Personalization in Action

True personalization is more than just using a customer's name in a promotional email, or product recommendations suggesting "people who bought this also bought … " It's about creating unique, always relevant experiences for every customer. True personalization is about delivering a consistent experience across channels that customers use to interact with a brand via appropriate content at the time of their interaction.

Consumers are demanding more consistent brand experiences, and retailers are being challenged to provide personalized experiences across multiple touchpoints — e.g., web, email, mobile, social and offline. So what does personalization look like across these multiple touchpoints, and how can retailers use these techniques to generate return on investment? Let's take a closer look at personalization in action.

Channeling Personalization
In the age of the connected consumer, multichannel marketing is about understanding how your customer interacts with your brand across different platforms, then delivering a consistent, personalized experience across those channels.

For example, marketers can personalize the web experience for customers by using real-time and past behavioral data, preferences, and demographic information to tailor customer website experiences accordingly. They can also optimize email campaigns by adapting subject lines and personalizing dynamic content based on customer understanding. Then, they must ensure that personalized web and email experiences translate seamlessly for mobile devices and deliver relevant content at the right time through the right channel.

Similarly, retailers can improve social marketing ROI using preferences and demographic data to deliver relevant updates to individuals in their communities. In-store, for example, brands can empower sales associates with customer data to improve the shopping experience using iPads and kiosks, guiding customers to product lines that might be of interest — potentially without even having to ask for the customer's size. This same data can be used to maximize the effectiveness of customer calls with relevant offers, upsells and cross-sells.

Here are some examples of how businesses across different industries can use customer data to personalize the customer experience through multiple channels:

Travel
Airlines can use past and real-time behavior as well as demographics to personalize their websites. Using visitors’ locations to dynamically adapt the homepage for each customer, an airline can show flights from their nearest airport and change content and images based on the visitor's previous behavior. This simple personalization can significantly increase conversions.

Publishing
Online news sites use personalization to increase page views, time spent on-site and advertising clickthroughs. By recommending both trending articles and similar articles on content pages, the use of personalization creates personal, relevant environments for each visitor. We've seen this type of personalization triple the number of return visitors for news sites.

Financial Services
Using data to understand customer behavior, financial services companies can personalize email marketing to improve the customer experience. By targeting newsletters using the customer's behavior, including their account status, demographics, real-time behavior and other activity, businesses can decide whether a customer will be more responsive to upsell promotions via a letter, phone call or email based on their history.

Retailers
Retailers use real-time personalization to both engage customers with relevant content and encourage sales with personalized product recommendations. By using preferences and real-time behavior, retailers can adapt their homepage with relevant blog posts based on the visitor's interests. At the same time, these blog posts are then dynamically merchandised with relevant product suggestions.

Taking personalization further, retailers can enhance the shopping experience with relevant product recommendations based on past behavior and demographics. Using a blend of crowdsourced and individual behavior, retailers can program their website to react to macro trends while catering to each customer's unique preferences — i.e., displaying personal product suggestions that increase sales. In addition, retailers can determine whether customers are "top of funnel" or "bottom of funnel" to determine what content would be most appropriate at the time of the customer's interaction.

Bottom line? Personalization strengthens customer engagement. It leads to a positive reaction from customers, namely increased conversion, loyalty and revenue.

Joe Dalton is the chief product officer at SmartFocus, a SaaS cloud marketing platform for email, mobile and social marketing campaigns.