Why Personalization is crucial for your business

Obviously, this requires businesses to understand the dynamic possibilities personalization solutions hold.

In this blog post, we will provide you with the top 3 reasons for why you should consider implementing a personalization solution as part of your customer’s journey if you want to remain competitive.

What is Personalization?

Before addressing the big ‘Why’, we do need to understand what personalization looks like.

Personalization is the process of delivering products and content that are individually tailored to specific users.

Personalization is the advanced solution presenting you with qualified recommendations based on your prior behavior. With personalization you are being presented with recommendations reflecting former behavior gathered from different touchpoints via an algorithm.

Take for example your Spotify-account that at the bottom of your favorite playlist recommends you to new, personalized music choices, based on inputs and the songs in your playlist. The outcome is personalized music recommendations.

Personalization can be integrated in several ways, and some are more obvious than others. They all rely on costumer data points and advanced technology such as AI and machine learning in order to deliver personalized products and content at scale that make customers engage, buy and come back for more.

The type of customer touchpoints that can be personalized are many. Most common platforms for these are: websites, e-mails, onsite search, and adds. You are probably familiar with the ones that track your latest search on a site, your purchases and the e-mails you have opened and clicked on.

Why does personalization matter?

In a sense, this question is redundant and might as well be replaced with “why does customer service matter?” It always has and always will. As customers (and human beings) we are psychologically drawn to people and businesses that demonstrate insights and an understanding of our needs and desires. This is how we connect and how we form relationships – when we experience that someone “knows” us.

As a business you aim to do the same: create loyal customers that value your brand, purchase your products and thereby increase revenue to maintain a high customer satisfaction level. The road for doing so, however, has changed and this is why you need to jump on the personalization train if you want to keep engaging customers in an increasingly competitive market.

CASE: Get inspired by how NEYE turned their e-commerce into a 360° personal omnichannel

1. Today’s customers expect you to know them

The shift is real. Where customers prior to the digital boom would expect convenient experiences, today’s customers have become accustomed to getting what they want and gravitating towards brands that recognize them as individuals rather than generic buyers. This is only stressed by how difficult it has become to captivate your customers attention with marketing, as these are constantly bombarded with information.

In other words, personalization is no longer a nice-to-have but an essential need-to-have tool for any business that plans to survive in the highly competitive, digital market. Personalization can even be called a “hygiene factor” where customers expect that retailers present the right information, in the right order. On the other hand, if businesses misapply preferences or fail to display relevant products, the customer might turn to a competitor.

48 % of consumers have left a company’s website and made a purchase elsewhere if the customer experience was poor. Accenture survey, 2018.

Where personalization used to be targeted offers this now extends to the entire customer experience. Any touchpoint a customer makes can be tracked, and as a result save the customer time, energy and money. So, instead of browsing through Netflix to find new, thrilling series to binge, these are brought to you from a recommendation algorithm. Saving the customer time and energy.

Mind you, Netflix’s personalized recommendation algorithm produce $1 billion a year in value from customer retention.

2. Personalization is just good business

Anyone who has made an impulse buy knows that not every shopping decision is a rational one. Your emotions play a big role in what you buy, when and how much that ends up in your shopping basket.

Emotions and personal connection are crucial triggers in forming customer relationships. As a business or a representative of one, it is your responsibility to apply data points about preferences, tastes, behavior in order to engage with customers and ultimately boosts your bottom line.

Today’s leaders within personalization have demonstrated an increase in their revenue growth between 10 to 30 % due to applied customer knowledge. If executed in the appropriate way, personalization is one of the most effective ways to increase revenue.

3. Personalization provides a competitive advantage

As machine learning and technology advances, more intelligent personalization solutions will see the light of day. Collecting, analyzing and effectively using customer data, such as clicks, visits, add to basket, previous purchases and many other tracking options will help your business create campaigns, content and overall experiences that align with your target audience. At the same time, personalization has proven to decrease bounce-rates significantly as customers are met with personalized content, which is good for SEO performance.

CASE: How does personalization affect your SEO?

Not only is customer data specific to your audience, but it is also impossible for competitors to replicate, as it is user specific. This makes personalization a competitive advantage as it depends on unique data from your platforms. It enables you to stand out and communicate 1:1 with your customers based on their behavior.

Where does Raptor differentiate from other solutions in the market?

A Raptor personalization solution is not the right fit for every company. Raptor’s personalization engine is highly sophisticated and requires dedication from our clients, to get the most out of the solution. However, despite being an advanced and sophisticated solution, Raptor is easy to implement.

With Raptor’s solution, customer data is unified and consolidated from various sources across the organization like CRM, website, email marketing platform, and POS data, allowing marketers to activate customer data and deliver consistent customer experiences across channels.

CASE: Check out how Nemlig.com increased their revenue +28 % after implementing Raptor’s recommendation engine