Personalization at scale is a great way to encourage customer retention through more engaging experiences. In a recent webinar, Jon Mandell (SVP, Membership Marketing and Global Ecommerce, WW), Ujjwal Dhoot (CMO, DXL Group) and David Henry (Director of Product Marketing, Amperity) discussed the opportunities and challenges of personalization.
Watch the replay here or read the recap below.
Amperity Presentation: How to Personalize Your Customers’ Experiences
Personalization at scale is the moon shot for engaging customers throughout their experience with a brand. When personalization is used, a brand will “ultimately do a better job at captivating and engaging customers” according to Amperity. As a brand personalizes their customers’ journeys, it leads to growth and improvement in the customer experience.
David Henry lists out what to implement to achieve personalization at scale.
- New customer acquisition journey—find new customers who are valuable.
- Persona based welcome journey—post 1st purchase emails to prevent “one and done” drop off.
- Product affinity up-sell journey—identify which additional products will be compelling.
- Proactive churn prevention journey—know if she is fading away and intervene with escalating “we miss you” offers.
- Rewards enrollment and adoption journey—make her feel valued with “surprise and delight’ experiences.
There are a variety of customer data points that you must bring together to personalize a customer’s experience, including technology, analytics and line of business. Broken down more specifically, the required capabilities of personalized customer journeys are:
- Data collection
- Identity resolution
- Profile creation
- Insights and predictions
- Audience segmentation
- Data orchestration
The effects of personalization can be extremely positive, with Amperity finding gains in revenue among their clients, including:
- +61.1% Open Rate
- +22.5% Click Through Rate
- +198% Conversion Rate
- 30% Cost savings on online advertising by using first-party data
Panel Discussion: Top Brands Discuss Their Strategies for Personalization
From the very start of a customer’s journey with WW, their regime is personalized to fit their lifestyle. WW gains more data about each user through their interactions with the WW app. To ensure the data is used effectively, for every piece of data they receive, they immediately ask why the data was collected to determine how it should be used.
The challenge with personalization is to execute it at scale, while also not losing efficiency of the site or data retrieving platform. According to the DXL Group, “It is about the data. The data is the foundation” of personalization.
Though both DXL Group and WW look to target high levels of personalization throughout their customers’ journeys, the exact types of data that are used are very different given how the two brands have very different goals. Through using operation and transactional data sets, they are able to target the specific data they need.
NORTH STARS TO FOLLOW
The panelists highlighted Apple’s segmentation through age, Starbucks’s creation of a star program which customers feel drawn to be a part of and Netflix’s ability to target their customers’ viewing preferences as some of the strongest brands in personalization.
Brands should take incremental steps in order to reach their goals of personalization. A successful personalized customer experience will come through starting small, such as data collection through webpage and email.
