How personalizing customer experience helps drive bottom-line performance

In the digital world, any purchase begins with research followed by the comparison of features and pricing. The edge for any brand is the emotional connect they’re able to establish in the first 30 secs the consumer interacts with the brand. In this case, the unconscious urges take over the purchase decision. About 95% of customers respond emotionally to a product. In support of this, research on advertising shows that the emotional response to an ad is rather influential than the ad’s content itself. 

So, how can a marketer go about eliciting emotional responses in consumers? It’s not enough to pool terabytes of data but humanize it. What do I mean by humanizing data? It’s as simple as looking at every aspect of the campaign and its impact through a consumer lens. Evaluation of data with a purpose helps understand consumer behavior and how it evolves over time with the changing trends in the market.

Why should brands care about personalizing experience?

Although 86% of the consumers are concerned of data privacy, a major chunk of the mentioned, around 76% engage with personalized marketing messages.

Nonetheless, it’s important for brands to differentiate between personalization and mere upsell. Business need to be on top of consumers by building excellent consumer experiences at every stage of the buyer journey. In a hyper-connected world, optimal customer experience sets apart a brand from the rest in a ever so competitive eco-system.

The perception of a need can be identified by using social media analytics and A/B testing. Besides, personalized marketing has proven to drive a 15% increase in revenue and a 30% increase in marketing-spend efficiency. Hence, combining technology, data, and human emotions is the pathway to boosting your company ROI and driving meaningful improvements for your business.

Building emotional connect with the brand

It’s no secret that to build an emotional connect with the target audience brand needs to create an experience that is of value to this segment. A value that doesn’t just keep consumers engaged and emotionally attached but also one that facilitates demand and encourages growth.

Taking on unique feelings proposition

To explain the above with an ex—Always, a feminine care brand incorporated an emotion to their campaign that every demographic could relate to. The strategy was simple—Pick a cause that everyone deeply cares about, add a dash of a strong emotion(Anger) and stress on change by utilizing the brand voice. Through this campaign, Always redefined the perception of “like a girl” and turned it into a source of inspiration to many. 

Furthermore, the emotionally-driven ad evolved into a confidence movement that defied gender stereotypes. At its peak, the campaign amassed 90 million shares on the internet. Globally, it left a footprint with 1880 media placements and increased purchase intent among target consumers by 50%. 

Capitalizing on FOMO

Who better than Starbucks to ace the concept of marketing at the right moment to the right target audience. They’ve mastered FOMO mentality of their ideal customers and bank on mobile push notifications to get to consumers where they are. By focusing on the impulsive nature of target audience the brand uses GPS technology to trigger location-based push notifications to customers when they’re nearing a store.

Other strategies involve including sales associates with apps that automatically provide personalized product recommendations for specific customers. 

Girlfriend Collective is another brand that nailed the FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) to perfection by provoking a sense of urgency amongst their customers.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BDzbOu4s4pN/?utm_source=ig_embed

For a limited period, the brand offered to send a pair of leggings worth $100 to everyone who paid for everyone who paid for the shipping cost. All that consumers had to do was to share the brand’s website link on their Facebook timeline. Just on the first day of their campaign, they sold about 10,000 pairs of leggings. 

“Free” and “Limited Supply” didn’t go unnoticed as usual and made it hard for consumers to ignore.

Personalized experience to drive bottom line conversions

No matter how creative you get personalizing campaigns, to drive bottom line conversions data is marketers best friend. By taking into account the pattern in user behavior, response rates to campaigns, percentage of each cohort that engaged with the campaign, marketers can predict consumer expectation shifts to optimize campaigns for a better ROI.

The success is determined by the scale at which the campaigns are executed and A/B testing all of the ideas. It’s easier said than done when brands operate in multiple location, multitude of languages and messaging. But, with tools that automate the execution of campaigns and leave creativity and ideation to the team it’s possible to go to marker faster, draw parallels with the outcome and derive bottom line conversions.

More on data – Go-to for decision making

Data is a marketer’s new-age best friend as businesses with data-driven strategies drive about 8 times more ROI.

Before collecting further data, take stock of your existing data sources and integrating them into one solution. However, one of the biggest issues faced by nearly 47% of marketers is data silos. With several potential customer touchpoints available that are managed across several tools, teams end up divided. Hence, ensure to maintain a complete solution that can align business KPIs and follow a united company vision. 

After amassing a certain amount of data, you need to turn it into insights to benefit the brand. These insights could be strategy changing or even minimal. It also enables you to tap into data that can help you uncover the channels that your target customers are using. For example, your competitors could be using a social channel that you may not be using effectively. Now, with your past data and insights analyzed, integrate it into your current strategy for maximum impact. 

By mapping the preference of consumers break the repetition and grow business unconditionally. Finally, ensure that data needs to translate into stories and actions identifying new pathways to growth.

Address privacy concerns upfront in a digital-first world

Privacy is the number one concern for online consumers. About 86% of consumers actively take a step to improve their privacy online. Hence, proactively managing customer privacy will be especially important. To do so, you must ensure transparency about how you’re using customers’ data. 

Truly protecting customer data involves more than merely defending your network from hackers and using boilerplate privacy policy. To transform your business’ privacy policy, perform the following actions:

• Develop a user-centric privacy policy that gives customers more control.
• Use automation as much as possible to prevent human intrusion.
• Restrict selling data to third parties and if you do make it bold and clear.

It’s not too late to examine your current privacy policies to keep up with privacy regulations. Stay diligent as privacy issues lie at the heart of the customer’s brand loyalty. 

Conclusion

The market is constantly evolving and so are consumer needs. The dynamic nature of the consumer base gets shaped as per brand design and perception. To drive bottom line conversions it’s not enough to be strategic in approach but also tactical by implementing a full suite of capabilities ranging from data collection, actionable insights, tools to implement campaigns at scale to governed privacy policies.