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Accelerate your personalization journey

Andrew Mullins, Brad Koszuta
Four balls rolling down paths

Elevate your connection to your customers

Effective personalization starts with trust. Imagine recommending a TV show to a friend; You choose a show that perfectly matches their preferences and personality, and they end up binge-watching the whole season. Matching their preferences to the show demonstrates you "get" them.

The same applies to businesses. When you consistently tailor offerings to individual preferences, customers feel valued and understood, fostering trust and engagement. On the other hand, generic, irrelevant experiences mean customers are likely to be irritated, skeptical, and, ultimately, walk away.

This is the power of accurate personalization. Organizations with a proven track record of recommendations have an increased likelihood of building strong customer relationships and loyalty. But while success can bring many benefits, it can also have negative consequences. As customers get used to personalized interactions, any mistake will be more noticeable and could jeopardize the trust you’ve worked hard to earn.

At the core of our approach to personalization are three key pillars. For clients seeking to refine and elevate their personalization programs, we follow a proven process focused on these essential steps:

1. Strategize

Keep the end in mind and clearly identify the actions or feelings you want to trigger from your customers. If you don’t know what you want your personalization efforts to accomplish, determining next steps is difficult. Even a straightforward goal like inspiring more engagement with customers is enough to move forward. Understanding the outcome you want from your relationship with customers will guide your hypotheses and help you set achievable goals.

2. Collect high-quality data

Quality data is the bedrock of personalization. A results-driven personalization plan cannot be built without high-quality data. With that in mind, audit the data you have available or find reliable proxies that will help measure success.

3. Align goals and behaviors

Consider the goal of each aspect of your personalization plan and be mindful of balancing short-term wins with long-term loyalty.

For example, a client used net incremental revenue as a KPI (key performance indicator). Success was defined as the money brought in via the personalized marketing program minus the discount it took to achieve the results. In the short term, you can improve this KPI by minimizing the discount because customer behavior is somewhat sticky. Customers will keep coming in and your net incremental revenue KPI will indicate a massive win. While this might work for a period of time, customers change their behavior to new norms, which necessitates re-aligning your goals so that you are focused on the right outcomes.

4. Determine the right channel optimization

Where will you personalize your customer interactions? You should consider your website, app, content, social, stores, or a combination of channels to make a measurable impact.

5. Get team buy-in

Personalizing customer experiences isn’t the sole responsibility of one department or team. Include all relevant stakeholders, like merchandising, customer service, marketing, and sales, to ensure your personalization efforts are thorough and effective.

6. Execute and iterate

Execute the personalization action(s) your team decided on. Monitor the results—did the customers interact with the offer, buy the product, ignore it altogether, or take some other action? Use the results to adjust your strategy and tactics for the future.

Personalization can feel like just another buzzword, but the benefits of getting it right are huge and customer expectations around tailored offerings are rising. A robust personalization approach is no longer optional—so make sure you have what it takes to compete for (and win) customer hearts and minds.

We can help you optimize your loyalty and personalization efforts

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