Why personalisation is important for the customer experience
For every company, each customer’s experience matters. If you can offer your prospects a memorable, enjoyable, and satisfying experience with your brand, they will be more likely to return. In this guide, we discuss one way of guaranteeing this in today’s competitive market: personalisation.
What is the customer experience?
As its name suggests, the customer experience is the overall perception and understanding a customer has of your company based on their time with you. Each contact point will affect this: from how they first hear about you to post-purchase contact emails, customer reviews, or a troubleshooting call with your customer service team.
Today, the many customer touchpoints each company uses across available channels and devices make a seamless, consistent experience more important than ever. In a world where image and perception are critical for success online, you need to ensure that your customers have a positive experience every time.
Why is customer experience so important?
It’s important that every customer who encounters your brand has a satisfying experience. There are two reasons for this:
1) it is what today’s customers expect; and
2) they quickly share both positive and negative experiences, even incidental ones you may think are insignificant.
Imagine your website is not optimised for tablets: if a customer tries to use it, they will be frustrated and ultimately have a negative experience. This will affect their chances of conversion, even if their experiences on other devices have been positive. Worse still, they are likely to tell their friends or post a negative review online, creating negative buzz about your website and brand. And a single negative perception can have a significant impact on your image, revenue, and success.
3 benefits of a strong customer experience
Clearly, you have a lot to gain from a positive customer experience. Here are three key benefits:
1. You can develop loyal customers who stay around
By offering an engaging and effective customer experience, your customers will come to appreciate and value your brand. Through this, you can promote customer retention, creating loyal customers who will return.
2. You can stand out in the market
With so much competition, offering your customers a seamless experience that is tailored to their needs and wants across multiple channels and devices is a sure-fire way to stand out on the market.
3. You can increase revenue
If you can provide your customers with a simple, exciting, and satisfying experience, their trust in your competence will grow, and they will be more likely to purchase your product or service. If you step up your marketing automation flow, you can use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to create personalised customer experiences which appeal to individual tastes and needs – and are even more likely to result in a sale or recurring sales.
3 steps toward improving customer experience
If you are looking to improve this aspect of your business, where should you start? Here are three important steps to include in your plan:
1. Understand your customer
If you can develop a clearer understanding of your customers and what they are looking for, you will be able to offer them an experience tailored to their needs. In general terms, this includes looking at your products and exploring the types of customers who will be interested. Another step is to consider utilising a Customer Data Platform (CDP) to create accessible 360-degree profiles of all your customers.
2. Understand each touchpoint
By examining and optimising touchpoints across all your channels and devices, you can ensure every customer has the optimal experience every time. Assessing your touchpoints and the overall customer experience they create will help you identify weak spots that could damage your customers’ perception of your brand.
3. Adopt marketing automation and personalisation software
If you are looking to take your customer experience to the next level, adopting marketing automation tools is the way forward. By collecting and automatically analysing customer data, you can offer customers experiences tailored to them. For example, imagine your landing page automatically shows a prospect a product they are more likely to want, based on their data and predictive modelling. Marketing automation helps you deliver the perfect content to your customers.
How does personalisation impact customer experience?
By adopting marketing automation and personalisation tools, you can create the ideal experience for your customers. By collecting, analysing, and using extensive customer data, you can automatically tailor the customer experience to each individual. And, with predictive modelling and lead scoring, you can increase revenue too.
Whether it’s specific email campaigns or automatic product recommendations across multiple channels and devices, your customers will greatly appreciate this personalisation: it will make your company stand out in their minds. Thanks to the positive experience they’ve had with you, they will become more invested in your brand.
Should my company adopt marketing automation and personalisation?
If your company wants to increase customer loyalty and boost revenue, adopting personalisation for your customer experience is a logical step. It is a clear way to enhance your company’s online presence and create valuable experiences for both prospects and retained customers. Collecting and using data has benefits beyond just marketing: it can help you to make data-driven decisions, too. If you want to move into the future and create experiences your customers will value, integrate personalisation and marketing automation in your strategy.
By collecting a broad range of data from internal and external channels and linking it to marketing automation software, our solutions help you offer your customers experiences tailored to their personal needs and preferences.
What can a CDP do for you?
Explore the possibilities of using a CDP for your business. Book a quick demo at a time that suits you.
