How To Make Your Digital Touchpoints With Customers More Personal

Nailing personalization at scale is like unlocking a money cheat code for companies, but it’s not an easy feat. Credit: Getty Images

Customers today expect highly personalized experiences from the brands they interact with. Generic, one-size-fits-all messaging and experiences simply won’t cut it anymore. Companies that fail to deliver personalized digital touchpoints risk losing customers to competitors who better understand and cater to individual preferences.

In fact, customer experience trends indicate 46% of customers will buy more when given a personalized experience and 50% of customers are willing to share personal information for a more personalized experience

However, actually pulling off effective personalization at scale is easier said than done. Brands have to overcome some major hurdles to make it work. For example, they have to unify their fragmented customer data that’s spread across different systems. Their heads need to wrap around complex customer journeys that span multiple channels. Getting personalization right requires having the proper strategies, technology, and expertise in place.

The Key Components of Personalization

For brands to develop truly personalized digital experiences for customers, they need to first master a few core components:

Customer Personas

Before you can even think about personalization, you have to deeply understand the different types of audiences you’re targeting. That means building out detailed personas that go beyond just demographics to capture the goals, pain points, behaviors, and other distinguishing details of your key customer segments. With fleshed out personas, you can then craft messaging, content, and experiences tailored to really click with each specific profile.

Customer Segmentation

After developing detailed customer personas, the next step is to group your customers into different segments or “buckets” based on real data about their behaviors and preferences. For example, you might have one segment of customers who frequently buy from your app, another segment that prefers desktop, and another segment interested in a specific product category.
Companies use specialized customer data platform tools to automatically analyze all the data they have on customers – like purchase histories, website interactions, and other signals – to sort folks into these unique segments. With advanced segmentation, you can better target personalized marketing and digital experiences instead of just going off broad demographics.

Data Collection

The fuel that powers effective personalization is having a unified view of customer data collected across every single touchpoint and channel. Brands need centralized data repositories along with sophisticated analytics and activation tools. Modern customer data platforms and CRMs make it possible to gather all those valuable insights into a single source of truth that guides the personalization strategies.

Implementing a Personalization Strategy

Once you have all the essential personalization building blocks like data, technology, and audience insights in place, you can start executing your strategies.
First, set clear goals for what you want personalization to accomplish, like boosting sales conversions or keeping more customers loyal. Define the key metrics to track right from the start.

From there, it’s about genuinely understanding your different customer segments and using up-to-date data to constantly tweak those audience groups as people’s needs and behaviors change. A central data hub with tools to analyze how consumers interact across all channels and touchpoints becomes crucial.

Brands then need automation to streamline delivering those personalized experiences throughout the entire customer journey. Leveraging AI for personalized self-service and support elevates it even further. And all digital platforms like sites and apps need to dynamically adapt with personalized content, navigation, layouts all tailored to each individual user.

But you can’t just set it and forget. You must keep continuously testing new personal approaches against the current ones using techniques like A/B testing. Studying performance metrics and customer feedback loops helps optimize and perfect those experiences. It’s an endless cycle of understanding audiences, combining data, automating personalization, tailoring every part of the user experience, and fine-tuning based on what works best.

Along with having the right personalization strategies and tech, brands should follow some proven best practices. Keep personalized experiences consistent across every channel and digital touchpoint for a seamless journey. Track the right KPIs tied specifically to your personalization goals rather than just generic metrics. The whole customer lifecycle from initially grabbing their attention to keeping them loyal for life should be personalized using data and behavior patterns.

Brands should also gather customer feedback and preferences to enhance the accuracy of those personal experiences. Fostering strategic partnerships with innovative tech companies, like iVirtual and Saige Consulting’s collaboration on FanMore, gives them access to cutting-edge capabilities for taking personalization to new heights.

As Charles Hu, Senior Partner of Technology at Saige, states: “In today’s competitive landscape, brands recognize the value of customer data but struggle to turn it into actionable insights. Saige helped facilitate the development of the Seattle Kraken’s ‘FanMore’ platform with iVirtual, rewarding loyal fans for natural interactions like social media engagement and merchandise purchases. This approach prioritizes enhancing fan loyalty and engagement, emphasizing transparent data exchanges for personalized experiences. Importantly, it opens new revenue streams through corporate sponsorships. This strategy’s versatility can benefit any brand aiming to build genuine connections responsibly.”

The Rewards of Personalization Done Right

Nailing personalization at scale is like unlocking a money cheat code for companies, but it’s not an easy feat. You need the right strategies, tools, and expertise to make that personalization magic happen seamlessly behind the scenes. When you get it right though, it pays off.
Martin Couturier, Director of AI Innovation at Saige, emphasizes the importance of balancing engagement and avoiding overcommunication. Saige’s use of advanced AI technology enables personalized customer engagement, including custom product recommendations and messaging tailored to individual preferences and behavior. This approach replaces generic, segment-based mass communication with AI-driven personalized interactions, optimizing communication frequency through continuous analysis of consumer behavior. Prioritizing user feedback enriches AI-driven personalization and communication strategies, ensuring a more tailored and respectful approach to engagement.

This article was written by Serenity Gibbons from Forbes and was legally licensed through the DiveMarketplace by Industry Dive. Please direct all licensing questions to legal@industrydive.com.