Omnichannel Archives - Page 4 of 10 - Omnichannel Personalization SaaS Solution

13 Oct
2017

5 Key Takeaways from TGI Friday’s Successful Use of Omnichannel Personalization

How the restaurant chain bucked the trend and increased conversion rate by 35%

Many casual dining restaurant chains have been struggling for the past couple of years.

For instance, Ruby Tuesday saw a drop of 8.2% in revenue and closed 109 restaurants hich hile Applebee’s same-restaurant sales are down by 5.2%. (source)

TGI Friday’s, however, bucked the trend and experienced a 35% increase in conversion rate.

Their secret weapon?

Omnichannel personalization technologies that allow them to create a seamless online and offline experience and interact with customers through various touch points.

By delivering the most relevant and timely content and offers based on a customer’s preferences, habits, and past purchases, TGI Friday’s has increased conversion, ROI, average order value, and customer lifetime value.

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Key takeaways from TGI Friday’s personalization strategy

The challenge for many restaurants when entering the digital realm is bridging the online experience with in-store interactions.

Here’s how TGI Friday’s leverage omnichannel personalization for their marketing:

1. Master Guest Profile (MGP)

TGI Fridays’ integrates all of its owned customer data as well as online digital experience tracking metrics into one centralized platform to create an MGP, which is updated in real-time to reflect the latest customer interactions.

Your MGP should incorporate data such as social media activities, location information, customer preferences, and order history to inform how you can deliver content and offers that will add value and increase sales.

2. Personalized interactions on social media

TGI Friday’s uses a chatbot technology to deliver one-on-one interactions with guests on Twitter, helping them find nearby restaurants, place takeout orders, and more.

Social media platforms are launching more features that allow brands to personalize customer experiences. Besides providing customer service, you can also leverage customer data to deliver personalized offers in the right place at the right time.

3. Special offers via mobile apps

Through their app, TGI Friday’s uses push notification to send reminders based on customers’ past purchasing behaviors. The app also makes it easy for customers to re-order their favorite dishes from a list of past purchases.

4. Automated email personalization

TGI Friday’s uses email to stay in touch with customers and deliver personalized offers to encourage them to order online or visit the restaurants.

Here are some ideas for using email marketing in your restaurant business by leveraging customer data:

Offer personalized discounts based on order history.
Send birthday and anniversary emails.
Update customers on loyalty rewards.
Reach out to guests who haven’t visited for a while.
Offer priority reservation for the busiest holidays.

5. Push notifications to encourage first-time orders

Offering a mobile app is a great way to market your restaurant business. However, having downloaded the app doesn’t imply that a user would convert into a customer.

TGI Friday’s sends out a push notification with a discount code to entice these users to place their first orders. This personalization strategy has helped the restaurant chain 3.8x the conversion rate.

Omnichannel personalization is the new frontier in Restaurant Marketing

New technologies are now making it much easier to collect and analyze a large amount of consumer data to inform your marketing strategies.

By using a robust centralized platform to manage your customer data, you can deliver highly personalized messaging and offers to build relationships with your customers and increase sales.

11 Oct
2017

Winter Is Coming: Is Your Menu Ready to Deliver Across Channels?

One of the greatest challenges as a restaurant owner is learning how to create prolonged customer engagement across channels that assists in maintaining consistent customer traffic despite fluctuations in weather. Customer engagement is a pivotal factor in determining a restaurant’s level of success: According to a recent study by Deloitte, customers value being engaged by a restaurant more than any other experiential metric. In fact, 34 percent of customers reported that engagement — which is defined in this study as when the restaurant interacts with the customer in a “friendly, authentic, and hospitable way” as the most important factor in determining whether or not they are satisfied with their visit to a dining establishment.

The change in seasons presents an opportunity for you to engage customers through implementing changes in your menu and services which will lead to renewed customer interest across channels, enabling your company to maintain margins even during the most challenging winter months.

Prioritize omnichannel delivery

In order to build your business during cold season, you will need to take into account how consumer behavior differs as the temperature drops. Customers order higher amounts of food delivery in cases of extreme weather and food delivery platforms such as Grubhub see an increase in growth during cold weather months. Home delivery is a growing segment for restaurants, leading CNBC to predict a 79 percent increase in home food delivery by 2020. As a result, you must be prepared to cater to seasonal consumer demand for home delivery with a seamless omnichannel presence across channels.

By streamlining your business’s mobile functions and focusing your marketing efforts on promoting your local affiliations on social media, you’ll be prepared to cater to the growing demand for home delivery.

Opportunity for mobile expansion

A recent study by the National Restaurant Association found that 46 percent of smartphone users use their phones to order food at least once a month. Increasing customer demand for smartphone-optimized food delivery has led to rapid growth of custom delivery service platforms such as Grubhub. Even more notably, 60 percent of Grubhub’s over 3 billion dollars in annual local revenue is generated through orders on mobile devices.

Grubhub’s expansion highlights the growing opportunity for restaurateurs to reduce revenue loss through the outsourcing of restaurant functions such as food delivery to outside enterprises. Keep sales in-house by strengthening your company’s omnichannel functions to increase sales that might otherwise have been lost due to consumer buying patterns and restaurant delivery startups.

Promote affiliation with local growers

Consistent output on social media is essential to maintaining customer engagement during times when the temperature prohibits them from visiting your physical restaurant. Promote your connection with local growers and Farmers’ Markets in order to expand your restaurant’s visibility on social media. According to a 2016 survey by the National Restaurant Association, 57 percent of adults prefer restaurants that serve locally-sourced food. In light of this evidence, there is a substantial opportunity for restaurateurs to grow business during off-seasons by partnering with local growers and creating hashtag campaigns to drive restaurant traffic.

Collaborating with local companies also gives you that ability to market your business through #shoplocal social media campaigns. For example, restaurants in Boston, Massachusetts collaborated to create the Boston Local Food Festival. At the outdoor festival, members of the community can experience local food and support small businesses, as well as meeting local growers and fisherpeople from Boston’s wharf. Look into online marketing software platforms such as BuzzSumo and Sprout Social to assist in identifying the right hashtags to market your company’s local affiliations.

In addition to publicizing partnerships with local growers, participate in events such as American Express’s Small Business Saturday to promote your restaurant’s affiliation with your local community. Small Business Saturday facilitates omnichannel marketing for small businesses and restaurants by offering retailers customizable social media materials, website banners, and in-store signage to promote the annual shopping event held on November 25th.

Are you interested in learning more about how to create an omnichannel customer experience and increase engagement? Read how NectarOM increased TGI Fridays in-app conversions by 35% here

27 Sep
2017

Unlock the Power of Omnichannel Marketing with Personalization

Increase sales and improve customer loyalty with personalized marketing

Your customers want to feel special.

They want more than a one-size-fits-all mass marketing message from the brands they love.

Delivering a tailored experience to your customers isn’t just a touchy-feely thing.

A study found that 59% of shoppers who have experienced personalized marketing believe it has a noticeable influence on their purchasing decision.

A personalized shopping experience is particularly important for eCommerce websites when it comes to building connections with customers.

Thankfully, new technologies are making it possible for online merchants to deliver that warm and fuzzy feeling using personalized marketing:

Use Personalization To Increase eCommerce Conversion

The foundation of omnichannel personalization is the creation of a single customer view. After you have your 360-degree customer profiles set up, you can leverage the customer data in all of your customer touchpoints to deliver the right message and the right offer at the right time.

Personalized Product Recommendations

Today’s customers have little patience for recommendations that aren’t relevant to them.

75% of shoppers prefer to buy from a retailer that recognizes them personally by name, recommends products based on past purchases, browsing history, and other interactions with the brand.

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Personalized recommendation is particularly well-suited for selling “long-tail” items that may not make it to other forms of product recommendations.

Customer history and preferences can also be aggregated to offer recommendations to new visitors by mapping their browsing behaviors to the preferences of registered users with similar interests.

Personalized Email Campaigns

Personalized emails with relevant content and promotions can help drive traffic to your eCommerce website and increase conversion.

To personalize your email campaigns, you can:

Segment your email list based on buyer personas, taking into account how they think, what drives their decisions, how they buy, and what they’re trying to accomplish with your products
Send triggered or behavioral emails based on customer’s interaction with your website. E.g. when they abandon their carts, recently made a purchase or have browsed a series of similar items

Personalized Content Marketing

Content marketing is a great way to cultivate trust and nurture relationships with your potential customers by building brand awareness and providing value.

It also allows you to target customers who are in specific stages of their buyer’s journey with highly relevant information.

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You can target content to your audience through email campaigns, personalized website view, or social media marketing campaigns.

With an omnichannel marketing platform, you can track the audience’s interaction with your content across all touch points to effectively move them along the purchasing path.

Personalized Mobile Marketing

Mobile marketing includes the use of SMS, MMS, In-App Ads, QR Codes, etc. to deliver messages to shopper’s mobile devices.

To deliver highly-personalized messages and offers to your customers without being a nuisance, you need to:

Track user permission
Focus on making connections and building relationships
Pay attention to the frequency of push notifications
Deliver messages that match the context
Allow recipients to control the amount of communication they want to receive from you

Personalization is the key to unlocking the power of omnichannel marketing so you can be in the right place at the right time with the right message.

Many retailers who implemented personalization strategies have benefited from this technology:

74% enjoyed a boost in sales
61% saw an increase in profit
58% experienced a swell in online traffic
55% made improvement in customer loyalty

If you’re ready to increase the sales and conversion rate of your eCommerce store, see how our omnichannel marketing and hyper-personalization platform can give you the tools to succeed.

21 Sep
2017

Big Brands Get Personal With Customer Data [Case Study]

See how Target, Fig & Olive, and Bank of America are using omnichannel personalization in their marketing

Big brands in every industry vertical are leveraging the power of customer data to deliver personalized campaigns and promotions to increase sales, deepen engagement, and improve customer loyalty.

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How are you using customer data to inform your personalized marketing campaigns?

Here are some examples from three industry leaders to get you inspired:

Retail Industry — Target

In 2012, Target made the news by sending a promotional mailer advertising baby gear to a teenage girl before she told her parents about the pregnancy.

The retail giant was able to do so by creating a customer profile on each shopper to store demographic information and track buying behaviors.

Since then, Target has further refined its personalized marketing strategies (besides taking more care to avoid public-relationship disasters) most notably with their app Cartwheel.

The app uses customer data from a centralized database as well as real-time in-store interactions to offer recommendations and discounts based on past purchases and app usage.

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Cartwheel features shopping lists with a scanning function, and allows guests to personalize the homepage by choosing exactly which categories to feature.

In addition, the app’s Personalized Recommendations suggest tailored offers based on guests’ in-app activities and Exclusive Offers reward loyal guests with personalized, higher-value offers.

The app boasts over 7 million users while active users have increased their spending at Target by nearly 30 percent.

Restaurant Industry — Fig & Olive

With eight locations across the country, Fig & Olive struggled with the large amount of customer data they have collected both from the point-of-sale systems at their individual locations and from OpenTable.

To leverage this wealth of customer information, the restaurant group developed a centralized reservation center so they can combine data from all locations.

This allows the company to track the dining habits and visit frequency of guests across all of their restaurants.

Using the centralized data platform, the company ran automated personalized email campaigns targeting specific customer behaviors.

For instance, the “we miss you campaign” that offered complimentary crostini to guests who had not visited in the last 30 days resulted in 300 visits and more than $36,000 in sales—an ROI of 700%.

Their automated email campaigns have an extraordinarily high open rate of 53%. Their personalized communication strategy has increased customer loyalty and spending.

In addition, the restaurant group used their customer relationship management (CRM) platform to gather feedback from their guests through online surveys.

By gathering and acting on customer feedback, Fig & Olive decreased negative reviews on Yelp by 36%.

Financial Industry — Bank of America

Bank of America launched BankAmeriDeals, a program that has served 1.5 billion offers to its 30 million online and 14 million mobile banking customers during a 2-year period.

Using data in bank customers’ accounts to discover their purchasing habits, BofA partnered with popular merchants to offer customers deals on products and services.

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The program, while keeping the customers’ personally identifiable information within the bank’s database, allows participating merchants to “link” offers of up to 15 percent “cash back” within BofA’s online and mobile banking customers’ accounts.

BofA further increased the relevance of the offers by going beyond national brands. It partners with regional and local merchants to deliver the right level of relevance to the right customers.

This program has helped the bank deepen engagement with their customers, creating a win-win situation for the merchants, customers, and bank.

77% of consumers have chosen, recommended, or paid more for a brand that provides a personalized service or experience.

Personalization is no longer a “luxury” in marketing if you want to cut through the clutter.

It’s time to set up your business to leverage customer data and deliver an outstanding customer experience that increases conversion.

20 Sep
2017

Increase Sales and Conversion Using Customer Behavioral Data

How to supercharge your omnichannel marketing campaign with personalization by leveraging customer data.

Most data-driven marketers take information gathered from surveys or focus groups with a grain of salt because of the biases and errors inherent in the methodology.

Simply put, there are often discrepancies between what the consumers say and their purchasing behaviors.

A much better way to understand what your customers really want is to gather data on how they behave—namely, how they vote with their wallets.

The use of consumer data and behavioral analytics is now driving the growth of many successful businesses through personalized marketing campaigns.

More than 60% of Netflix’s rentals stem from recommendations while 35% of Amazon’s sales originate from product recommendations based on individual consumer’s past interactions with the website.

Such personalized recommendations are helping brands become more relevant to the individual consumer, resulting in higher conversion rates and improved customer loyalty.

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Collecting and Utilizing Customer Behavioral Data

The first step to leveraging customer behavior analytics is, of course, to have the right kind of data.

Start by capturing as much information as possible to avoid blind spots. Collect and collate data from all customer touch points with the help of an omnichannel marketing software to give you a complete picture of your customers’ behaviors.

Stay objective and don’t assume anything about what your customers want or need.

The data you select to use in your analytics should help inform how personalized content, promotions, and product recommendations are delivered to each individual customer.

The aggregation of such information will also allow you to identify trends and anticipate consumer needs, as well as predict the preferences of unregistered prospects by comparing their behaviors with customer information on your database.

Take advantage of your omnichannel marketing software’s ability to respond to your customers’ behaviors in real-time to deliver an outstanding customer experience that increases sales and builds brand loyalty.

Applying Customer Behavioral Data To Marketing Campaigns

Use the data you have gathered to inform how you deliver targeted content and messaging to your prospects and customers.

Here are a few ways to integrate customer behavioral data to personalized marketing campaigns:

Targeted Content

A study by Forrester found that when their marketing messages match consumer behaviors to products, marketers saw a 15% revenue lift and a 667% ROI.

By focusing on individual consumers rather than mass segmentation, you can use personalized content to drive purchases.

Real-Time Interactions

Whether your customers are interacting with your brand online or in-store, responding to their behaviors in real time can lead to a much higher conversion rate.

You can use an omnichannel marketing platform to trigger an email campaign based on a customer’s past and present interactions with your brand across all touch points.

You can also change content on your website dynamically as a response to each visitor’s history, interest, and real-time behaviors to deliver the most relevant information and recommendations.

Trend Recommendations

With the help of sophisticated technologies, you can take product recommendations to the next level.

The insights on shopper behaviors can be used to show unique product combinations that encompass purchasing trends from “people like them” by uncovering correlations that most marketers might miss.

The use of customer behavior analytics is taking personalized marketing campaign to the next level. It’s a trend that marketers can’t afford to ignore.

NectorOm’s omnichannel marketing software is designed to help data-driven marketers glean the right insight so you can always be in the right place at the right time with the right message. Learn more about our suite of solutions.

14 Sep
2017

The Most Important Element For Successful Personalized Marketing Campaigns

Customer data is driving the next generation of omnichannel marketing strategies. What you can do to stay ahead of your competition.

Every time you interact with your customers, you have the opportunity to aggregate invaluable information. That data can inform your marketing strategies if you leverage it and turn it into actionable insights.

McKinsey predicts that data-activated marketing can boost total sales by 15 to 20 percent (and even more for digital sales) while significantly improving the ROI on marketing budget across all channels.

These strategies are based on a customer’s real-time needs, interests, and behaviors.

We’re not talking about the same old “Hi [ FIRST NAME ]” kind of personalization.

The way companies used to segment their audience is too isolated and simplistic, failing to take into account the complex manner in which consumers interact with brands across all channels, and at various stages of their customer journeys.

With the information available to today’s businesses, it’s not the lack of data that plagues marketers.

Instead, they have access to more data than they know how to utilize effectively.

Thankfully, new technologies are emerging to help brands leverage the vast amount of customer data to deliver personalized messages across all customer touch points, creating an exceptional customer experience.

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Here’s how you can activate customer data by implementing personalized marketing campaigns across all channels:

1. Create Single Customer View

A 360-degree customer profile is the foundation of any successful omnichannel personalized marketing campaign.

By using an omnichannel marketing software, you can consolidate all customer data and collect signals from ongoing interactions to aid in the creation of targeted messages and offers.

2. Make Decisions Based On Signals

When customers interact with your brand at different touch points, they leave behind “signals” that can inform your next personalized marketing message.

These “signals” could be cart abandonment, Facebook “check in” at a store, entering an area within your “geo fence,” or returning to your website shortly after a purchase.

3. Deliver Real-Time Personalized Experiences and Offers

By combining signals from a customer’s real-time interaction with your brand and the customer’s history, habits, and preferences, you can deliver the most relevant content or offer in the right place at the right time.

Utilize a centralized platform to implement your personalized marketing campaign so you can deliver consistent messaging across all channels.

This will ensure that all content is working synergistically to move your customers seamlessly along the buyer’s journey.

4. Send Personalized Email

Consumers are fed up with getting one-size-fits-all content and promotions that have nothing to do with their interests, preferences, or habits.

Email is one of the best ways to tailor unique messages. Having them sent at the appropriate frequency positions your brand as relevant and valuable.

It’s an easy way to reach mobile users, a transactional medium perfect for coupons, and allows you to track metrics to understand what works so you can refine your campaigns.

5. Offer Individualized Content On Website

When your customers log onto your website, you can leverage their behavioral data (such as browsing history and interactions with your brand) to deliver relevant and valuable content such as useful articles, localized information, product recommendations or special offers.

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Your customer data is a treasure trove of information and it’s the next frontier in personalized marketing.

With the help of today’s technology, you can now tap into that knowledge to help maximize engagement and increase ROI.

Explore our library of resource to see how you can get more leads and generate more sales with omnichannel marketing.

12 Sep
2017

4 Reasons For Walmart’s Omnichannel Grocery Retail Success

Even though Amazon’s recent acquisition of Whole Foods has brought omnichannel grocery retail to our attention, Walmart has been profiting from the synergy of its well established online and offline grocery retail channels for quite some time.

The company is well positioned to take advantage of the consumer trend in omnichannel retail, in which consumers expect a seamless and consistent user experience across all channels and interactions, including physical stores, web, social media, mobile, call center, and others.

Walmart’s infrastructure allows it to coordinate activities and consolidate data across channels to achieve synergy and efficiency while analytics on its large customer database provide further insights into consumer preferences and behaviors.

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Instead of solely focusing on providing delivery service like many eGrocers do, Walmart offers a mix of online and in-store experiences that include drive-through and buy-online-pick-up-in-store to satisfy the various reasons that consumers choose to shop for grocery online.

In Q1 2017, Walmart’s grocery business surged a staggering 63 percent and added 0.8 percentage points to its first-quarter same-store sales gain. Now the company is on track to scaling this offering to more stores.

What’s Walmart doing right in its omnichannel grocery retail strategy? Turns out, quite a bit:

1. Brand Promise of “Everyday Low Price”

A study by Hartman Group found that 35% of consumers order groceries online for better pricing.

Walmart leverages its brand promise of “everyday low price,” which is very appealing to many shoppers.Image source

Not only does this pricing strategy increase Walmart’s competitiveness in both mainstream and online Grocery markets, but it also helps attract customers used to shopping for food at brick-and-mortar discount or dollar stores.

2. Free Two-Day Shipping

In the same study by Hartman Group, 43% of participants indicated free shipping as a major reason they buy groceries online.

Walmart’s free two-day shipping makes having groceries delivered to their doorsteps a no-brainer for the many customers who want to avoid traveling to a store, dealing with a crowd, and spending time on shopping.

3. In-Store Pick Up Of Online Orders

For customers who like instant gratification but want to avoid the crowd, save time from having to look for items in the store, and enjoy the convenience of utilizing their personalized re-order lists, Walmart offers a service that allows shoppers to place their orders online, choose a time slot, and have the order loaded directly into their cars at their local Walmart.

In addition, the company has recently implemented geo-fencing technology that links up a customer’s mobile device to the local store so the order, which was placed online, will be waiting for the customer at the parking lot.

This omnichannel customer experience is made possible by Walmart’s many physical locations, as well as its robust e-commerce platform and personalization strategy that link their offline operation to the online shopping experience.

4. Employee Delivery

For many online grocery retailers, the “last mile” delivery is often the most costly and creates the biggest logistic challenges.

Walmart is testing a program that pays participating employees to deliver online orders on their way home from work. If successful, this program can potentially increase the efficiency and reduce the cost associated with the “last mile” while delivering an even more seamless online-offline shopping experience to consumers.

The Key To Successful Omnichannel Retail

Successful execution of an omnichannel customer experience is dependent upon a seamless integration of online and offline channels.

Many of these interactions hinge upon the creation of a personalized experience based on each customer’s preferences, behaviors, and interactions with the brand, and it has become imperative that retailers design customer-centric interactions that span online and offline channels.

05 Sep
2017

The Secret To Being in the Right Place at the Right Time All the Time

Design an omnichannel customer experience that increases engagement and conversion

Kids selling lemonade on a hot summer day at a busy street corner make more money than those who set up shop at a deserted spot on a wintry morning.

And as the saying goes, you don’t sell ice to an Eskimo.

These are simple yet fundamental lessons in sales and marketing—you need to be in the right place at the right time to sell the right product to the right people.

Of course, it’s exponentially more complex in today’s marketplace where consumers are interacting with brands on multiple channels, both online and offline, at various stages of their customer journey.

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Not only do businesses need to design a seamless online experience but they also have to make sure it extends into their brick-and-mortar presence, and vice versa.

To successfully connect all the customer touch points, you need a holistic approach to your marketing and promotion strategies.

Omnichannel Marketing — Putting All the Pieces Together

Omnichannel marketing is a strategy for delivering seamless and consistent customer experience across channels and on different devices so each interaction builds on the previous one to effectively move the audience along the customer journey.

The key to omnichannel marketing lies in understanding who you’re communicating with across channels (website, emails, social, apps, call center, stores, ads, etc.) and then connecting those channels to give individuals what they want. (Hubspot)

A survey found that 47% of shoppers who engage with a retailer across 10 or more channels make purchases from its website at least once a week, compared to just 21% for those who engage up to four channels.

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In addition, companies with omnichannel customer engagement strategies are able to retain 89% of their customers, compared to 33% for companies with weak customer engagement strategies.

Since omnichannel marketing involves the strategic coordination of multiple customer touch points, you can’t just throw some spaghetti on the wall and hope it will stick.

Here’s how to make omnichannel marketing work for your business:

Take stock of all your customer touch points (e.g. website, email, social media, call center, store) and understand how your audience interacts with each of them (e.g. making a purchase, looking for support, sharing reviews, and comments)
Leverage customers’ geographic information to deliver localized content and offers
Design personalized promotions based on customers’ past purchases and recent interactions with your brand
Develop a consistent brand identity and brand voice to deliver a cohesive user experience across all channels
Offer product recommendations based on items customers have viewed or purchased
Deliver relevant content to each customer segment based on their preferences and customer journey
Keep all your channels active and interact with customers on their preferred platforms
Use an omnichannel marketing software to consolidate customer information from all touch points and create a single 360-degree customer profile to inform future interactions
Audit your existing systems, such as your POS software, to make sure the data can be integrated into your omnichannel marketing software
Provide your salespeople (e.g. in-store, call center, live chat) with access to the master customer profiles so they can have the necessary context to delight your customers. At the same time, ensure that they record their customer interactions onto the centralized platform for future reference

Simply showing up in front of your customers with a mass marketing message is no longer enough in today’s marketplace.

To stay ahead of your competition, you need to deliver the right message that speaks to your customers’ relationship with your brand and where they’re at in the customer journey. Doing so allows you to add value and build trust by being relevant all the time.

31 Aug
2017

How To Augment Customer Experience With Omnichannel Personalization

Omnichannel personalized marketing is no longer just “nice to have” in today’s marketplace, especially with customer experience becoming a key brand differentiator.

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Consumers are now interacting with brands across multiple channels. Not only do they expect relevant content but they also want the ability to “pick up where they left off” when they switch from one channel to another.

Many retailers consider implementing omnichannel personalization as one of the key strategies to generate growth and increase revenue through providing a customer-centric brand experience. In fact, many retailers see an increase in revenue and new customer conversion rate when they start offering personalized customer experience.

A study by Invesp has shown that personalization has been proven to improve customer loyalty and increase conversion:

53% of online shoppers consider customization valuable.
45% of shoppers prefer to shop on sites offering personalized recommendations.
Personalized ads have a conversion rate 10 times higher than “one-size-fits-all” ads.

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However, there are many moving pieces to ensure the successful implementation of such strategy, including the collection, integration, and synthesis of a large amount of customer data and the ability to turn it into actionable insights.

Thankfully, there are many tools you can use to help gather customer data and apply them to improve customer experience. Here are a few helpful features to look for:

Customer Data Management (CDM)

Information on your customers’ behaviors and preferences will help you cultivate relationships and increase retention rate. Data collection is the first step to implementing a personalization strategy.

To see CDM in action, look no further than online retail giant Amazon.com. Customer information is collected and utilized for making recommendations that leads to increase in sales, as well as improving customer relationships with more personal services.

To get the most out of your customer data, you should:

Decide on the critical data to collect so you don’t end up having to parse through irrelevant information
Clean up your data to avoid duplication
Funnel all information into one centralized database to construct 360° customer profiles
Avoid siloed internal practice and encourage collaboration between departments
Make the information and customer profiles easily accessible to sales personnel in the field.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

After you have constructed 360° Customer Profiles that aggregate your customers’ unique preferences, brand interactions, and habits, it’s time to take that information to the next level.

You can leverage the analytics capabilities of your software to make data-backed business decisions based on the level of brand interaction and projected lifetime value of each of your individual customers.

To leverage the power of CRM, follow these best practices:

Create targeted content for specific customer segment to help your brand stay relevant and top of mind. For example, P&G developed the Being Girl microsite to share relevant content with a specific customer segment
Use geo-location to target customers who are in the vicinity of a physical store
Learn customer habits and preferences to create offers and deliver services that are timely, customized, and relevant
Implement Omnichannel marketing and customer care to deliver a seamless customer experience across all touch points

Automated Personalization

You can also leverage the information about your customers to create personalized campaigns and communications that help you deliver the most relevant information to specific customer segments in a timely manner.

This will not only allow you to nurture customer relationships and improve retention rate but also entice new customers to engage with your business by sending out highly relevant offers at the critical moments of their customer journey.

These are some of the ways you can leverage automated personalization to increase sales:

Segment and target high-quality leads that are likely to convert
Implement personalized lead nurturing campaigns to deliver the most relevant content and offers
Increase customer lifetime value by improving customer satisfaction and loyalty with relevant offers
Leverage your social media presence to deliver a seamless experience that moves customer along their purchasing path

The Best Marketing Speaks To What Makes Your Customers Tick

The effectiveness of one-size-fits-all marketing messages is plummeting as consumers are becoming increasingly savvy and expect for customized content and offers from brands.

As a marketer, you need to deliver a personalized customer experience across all channels and make sure your copy, content, and offer are highly relevant while appearing in front of your audience in the right place at the right time to get the highest ROI on your marketing budget.

29 Aug
2017

I’ve Got the Customer Data…. Now What?

Leverage big data for your omnichannel marketing strategies

Big data is everywhere, but do you know what to do with it?

Marketers are tapping into customer data to generate insights that have never been available before.

If you aren’t leveraging this gold mine of information, you’re missing out on a vast opportunity to surprise and delight your prospects and customers.

The problem for most marketers isn’t the lack of such data.

In fact, you’re probably sitting on a large amount of information gathered from various customer touch points—website, email, social media, call center, live chat, or in-store interactions.

All this information can be very overwhelming if you don’t have a plan to utilize it for your business.

What can you do with this data to advance your marketing and sales efforts?

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Optimize Pricing at Customer-Product Level

McKinsey has found that on average, a 1 percent price increase translates into an 8.7 percent rise in operating profits.

Yet up to 30 percent of all pricing decisions made by companies fail to deliver the best price.

The ability to analyze customer preferences and behaviors can help you fine-tune pricing of each product for individual customers to maximize profit.

Attain Greater Customer Responsiveness With Relationship-Driven Strategies

A Forrester study found that 36% of B2C marketers are actively using analytics and data mining to plan relationship-driven strategies.

These strategies have been found to increase customer acquisition, reduce customer churn, and improve existing products for more sales.

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You can leverage data and implement the insights with a robust customer relationship management (CRM) platform to build relationships with your customers. The key is to give them what they want when they want it to increase engagement, loyalty, and customer lifetime value.

Embed Intelligence Into Contextual Marketing

By bringing together evolving customer preferences and interactions across channels, marketers can now take contextual marketing to the next level.

When a customer enters a search term on your website or app, you can combine the search term with the customer’s purchasing history to improve the relevance of the search results and product recommendations.

Develop Customer-Centric Strategies

The use of customer data and single customer view turns the focus from executing discrete campaigns to managing customer lifecycle.

Through improving customer experience across all touch points, companies are better positioned to cultivate long-term relationships that lead to greater customer loyalty and lifetime value.

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Optimize Go-To Market Plans Using Geoanalytics

Customer data can show you how demand differs across geographic regions.

Using this insight, you can align your sales and go-to-market strategies with territories that have the greatest sales potential to increase sales, improve supply chain efficiency, and reduce cost.

Identify VIP Buyers To Increase Sales

By analyzing average purchase amount, lifetime value, acquisition cost, and retention, you can identify your “VIP” customers that are of highest value to your business.

You can then focus your customer care efforts to nurture relationships with this segment with a personalized shopping experience and targeted content or offers to increase engagement and loyalty.

Deliver Consistent Omnichannel Customer Experience

The use of robust Customer Data Management (CDM) technologies is making it possible for businesses to orchestrate excellent omnichannel customer experiences across a selling network.

This allows you to effectively move prospects along the buyer’s journey to engage with and purchase from your brand.

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The technologies for tapping into the power of customer data are now available at your fingertips.

You can finally collect data, collate information, generate insights, and turn them into implementable strategies that will dramatically increase your marketing ROI.

Discover how NectarOm’s suite of tools can help you leverage customer data and take your marketing to the next level.