Imagine you are at your favorite apparel store or your frequently visited restaurant. The recognition and acknowledgment offered by the store owner or the restaurant as you enter is invaluable. Many times, it is more than a casual “hi” or “hello” or just addressing you by your name. It is enquiring about your previous experience or the brands you bought earlier.
Customers always feel connected to a brand that offers tailored shopping experiences. They love being recommended a new line of clothes or a new dish that suits their style. Customized experiences that address individual needs go deeper to understand what each customer wants, at what time, where, and how — and they do all this in real time.
The power of personalization
While purposeful personalization in a brick-and-mortar setting is a given, customer expectations also hover around the same in the digital world. What does not hold water here is generic personalization, like greeting customers by name or addressing them by gender. In fact, an e-commerce website that does not fulfill customer desires or solve a specific issue makes customers feel they are not understood by brands.
The world has come a long way since British physicist Tim Berners-Lee published the first-ever website in August 1991. With ten websites a year later, 3000 of them by 1994, and 1.89 billion now, brands must elbow their way to make it to the first line of user recall.
Let’s look at how Amazon or Netflix makes notes on each of their customers as they browse their websites or platforms. The data they gather is converted into insights and offered as personalized experiences whenever the customer logs in. Suggestions like “You may like this” or “Because you bought this” are not just courtesy statements. They are a logical result of large-scale data collection, deep analytics, and insights with which brands arrive at hyper-tailored experiences.
No longer a mission impossible
With AI-enabled technology, it is possible to offer personalized experiences to customers every time they engage with you. Customized experiences that address individual needs delve deeper into understanding what customers want, when, where, and how — all in real time.
Harvesting and analyzing massive datasets from customer interactions allow brands to understand exactly what each customer has purchased in the past and what they are looking for now. By analyzing this customer behavior and data, brands can tailor the content and layout of their websites to precisely fulfill the needs of their target audience. For example, online retailers can offer targeted offers like discounts on each customer’s favorite product, or news sites can flash news of interest to each browser.
Website personalization greatly impacts a customer’s experience of the brand. A deeper and enhanced approach to personalization extends site visit time, sharpens recommendation accuracy, and results in higher conversion outcomes with increased value per order.
Better clickthrough rates
Reiterating this, a leading report on Customer Engagement Benchmarks sheds light on the impactful interconnection between personalizing behavioral data and increasing levels of customer engagement. It was found that brands from the Middle East and Africa sending behavior-based onsite messaging saw an increase of 222 percent in conversion rates (CVR) and a 32 percent increase in clickthrough rates (CTR). Purposeful personalization also attracts anonymous visitors and motivates them to stay longer on the site making it easier to convert them into customers. The uplifting CTR/CVR strengthens the case for website personalization.
Brands dreading recent developments like the ban on third-party cookies can dodge the bullet with new technologies. They need not be dismayed, according to a recent survey, as it was found that 30 percent of consumers are open to sharing personal information in exchange for personalized experiences.
Businesses can provide consumers with a choice to opt in or out of data collection. First-party cookies allow them to collect their data directly, bypassing third-party organizations.
Getting relevant information from customers is not difficult, but the challenge lies in giving them a seamless and highly personalized experience in return, which they perceive as valuable.
Opt for the right technology
Successfully personalizing a website to align with customer interests requires innovative technologies that enable segmenting target groups based on buyer personas and use location data to suggest products that suit the weather or region’s culture. For example, a fashion retailer can show products to logged-in customers based on location. It could be a trench coat for customers living in wet conditions or summer clothes for customers who have logged in from tropical regions.
In addition, personalization also has to suit devices used by the customers and adjust their call to action based on where they are in their purchase journey.
Personalizing the website to visitors’ and customers’ preferences, affinity, and behavior can also help brands boost customer loyalty. Website personalization has become a powerful tool for brands across industries that want to create a delightful customer experience to drive engagement, conversion, and retention.
Kunal Badiani is regional head, MoEngage Middle East, Africa and Türkiye
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