your customers (and your content).

You need to be measuring factors such as:

• Behavior
• Purchasing history
• Geography
• Demographics
• Profile
• Attitude
• Sentiment
• Context
• Affinities

However, all of this customer data is worthless on its own. Without robust content data, it’s impossible to deliver contextually relevant buying experiences. True personalization pieces together both customer and non-customer data.

Does personalization really face a looming deadline?

The benefits of personalization in marketing are plenty. But we wouldn’t be providing you with balanced, educational content if we didn’t shine a light on a couple of home truths that are bouncing around the marketing world right now:

According to Gartner:

• One in three marketers will reduce spending on personalization as a line item in their marketing budget by 2021
• 80% of marketers who invested in personalization are likely to abandon their efforts by 2025

But what’s propelling these predictions?

It’s a long road to ROI

High budgets come with high expectations, yet returns on personalization platforms and software are hard to quantify for marketing. And that’s largely down to how we’re measuring the effectiveness of such investments. Most brands who have taken the leap rely on vague customer satisfaction and engagement metrics, which only connect to business value indirectly.
As a result of focusing on metrics too far away from the bottom line, it’s unlikely that marketers will be able to maintain enough financial support for such initiatives.

The perils of customer data management

Research from Gartner finds 27% of marketers believe customer data is the main obstacle to personalization – revealing weaknesses in data collection, integration, and protection. The necessary shift for brands is to focus on first-party data access, which means they’ll need to lean on the customer data that they’ve collected with full consent. Yet, one of the biggest obstacles to doing so effectively is that shoppers aren’t stagnant. They move, they change, and they never cease to be in motion. And, as you may have guessed, the data that they produce never stops either. Successful data management is a fluid process. Proper management of it can therefore seem challenging, stressful, and at times feel downright impossible.

Disconnected and disorganized content

Digitally savvy shoppers have growing expectations that put brands under pressure to deliver the right content, at the right time, to the right person. However, even if you collect every possible piece of data about your audience – gaining that elusive 360-degree customer view – there are still barriers in the way to meaningful personalized experiences. 

The reason behind this? Most brands lack sufficient metadata which is necessary to fuel personalization tactics.

And the problem?

If your content isn’t tagged with enough relevant information, then selecting the right content or product offers quickly becomes a guessing game. For example, a car manufacturer’s stock images may live in the DAM, while model specifications may be found in the PIM. It’s impossible to enrich the delivery of such content without communication between the two systems. What’s more, the management of a brand’s content is often all over the place. Between old folder systems, many different content management systems, and teams sitting in silos, it’s a long road to locate and reuse content in personalized campaigns.

The future of personalization

Despite these barriers, the benefits of personalization in marketing greatly outweigh the challenges. Providing such a strategy is executed properly, of course. Successful personalization leads to meaningful, contextually relevant, one-to-one experiences for your customers across all your different marketing channels. Which drives acquisition, engagement, and retention goals, and in turn boosts revenue. And while the challenges cannot be ignored, they can be overcome. 

The new era of visual commerce combines content intelligence and dynamic customer data, so that you can deliver rich, individualized content experiences that engage, sell more, and keep your customers coming back. It bridges the gap between personalized marketing and revenue, enabling you to pinpoint the exact content – from your brand, influencers and customers alike – that’s directly impacting your sales figures. And it creates a single view of your content and customer, so that it can continually optimize its selection of the right content, at the right time, to the right individual.

Find out how Johnson’s Baby went from drab to fab with visual commerce, creating content experiences that convert and reaping the benefits of personalized marketing.

Reaching The New Benchmark In Customer Expectations

Digital transformation has created a huge shift in customer expectations. Today’s customers require a seamless , intuitive experience across channels, transparent product information and pricing, real-time contextual solutions and high relevance, personal experiences.

To achieve this step change in capabilities, most companies fall into one of two categories. They either require stronger insights into the behaviours, needs and journeys of their customers or to harness that data more effectively (especially in terms of data aggregation and analysis) . Either way, customer data sits at the core.

Data Driven Customer Insights

Data driven customer insights are helping companies change their approach to customers in many ways, such as improving a product or service, identifying the optimum channels and journeys for customers and tailoring propositions. Here we’re specifically addressing the importance for improving relevance for customers, so using a strong understanding of customers to deliver exceptional, personalized experiences.

Some of the brands demonstrating the way forward are of course internet giants like Google, Amazon and Facebook. Google built its success on algorithms that deliver the most relevant search results whilst Facebook draws in billions of dollars in ad revenue by leveraging customer data to provide highly targeted opportunities for its advertisers. In retail, eBay uses data to predict future customer needs eg. a shopper buying items for a newborn then gets targeted 12 months later with clothes and toys for their 1-year-old.

Skyrocketing Opportunities To Capture Insights

New technologies are capturing unprecedented amounts of real time data, enabling brands to understand and predict customer behaviour at a speed, scale and level of sophistication beyond any marketers dreams just a few years ago.

From point of sale information, digital transactions, sensors, beacons for location data, social media insights, mobile apps and more, these insights provide the springboard to deliver much more personalized customer journeys and experiences.

Image Source : indatalabs.com

And this potential is set to grow exponentially. In ‘Role Of Internet Of Things For Individualization In Retail’ we highlighted a prediction from Cisco that 500 billion devices will be connected to the internet by 2025 due to the Internet of Things (IoT), compared to approx 10 billion currently. All of those devices will be capable of capturing insights.

Insights Are A Critical Stepping Stone, Not An End Game

Having highlighted the importance of better customer insights to achieve greater relevance, a word of caution. Too much focus on customer data can become a trap. A mindset that says ‘once we have a single customer view we’re all set’, is misguided. Successfully delivering more relevant, personal customer experiences requires companies to address a number of key priorities including how to use their content more effectively, breaking down internal silos to focus on the customer and more. For example, eConsultancy’s New Marketing Reality report found over a third (37%) of respondents said that the customer journey is owned by a mixture of different departments and nearly a fifth (19%) said no-one has responsibility.

Companies that take a balanced approach across these priorities and adopt a ‘test and fail’ philosophy are delivering results faster than those attempting to create the ideal build blocks, starting with customer data, one at a time.

To learn more about Knexus and how our technology combines smarter customer insights with social and marketing content to provide the most relevant customer experiences, request a demo.

Traditional To Digital Customer Journeys – A World Of Difference

Compare a digital customer journey with its traditional predecessor, and the scale of change and challenge for marketers is striking. Traditional customer journeys were largely controlled by marketers, defining the message, providing consumers with a limited number of touchpoints and a linear journey (starting with awareness, through consideration to purchase).

With a digital customer journey, the consumer is largely in control and empowered with many touch points, both online and offline, and a powerful array of influencers such as social networks, online communities, reviews and blogs.

Image Source : knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu

Technology is central to the customer journey, with mobile devices playing a pivotal role and the prevalence of connected technologies accelerating through the internet of things.

Rejection Of Mass Marketing

Now that Millennials, who’ve know nothing other than the digital ecosystem, have reached their 20’s in age, the era of mass marketing is in a death spiral. Only the most insular or naive marketers can miss or ignore this new reality. So the challenge is where next, and how quickly to migrate from the familiar, tried and tested (but rapidly diminishing in terms of results) mass marketing techniques, to the new one-to-one or segment level personalization to engage customers.

Focusing On The Customer Experience

The digital customer journey shifts the weight of focus onto the customer experience rather than the product, with an emphasis on creating more relevant, personal experiences to engage and convert customers.

“Activating customer journeys to capture value requires journeys to be treated like products that need to be actively managed, measured, and nurtured. How well companies are able to do that will dictate how successful they are in making customer journeys a competitive advantage.” (McKinsey)

Here are four of the building blocks to help you personalize customer journeys…

Power Of Data

Four or five years ago the term ‘big data’ started trending as a hot top in digital marketing. With marketers already immersed in using analytics tools like Google Analytics, the concept of more data wasn’t difficult to grasp, but the true applications and implications were unclear. Wind forward a few years and the terms ‘machine learning’ and ‘artificial intelligence’ have become hot topics.

Image Source : consumerig.com

Bringing together understanding of Big Data plus Machine learning/artificial intelligence has helped brands realise the power of customer data, using data on customers behaviour, history, preferences etc to drive effective decision making.

Harness Your Content Effectively

Data is great as an enabler, but how you use it is what really matters. What consumers care about is the brand experience, and specifically how the brand engages with them. So here of course we turn attention to content. Brands today are generating content on an unprecedented scale. Bloggers, Vloggers, social media teams, campaigns, how to videos, sponsorships etc. The list goes on as the marketing machine churns out new content relentlessly. Content marketing is hot, and brands are investing, probably a lot more than they realise if all the different internal and external teams and investments are added up.

‘Content marketing will be a $300bn industry by 2022, having doubled in just four years (source: Marketingmag.com)’

The challenge for marketers who want to create more personalized customer journeys is how to effectively leverage that tremendous investment in content to deliver the best experience for a consumer in real time.

Adopt An ‘Outside-In’ Mindset

For decades the marketing industry treated customers as a bit of an afterthought, subordinate to how brands controlled the message, delivered campaigns etc. With traditional customer journeys, you could just about get away with such an approach.

In the digital age, where customer have wrestled control away from brands, you have to think about the journeys that customers choose to take and experience they expect, not the experience you want to provide. A failure to adopt an ‘outside-in’ mindset that always thinks from the customer’s perspective is sure to undermine performance.

Test, Learn And Grow

An ability to test effectively and use analytics to determine the best way forward, has proven a power engine for growth in digital. However, too often when companies approach challenges such as personalizing customer journeys and using customer data effectively, the size of the challenge can intimidate and overwhelm the ability to progress.

Rethinking your customer journeys to create greater relevance is not something that you should approach top down, looking for a universal solution from the outset. You’ll make faster progress and improve your likelihood of ultimate success by starting small, targeting key audiences or journeys to focus on improving initially, and then using the insights to adapt and grow.

About Knexus

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 you to make content sell.

Not everyone agrees on the level of marketing personalization that is required to meet consumer expectations. But one thing is sure: A mere product recommendation system is not enough. Your customer won’t be impressed at all. Why should they be? Your competitors probably already deliver individualized content experiences using the latest technology at their disposal.

You need to set the bar higher if you are serious about increasing retail revenue. And you can find some guidance going back to the basics of selling. An excellent salesperson is someone who listens and contributes value throughout a two-way conversation – making sense of the problem faced by consumers and offering a tailored solution real-time.

That’s the kind of experience you want to replicate with your digital marketing strategy. Online visitors take for granted that you won’t treat them like strangers anymore. They want relevant and targeted recommendations that anticipate their needs and align with their individual tastes. And they are willing to reward you for that with engagement and conversion rates respectively going up by 70 and 20 percent.

Retail Individualization in Action

There are two words on the lips of marketers working in a retail environment: Omnichannel and individualization. It is time to bridge digital and brick-and-mortar worlds and give a reason why shoppers should visit physical stores following online interactions. Blending channels “creates a seamless experience for customers regardless of how they engage with the brand” according to Nielsen. Let’s look at an example to illustrate that point.

Simon’s customer journey is shaping up as he considers purchasing a new phone. But he is not too sure about which model is best for him. He visited a manufacturer’s website on several occasions and spent most of his time comparing two options – Model A and B. He even contacted a brand representative on social media with a few questions.

This indicates that Simon is close to making a decision, but he probably needs some dedicated attention to take the step. Anna, the Head of Digital Marketing, noticed that and decided to build an individualized commerce environment with content. She gathered and emailed him relevant web articles that review Model A and B, before organizing a meeting next week to compare them live with a store assistant.

Automating Retail Individualization

Anna did a great job gathering relevant information and sending it to Simon. But strained marketing departments cannot reasonably manage those individualized relationships manually. They must find a way to optimize content operations while meeting consumers’ expectations. And today’s marketers can rely on technology to support them in the process.

Content engagement solutions mix actionable insights, and real-time responsiveness thanks to predictive analysis and deep learning algorithms – making relevance the priority.

Knexus platform automatically transforms UGC, influencer & brand owned assets into hyper personalized, shoppable content for ecommerce. Move visitors through inspiration to buying!

Consumers have a special relationship with their smartphones and tablets. That’s the devices they take with them at work, on the tube, on vacation, at a friends’ house, on the dinner table, etc. Yes, they literally go everywhere and anywhere with their favorite pieces of mobile technology – looking at them on average more than 40 times a day. In fact, Gartner expects that “by 2021, more than 50% of customers will use mobile first for all their online activities.”

However, you can’t make sense of what those devices truly mean to your customers without putting apps at the forefront. Indeed, users spend almost 90% of mobile media time on them.

You read this correctly: 90% of mobile media time. That sounds like a great insight and opportunity for marketers looking to meet consumers exactly where they are. But here is the catch: Increasing mobile app engagement is a tough game, and there are real sharks out there. The top 200 apps account for 70% of total app usage, and it is hard to grab user’s attention when you are up against multibillion-dollar companies like Snapchat or WhatsApp.

Creating Personalized Content Experience on Mobile Apps

Competing for some screen time is a challenge for the everyday marketer who does not have a six- or seven-figure marketing budget. But that’s not impossible. You can still get some attention and perhaps even be on the top of your target audience’s minds and on their screens by getting your messaging right and being more relevant than your competitors –potentially boosting your retention rate by a factor of two or three.

Easier said than done still. Brands often fall into the trap of focusing on quantity and standardization rather than delivering personalized app experiences. And that is not doing them any good. Hence, untargeted ads and intrusive notifications generate frustration among millennials as well as a strong push back on those apps – with 9 out of 10 users letting them go after only a month

Using Real-Time Content and Insight to Make Mobile Apps More Engaging

There is a lot for companies to monitor and learn from their customers in today’s data-driven environment – Every click, visit, download, and interaction can be kept in the loop for that purpose. However, making sense of such information is still a daunting task when data comes in multiple forms and shapes from various sources and touchpoints.

The good news for marketers is that they can now work with analytics and content engagement solutions to support them on the job. Those platforms enable them to put all the pieces together and transform mere facts into actionable insights – enabling personalized mobile app experiences and ensuring that each notification becomes relevant and valuable to users.

Knexus understands the strategic value of delivering real-time and personalized content experiences to customers. We can help you take user engagement & retention on mobile apps to new heights with our solutions – maximizing your return on marketing investment and brand loyalty.

Customer expectations are on the rise. 84% of people now want brands to entertain them with meaningful stories and events. That means companies must find new ways to interact with consumers and meet their demands. In an ideal world, businesses would be able to maximize the number of engagements with one-to-one relationships and drive growth through personalized content in a cost-efficient way. The good news for marketers is that this is no longer an irrational thought.

A revolution has been taking place, and everybody can benefit from this new marketing era. Solutions like analytics dashboards, content distribution platforms, and geolocalization applications are bringing businesses and consumers closer together – enabling rich and contextual experiences. Let’s illustrate this point with an example.

How To Improve Customer Engagement With Personalized Content

Lukas is new in town, and he is a yoga enthusiast. He did some online browsing a couple of days ago and spotted potential studios where he could practice his hobby. He is now having a walk in the center when he receives a personalized message on his smartphone:

“Hey Lukas, we noticed that you were in the neighborhood and thought you might be interested to know more about us. We’re an award-winning yoga studio with a large variety of courses and a flexible schedule. We’re located next to the clock tower. Come visit us if you want. We can show you around and schedule a class free of charge with one of our certified instructors.”

Wouldn’t you be tempted to give it a go if you were Lukas?

This is the kind of meaningful experiences consumers are looking for, and that convince them to share more personal data. Companies can create such events – and enhance brand loyalty as a result – following a strategic approach to content personalization.

Revamping Your Customer Engagement Strategy

Delivering personalization is high on the agenda of senior-level executives. 94% of them think this is essential to reaching customers – Forbes. But despite this enthusiasm, 95% of marketers admit they struggle to anticipate consumers’ actions and respond real-time.

Two critical challenges faced by organizations are the lack of integration among data channels and the inability to send timely and targeted messages. Brands are left with interesting pieces of information, but no real actionable insights, and are thus missing out on a higher conversion rate and the full revenue potential of personalized experiences.

Companies can step up their game by leveraging on customer engagement solutions and implementing a data-driven strategy. Those tools are useful to integrate existing sources of information and gather feedback from the target audience. They also help to nurture one-to-one relationships for a better consumer retention – notably with personalization rules defined according to demographics and past interactions with the company.

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 more about how we can help your brand.

Progressive Personalization is a technology framework that completely relies on understanding a customer in terms of their profile, journey to purchase a product and customer behaviour analysis. It require updating customer profiles with all key parameters in real time to create exclusive, relevant shopping journeys that enhance customer experiences & sales.

Instead of relying just on purchase statistics like click, adding to the cart, wishlist etc, Progressive Personalization strongly relies on key parameters like gender, geo location etc of individual shopper to deliver highly relevant content experiences in real time across all digital channels.

Role of IoT in Progressive Personalization

The Health and Beauty industry is a retail segment where one product cannot “fit all.” Most brands repeat the same mistake: they choose to ignore customer’s individual preferences such as the gender, hair type, skin current condition and so on.

With the vast use of IoT, AI or machine learning in the retail segment, brands undoubtedly have the biggest benefit, the ability to gain deeper insight into customer behaviour and wellbeing monitoring preferences. All this data works like a backbone to create highly relevant content experiences that increase user engagement & loyalty towards brands.

According to a new report by Grand View Research, the global healthcare predictive analytics market is expected to reach USD 19.5 billion by 2025. Meantime, according to Zebra 2017 Retail Vision Study interviewed 1700 retail decision makers globally and found 70% plan to invest in Internet of Things by 2021.

IoT technology lets brands track exactly what their customers are buying and, in turn, create a much richer and more inspiring experience for consumers, ultimately proving the value of their shared data.

The recent launch of L’Oreal’s smart hairbrush is an example of the industry tapping into the internet of things and embracing connected devices. This hairbrush not only analyses your hair type but gives you insights into manageability, frizziness, dryness, split ends and breakage, recommending products accordingly. It reflect how big brands are creating relevance for their customers using customer data effectively. This not only creates higher engagement but reinforces loyalty towards brands.

Importance of Social Content For Health And Beauty Industry

Social media is highly influential in buying beauty products online. According to a survey by Dove, 30% of women admitted that their purchasing decisions are influenced by social media. Watching a video about a product on YouTube and reading a review on Twitter, to buy online, all this social content inspires shoppers to buy it online. So to meet consumer’s expectations, brands can’t rely on landing pages to be the first and only point of contact but they need to utilise social content in buying journeys, creating inspiring customer experiences across digital channels in real time.

About Knexus

Knexus platform automatically transforms UGC, influencer & brand owned assets into hyper personalized, shoppable content for ecommerce. Move visitors through inspiration to buying! Book a demo.

Making digital content more relevant to shoppers can improve how much customers engage with your business and even turn them into brand evangelists.

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.

Dt marketing is still regarded as new, and content personalization is out towards the cutting edge.

It is no surprise, therefore, that a vast majority of marketers admit to struggling with content personalization (83% according to a survey of 500 organisations).

To find out more about how to use personalization, follow this link to see five ways to use it to boost conversions from prospective customers.

In this post, we will outline how to overcome the challenge of measuring personalization and to analyze and report on your success. Follow this guidance if you are planning to build a business case for content personalization or looking to secure additional investment to put such a marketing plan into action.

Choose Your Key Performance Indicators

Selecting your personalized content success KPIs can vary from industry to industry. However, there are a few common areas on which any firm can focus. If it’s carried out effectively, personalized content can deliver the following benefits:

• Improve your sales performance
• Grow repeat purchases
• Strengthen brand engagement
• Grow converting traffic
• Extend product/services reach
• Improve lead generation
• Increase content ROI
• Save time and resources
• Improve brand loyalty

When content is automatically analyzed and sorted into topics, it becomes much easier to put together a bespoke message and distribute it to individuals (rather than all customers or very large segments). “The hardest part of the business is how you create content at scale while making it relevant,” confirms Brian Harrington, CMO at Zipcar.

Testing Personalized Content

Are there any special metrics to measure personalized content? Conveniently, you can call upon time-honoured tools from the non-personalized world. For example, performing an A-B test in a similar way to how you might test two pieces of contrasting content will also show you whether a personalised page is working better than a conventional one.

A study of 380 CMOs by The Brand Publishing Institute and Forbes reported that marketers who deliver personalized web experiences are seeing double-digit returns in marketing performance and response.

Likewise, you can analyse a sales conversion funnel for a specific time period (it could be days or weeks if necessary). Amalgamate data for the period without personalization, then enable personalization and monitor the same conversion funnel for an identical length of time. This will demonstrate the impact of the change.

Justify The Investment

The content consumed by your customers is very revealing – of their interests, what they need and the products or services they are engaged about. Monitoring your content means being able to take advantage of digital tools that help you identify topics of interest for your users on an individual level and predict what they will respond to best in the future.

This eases the pain of content marketing creation because it makes the end result more relevant to the consumer. You can also justify the investment of time and budget for this when you have shown how the data stacks up in relation to your KPIs.

“The recent development of Web-based marketing services makes it possible for businesses to reach more potential customers without spending a fortune,” said Matthew Toren on Entrepreneur.com.

Selecting the right KPIs is a critical step in getting the budget for your content personalization plans. The specialist team at Knexus supports companies through this step so they can grasp the importance of content success measurement. Our platform takes an integrated approach so that organizations can measure their personalization performance more effectively and demonstrate the value back to senior executives.

Retailers face numerous challenges to grow their business in the digital age. Whether you are online, bricks and mortar or both, you need to stand out from your competitors.

With personalized content delivery you can convert target customers by engaging them through fast and more effective marketing. To help overcome these challenges, we have outlined the following 4 steps

• Analyze your data
• Understand the potential of mobile commerce
• Embrace social media for direct interaction
• Use content personalization in your retail marketing

1. Behaviour-Based Data

The content personalization environment goes hand in hand with gathering and using data smartly. This ability to understand your customers is key to gaining a competitive edge; digital tools now make this easier throughout the business, from production to sales.

In a survey of senior marketers by Forrester Consulting in 2016, 67% said they used behaviour-based data to develop the right content based on insights and emotions.

So, to tie this together: compile as much consumer data as you can from a range of sources. Combine it with user-friendly software that analyzes and predicts customer behavior patterns and future trends. Then use these results to guide the personalized content that you create.

2. E-Commerce On Mobile

The increasing use of mobile devices, especially for retail, cannot be ignored. Recent IMRG data showed that during 2016, £133bn was spent via online shopping in the UK. Compared to 2015, that was a 16% rise, while the number of mobile-phone transactions rose by a remarkable 47%.

3. Social Channels

Social media also plays a crucial part in the drive towards personalized content marketing for retail growth. The use of customer data, predictive analytics and marketing cloud solutions mean that organizations can personalize content across media, marketing and sales channels.

4. Content Personalization For Retail

Brands can create a better interaction with retail customers through personalization, guiding shoppers towards choices more easily. It’s especially applicable to fashion, luxury goods and health and beauty sectors where personal preferences play a big role.

“Marketers that deliver personalized web experiences are getting double digit returns in marketing performance and response,” reported the ‘Publish or Perish’ analysis of 380 CMOs byForbes.

Data sharing: Shoppers willingly share some data to get added value from transactions too. There are a few issues to bear in mind with data collection. “Consumers do want to know what information is being used, and they want retailers to ask permission,” noted Greg Sterling (contributing editor at Search Engine Land). He added: “Many studies argue consumers are favourably disposed toward personalization. They’re generally willing to trade their information for certain benefits.”

Greater profitability and customer satisfaction: Personalized digital shopping experiences yield significant growth. For example, “by 2020, smart personalization engines used to recognize customer intent will enable digital businesses to increase their profits by up to 15%,” said Gartner.

Stores thrive by keeping up with what consumers want and how they behave. Knexus Platform enables brands to delight customers and grow their business across the digital experience. It provides a complete view of your content and customers, with real-time optimization, and automatically delivers that content into e-commerce and other channels. Book a demo.