How to offer a personalised customer experience
23rd September 2020
80% of customers are more likely to make a purchase when brands offer a personalised customer experience. Customer experience is all about providing your customers with the best journey to connect them to your brand. A personalised customer experience is about diving deeper, looking at your individual offering.
The Cocktail Party Effect
In the 1950s, cognitive scientist Colin Cherry discovered the Cocktail Party Effect. After researching the results on how the brain functions receiving lots of information – in this case, a noisy room at a cocktail party. He discovered that our brains segment the overlapping conversation into different streams. Tuning out irrelevant conversations.
So, how do you get people to tune into your conversation? Colin learned that the strongest trigger is to use the person’s name. This effect applies to your business. Get specific about your customers and grab their attention in the sea of noise.
A great example of this comes from Jewellery brand Monica Vinder. Not only have they included their customer’s name in the email but they have gone one step further by personalising the images too. Showing relevant initial led imagery along with the customers name will be more relevant to that person. Therefore creating maximum relevance and increasing the CTR.
Source: Campaign Monitor
Admittedly there is no one-size-fits-all approach. But here are a few steps you can take to start offering a more personalised customer experience.
Develop Customer Personas
To be able to deliver a personalised experience you need to know who your customers are. By profiling your customers you can see their typicals wants, needs and expectations. Start by looking at your demographic data and any customer information you already have.
Segment Your Email Lists
As demonstrated in the example above, collecting emails is a priority for driving sales in your business. As long as the emails you are sending are relevant. Grouping your subscribers into separate lists will ensure that you can target each group with content that is direct to their needs. From segmenting by initals, interests or location it is proven to increase open rates by 14.3% and click rates by a whopping 101%!
Recommend Relevant Products
Try upselling your products to not only increase the transaction value but to improve the customer experience. Just like when your queing ata store checkout and your surrounded by items in the hope you’ll pick up a last minute purchase. Only these will be highly targeted items. If your customer has added a dress to their basket why not offer shoes and accessories to match? Amazon do this really well by comparing similar items available on their site with key features to analyse.
Source: Amazon
Interactive Elements
Boohoo have an interactive tool on their website which helps you to determine your size if you haven’t shopped with them before. After asking a series of questions they recommend the best size depending on the customers required fit. If you have an overwhelming number of options it can be difficult for customers to know what they’re looking for. Adding in interactivity to your site is great for when you don’t have a huge customer profile database.
Conclusion
Your customers want and expect a personalised shopping experience. As your business evolves and as your customer’s needs and habits evolve, it’s important to evaluate your offering regularly. It’s crucial to keep learning and building your customer knowledge so the insight you learn can be used to develop increasingly personalised interactions.
