How to Create an Omni-Channel Personalization Strategy for 2018 and Beyond

It’s a new year of retail technology and advancements in artificial intelligence are shaping customer expectations for personalization. In fact, 10 percent of purchasing decisions will be guided by intelligence agents this year, according to Forrester – making 2018 the first year that AI will have a measurable impact on consumer purchasing decisions. This is only the beginning of significant advancements in the field of personalization, as the fiscal impact of targeted suggestions from intelligent algorithms is only projected to grow.

Leaders Share Personalization Strategies

Personalization was the hot topic at the NRF Big Show this year and well-known retail leaders from such companies as Macy’s, The Children’s Place and the Neiman Marcus Group addressed how their companies plan to use personalization to differentiate themselves from the competition. As Karen Katz, President and CEO of the Neiman Marcus Group, told Forbes, “Great customer experience in 2018 will come from blending technology with a more personalized touch… people that can combine technology-powered personalization with a human will be the winners.”

Speaking the Language of Conversational Interface

Artificial intelligence-powered conversational platforms are becoming the preferred method for customers to interface with retail companies. Gartner predicts that by 2021, over 50 percent of companies will spend more per year on chatbots than they do on mobile app development. AI-powered chatbots and voice activated search platforms such as Amazon and Alexa enable retailers to offer targeted product suggestions and to resolve basic customer service issues. When AI-powered chatbots are used to facilitate a customer’s product search, they can take the customer through every phase of their purchasing process – from their first visit to a brand’s website to choosing the correct payment method for their final purchase. Customer service bots can be used to quickly to customer queries and direct shoppers to the appropriate branch of the company to handle their request.

Learning to Utilize Intelligent Algorithms  

Although most retailers know it’s necessary to implement niche technological developments such as chatbots and personalization platforms in order to compete, Forrester reports that 67 percent of retailers are still not prepared to leverage intelligent agents within their companies. This means that only 33 percent of retailers surveyed by Forrester understand the power of AI to disrupt the retail industry. However, disruption is inevitable. In 2018, it is advisable for retailers with stores of various sizes – across many different verticals – to implement intelligent personalization strategies across every branch of their retail store operations. Even the most advanced AI platforms depend on whittling customer data down to individual profiles to build loyalty strategies with authentic, applicable personalization. Yet the most effective personalization strategies take things yet a step further to suggest relevant marketing methods and formulate plans-of-action based on each customer’s unique search history, as well as their phase in the consumer lifecycle.

Integrating Marketing Touchpoints

The biggest mistake retailers make when implementing a burgeoning personalization strategy for their customer base is failing to update customer information each time a relevant transaction or communication takes place. When organizations fail to connect the dots across platforms, they cannot syndicate recommendations or register customer interactions, which often results in sending out duplicate communications or failing to follow-up with consumers. At NectarOM, we work to bridge the gap between various branches of our clients’ companies to create a unified, cohesive brand presence and customer outreach strategy across platforms. Don’t be one of the 67 percent of retailers that Forrester predicts will fall behind in the New Year – instead, partner with a solution provider with access to an intelligent, AI-fueled  personalization algorithm that produces measurable results.

Recharge Your Customer Data

Increase sales by leveraging the power of your CRM data

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software has become indispensable for both online and offline businesses. It’s likely that you have already collected a large amount of customer information from existing customers and prospects over time. However, sitting on a pile of data isn’t going to bring in revenue for your business.

Your information is only as good as how well it’s leveraged to engage with your customers and generate more sales. Here’s what you can do to boost your revenue using customer data:

1. Create targeted campaigns

Your data can give you unique insights into each individual customer’s demographic information, interests, preferences, location, browsing history, and purchasing behaviors enabling you to deliver targeted content and offers in the right place at the right time to maximize conversion.

For example, when a registered customer shows interest in a product but hasn’t placed an order, you can send an email with a special offer to entice them to complete the purchase.

According to Forrester, 30% of eCommerce repeat purchases come from email marketing. In addition, targeted campaigns can be delivered via social media, mobile app, and direct mail.

2. Improve customer service

Outstanding customer experience is the key to increasing conversion and boosting customer lifetime value.

When your customers contact your company through various touch points, such as website, social media, or email, the interactions can be recorded in the 360-degree customer profile. Your customer service representatives can use the information to construct a better picture of the customer’s history, pick up where they left off, and offer the most relevant and appropriate response.

3. Support personalization strategies

Personalization strategies have been proven to increase sales and conversion and become the priority of many marketing professionals. Your CRM data can inform a variety of personalization strategies on channels such as website, email, and social media by allowing you to:

  • Offer personalized product recommendations on your website, a strategy that’s found to increase store revenue by 300%, conversion rate by 150%, and average order value by 50%.
  • Use email personalization to deliver relevant and timely content or offers that’ll increase engagement and conversion.
  • Combine customer data with retargeting campaigns, such as social media or Google Adwords, to drive customers to products they’ve already shown interest in.

crm data

Image source

4. Attract new prospects

People who share similar demographic profiles, preferences, browsing behaviors, or purchase history with your current customers are more likely to be interested in your products or services. You can use the data from existing customers to determine the audience of your marketing campaigns.

For instance, you can upload a list of existing customers and use it to target a “look-alike” audience for your Facebook ads. In addition, for many B2B companies or B2C merchants selling higher-priced products, lead scoring can be used to identify the most qualified prospects by comparing new leads against the attributes of your most valuable customers.

A powerful customer data management (CDM) system

The ability to leverage customer data starts with a powerful CDM system that allows you to create a single customer view and collect data from multiple touch points. You’ll then be able to leverage the unique preferences, brand interactions, and habits of customers to deliver the most timely and relevant omnichannel campaigns that’ll drive conversion and sales.

Retargeting And Omnichannel Personalization: the Winning Combo

How retailers can drive traffic and increase sales this holiday season

This just in: US consumers spent $19.62 billion online over the five-day period from Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday in 2017. That’s 15% more than they did during the same timeframe the year prior.

So, what can you do to get a bigger piece of the pie this holiday season?

There are two important marketing trends you need to leverage:

  1. Omnichannel personalization, which delivers personalized content, offers, or interactions across all customer touchpoints.According to a research by BCG, brands that create personalized experiences for customers are seeing revenue increase by 6% to 10%.

    In addition, 52% of marketers consider personalization fundamental to their online marketing strategy.

  2.  Retargeting/remarketing, which is a cookie-based technology that allows you to “follow” your visitors all over the web after they’ve visited your website.

retargetingImage source

As a marketer, you can’t afford to overlook the effectiveness of remarketing:

  • Retargeted ads have 10x the click-through rate compared to display ads.
  • Website visitors who are retargeted with display ads are 70% more likely to convert.
  • Retargeted customers are 3x more likely to click on your ads than people who have never interacted with your business.

Now, what if you can combine the power of these two trends to supercharge your sales this holiday season?

You can choose from a variety of personalization strategies and retargeting methods based on your business and audience.

In this article, we’ll first look at the various types of retargeting tactics. Then we’ll show you the different kinds of personalization strategies you can apply to those remarketing methods.

You can then mix-and-match to decide on the right channel and the appropriate messaging to optimize your results:

Retargeting/remarketing methods

  • On-site retargeting: Also known as “exit intent,” it shows visitors a message such as an opt-in, a special offer, or a product recommendation when their behaviors indicate that they’re about to leave the site.
  • Social media retargeting: When you place a tracking pixel on your web pages, the social media platform will “know” to serve a specific ad to the visitor based on the segmentation criteria you set up for the ad. You can also use Facebook Dynamic Ads to serve ads of a specific product to visitors who recently showed interest in the item.
  • Email marketing: Send subscribers specific content or offers that are relevant to them based on recent purchases or browsing behaviors.
  • Google Adwords: Similar to Facebook retargeting, you can serve remarketing ads to people who have recently visited your website or specific product pages by using Google AdWord’s remarketing features.
  • Snail mail: Don’t forget the old but gold; you can deliver the same targeted message or offer to your customers by sending a postcard.

Omnichannel personalization strategies

  • Recommend products based on customers’ past purchases, searches, or browsing behaviors.
    retargetingImage source
  • If you have a gift selector or quiz on your website, you can show products based on the results.
  • Deliver targeted content that’s most relevant to your customers’ preferences and behaviors.
  • Promote in-store specials or in-store pick-up if you have a physical store at the customer’s location.
  • Add urgency, such as a limited time offer or limited quantity, to ads about an item that a customer has shown interest in.
  • Send cart abandonment reminder about products in the visitor’s cart. You can combine this with a special offer to help increase conversion.
  • Use in-app promotion to deliver a relevant offer when customers are in your store, using geo-fencing technology.

Powering up retargeting with personalization is the key to online retail success

When you layer customer data on retargeting technologies, you’ll reach the right people in the right place at the right time with the right message; the winning formula for online marketing success.

The foundation of making this strategy work for you is a robust customer data management system and personalization software so you have the right information to optimize your ROI.

NectarOM Highlighted By Forrester As A Leading Personalization Solution Provider

NectarOm featured in the “Vendor Landscape: Personalization Solution Providers, Q3 2017” report.

Forrester recently issued a report titled “Vendor Landscape: Personalization Solution Providers, Q3 2017” and here at NectarOM, we’re very excited to be highlighted as one of the featured vendors for the financial services, insurance, retail, telecommunications, travel, and hospitality verticals.

Forrester is a leading research and consulting firm that works with business and technology leaders to develop customer-centric strategies that drive growth.

This report predicts that marketing personalization is going to drive customer engagement and growth for both B2B and B2C businesses in 2018 and beyond.

What does it mean for you as a marketer and what do you need to know to stay ahead?

Redefining “Personalization” for today’s marketers

“Personalization” has become quite a buzzword in the online marketing world. From eCommerce recommendations to email marketing automation and remarketing ads on social media, targeted content is everywhere.

Personalization has gone way beyond “hi [ fNAME ]” or even simple segmentation and general personas to a carefully designed experience that reflects the needs, preferences, and buying triggers of each individual customer.

There are some very good reasons to hop on to the personalization bandwagon and become a customer insights-driven organization:

According to the Forrester report, significant investments are being made by digital marketing professionals in personalization, with 89% saying that personalizing the customer experience has been a priority for the last 12 months. After all, 78% of US adults have chosen, recommended, or paid more for a brand that offers a personalized online experience or service.

Too often marketers get caught up in existing data and business needs, forgetting that at the end of the day, they’d likely meet their other business objectives if they focus on serving their customers well.

Consumers now expect a personalized experience when interacting with brands. To successfully execute a personalization strategy, you need to put the customer experience first and consider what’s relevant for the individual at a specific moment.

As personalization technologies are becoming more sophisticated with the aid of machine learning and predictive analytics, brands have to select the right technologies so they can deliver an on-brand customer experience, meet customer expectations, and stay ahead of the curve.

Criteria for selecting a personalization technology

The market for personalization technology is a mix of large, established players, emerging challengers, and niche solution providers. The best solution to your marketing needs depends on a variety of factors.

When selecting a technology solution, the Forrester report recommends the following:

  • The ability to support real-time personalization and a seamless customer experience across all touchpoints. When customers interact with your brand on one channel, their centralized profiles are updated real-time so that the information is reflected in subsequent interactions, even if they switch channels mid-stream.
  • Features and functionalities that bring together insights, automation, and engagement to deliver personalization. While customer-facing engagement metrics are the obvious measurement of success, insights and automation are the determining factors when it comes to managing and executing long-term, sustainable, and scalable personalization strategies.
    Image source
  • Automation and next-generation analytics that’ll help you generate value and insights from the large amount of customer data you now have access to. Your technology solution should provide the automation and advanced analytics, including predictive, prescriptive, and machine learning, so that you can align content within the context of each touchpoint in the customer’s journey.

Companies that are able to select and implement the right mix of general experience management and niche personalization solutions to deliver a highly-personalized customer experience will win the marketing game in 2018 and beyond.

Omnichannel Personalization: The Key To Making More Sales This Holiday Season

How to use personalization strategies to increase conversion rate.

The holiday season is the “make or break” time of the year for many retailers.

Whether you’re an online merchant or a brick-and-mortar business, you’ll be facing tough competition this holiday season.

In this era, it’s no longer enough just to offer better pricing or a larger product selection. Shoppers are looking for a customer experience that’s as painless, frictionless, and convenient as possible.

Given that the average American purchases 14 gifts, consumers can use all the help they receive so that they don’t have to spend endless hours on their holiday shopping.

With today’s omnichannel personalization technology, retailers can augment the holiday shopping experience and increase sales by helping customers find the most relevant products and take advantage of the best offers, which in turn will entice them to buy more.

personalizationImage source

Real-time web personalization

When visitors interact with your website, you can promote the most relevant content, products, and offers based on their browsing behavior.

By using real-time web personalization, you can display items that shoppers have spent the most time viewing but haven’t purchased. This way you can increase the chances that they’ll re-engage with the products.

Keep in mind that many shoppers are looking for gifts to find recommendations related to the product they’re currently viewing helpful – even if it doesn’t match their personal profile.

You can also leverage aggregated customer data to map a shopper’s behavior to past customer purchases to display products they’d most likely be interested in.

Last but not least, there’s no better way to offer product recommendations than having shoppers tell you what they’re looking for.

Offer an interactive gift guide on your website to help them narrow down their choices. This will not only allow you to offer the most relevant recommendations but also increase engagement with your audience while educating them about your products along the way.

Personalized coupon offer

By using mobile and geofencing technology, you can send shoppers coupons when they’re near a physical store via text message or push notification on a mobile app.

Mobile coupon usage has been on the rise and 98% of SMS message is opened within the first minute, making this a powerful combination to drive more traffic and sales for brick-and-mortar merchants.

This real-time coupon offer can be a discount for one of the products they’ve viewed repeatedly on your website or it can be a recommendation based on their customer profiles.

personalizationImage source

Personalized email automation

Email marketing is a great way to deliver targeted content and offers to individual subscribers on your email lists.

personalizationImage source

Use personalization strategies such as email retargeting or triggered email campaigns to draw your customers’ attention to products or offers they’ve shown an interest in.

personalizationImage source

In addition, you can customize these emails based on each customer’s browsing behavior, preferences, location, past purchases, or items left in the cart, to increase engagement.

Another way to generate more sales from email marketing is to make good use of receipts. “Predictive receipts” are email receipts that include personalized product recommendations based on the products purchased.

These are emails your shoppers are expecting and will open. Not to mention, since they’ve already purchased from you, they’re more likely to buy again.

Boost your holiday sales with omnichannel personalization

Your personalization strategy should work across multiple channels and reflect shoppers’ interaction with your brand real-time.

Using an omnichannel marketing platform that supports personalization strategies will help you make the most of your customer data so that you can offer the best shopping experience that will not only increase brand loyalty but will also make more sales.

Stocking Produce this Holiday Season: Go Beyond Green Eggs and Ham

Holiday produce sales are upon us, and many retail firms are already predicting that the 2017-2018 holiday season will have the strongest sales numbers we have seen in years. Yet don’t make the mistake of thinking that this forecasted sales increase will only take place in gifts and apparel: According to Deloitte, “non-gift” spending will account for 65 percent of consumers’ holiday spending this year. The National Retail Federation is also optimistic about the coming holiday, forecasting that the average holiday shopper will spend 218 dollars on candy, food and decorations this year. Since customers intend to spend more on food and grocery items throughout the 2017-2018 holiday, there is an opportunity to reap the benefits of increased consumer spending in your grocery store.

 

However, in order to profit from the increase in consumer spending this holiday season you’ll need to compete with ecommerce megastores for your portion of market spend. Many grocers struggle to differentiate themselves from online megastores such as Amazon. Yet brick-and-mortar grocers have the advantage of being able to offer customers a festive, personalized omnichannel holiday shopping experience, which is something that even Amazon has yet to replicate. Consider the following suggestions to stand out from the ecommerce giants this holiday season.

 

Focus On Healthy and Organic Options

 

Grocery shoppers are eating more healthful foods and the availability of organic and low-calorie food options is a determining factor for customers when choosing which grocery store to patronize over the holiday season. In fact, Statista reports that 80 percent of U.S. consumers said that whether or not there were healthy food options factored into their decision-making process when choosing a restaurant in the past year. The United States government has also become increasingly proactive about encouraging customers to opt for healthy and organic food options. Among the initiatives dedicated to inspiring Americans to live more healthily are Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” enterprise devoted to decreasing childhood obesity rates, and the USDA’s “Choose My Plate” initiative, which offers a wide variety of healthy meal-planning options for Americans to maintain healthy weight levels during seasonal meals.

 

Plan of action: Cater to customer demand for organic and healthy options by offering gluten-free, vegan, and low calorie alternatives to some of your best-selling holiday dishes. Bookmark healthy food options in your store aisles with eye-level signs marking the areas where the diet-friendly alternatives are stocked. Instead of making customers search for their favorite products, lead them to the right place with large and pronounced signs which are easily-viewable from the high-traffic main aisles of your store. This way your customers looking for diet-friendly holiday meal alternatives will be able to easily locate the aisles that house their favorite ingredients.

 

Stream Holiday Recipes On Your Website

 

There is an opening for independent grocers to build a following by offering customers a unique shopping experience this holiday season. Retail Dive reports that in light of an overabundance of discount grocers in 2018, “price is no longer a competitive differentiator.”  Instead of trying to compete based on price alone, focus on establishing your company as an innovative leader in grocery with the addition of a seasonal recipe section to your business’s website. Your website’s recipe section should include cost-effective and diet-friendly classic seasonal dishes with a nod towards the traditional holiday dishes of your company’s prime consumer demographic. By monitoring customer demographic information as well as the sales of particular food items, you will be able to populate a list of holiday recipes that are uniquely targeted for your customer base.

 

Plan of action: Holiday recipes can boost margins only when customers can easily find the recipe ingredients on your website. Give customers a clear click-path to purchase the components of your holiday recipes by linking the produce, spices, and sauces from each recipe to buyable items in your online inventory. In addition, while low prices alone are not enough to differentiate your grocery store from the competition, offer your customers value in addition to your holiday recipes by adding links to online coupons and sale items in your ingredient lists. Appeal to the novice or holiday-only cook by keeping the ingredients and steps in each recipe simple, cost-effective and easy-to-locate on your company’s website.

 

Stocking produce for the 2017-2018 holiday season doesn’t have to be complicated. Edge out the ecommerce competition by loading up on healthy holiday meal options and by streaming fresh seasonal recipes on your company’s website and mobile app. Go beyond the standard holiday dishes by researching your company’s target consumer and loading up on economical versions of their favorite seasonal foods, so that your company can profit from the strongest holiday shopping forecast we have seen in years!

3 Ways To Maximize Sales On Black Friday

Want to get a piece of the $3.45 billion Black Friday pie? Here’s how to get ready.

In 2016, US consumers spent $3.45 billion on Black Friday. Is your retail business set up to make the most out of this year’s Black Friday Cyber Monday sale period?

With more eCommerce retailers competing for shoppers’ attention, you can’t afford to cook up a last-minute promotion and hope for the best.

It’s more important than ever to plan ahead and get your retail business ready for Black Friday/Cyber Monday.

Here are a few things you can’t afford to ignore:

Start early

The National Retail Federation (NRF) has found that 40% of shoppers start doing their research for holiday shopping as early as October.

Plan to start promoting holiday shopping related content and products, such as holiday gift guides, during that time. Set up website personalization strategies that leverage data from your customer profiles to ensure that you’re displaying the most relevant content and offers to your visitors.

In addition, make sure that you have contingency plans in place. For instance, figure out what your options are if your shipping company is delayed by a higher volume.

Not only should you be planning for things that may go wrong, you must also plan for when things go well. For instance, can your website handle a surge in traffic? Is your fulfillment system set up well enough to handle a large number of orders?

Last but not least, forecast your sales and communicate with your suppliers to ensure that you’ll have the right products in stock to fulfill your orders.

Plan your marketing efforts

Decide on the products you want to highlight, plan out your sales schedule, and coordinate all the promotional efforts to maximize your sales:

  • Schedule email marketing campaigns ahead of time and don’t forget to include personalized content and offers that are most relevant to each recipient.
  • Set up your social media promotions and use strategies such as email retargeting to deliver a personalized omnichannel shopping experience.
  • Connect with influencers early on so they can work any mention of your products or promotions into their schedule.
  • Do some social listening to find out what’s trending this holiday season and identify which products to promote.
  • Design a holiday-themed giveaway or contest with a viral component to help increase brand awareness and drive traffic to your website.

Be mobile-ready

During the 2016 holiday season, half of the web traffic and 30% of retail sales came from mobile sites.

If your eCommerce platform isn’t optimized for mobile, you could be missing out on sales and losing revenue this holiday season.

black fridayImage source

Mobile devices offer great opportunities to deliver personalized shopping experiences that will help you increase conversion rate.

Other than website personalization, you can deliver an omnichannel experience by using technologies such as geofencing (if you have a physical store) or mobile apps and leveraging data from your customer profiles.

You can also facilitate the mobile purchasing process with features such as tap-to-call or auto-fill by using location services to deliver a seamless customer experience.

Don’t get left behind this holiday season

An omnichannel personalized shopping experience will be the key to success for retailers this holiday season as well as for the ones in the coming years.

Thankfully, implementing these strategies are getting much easier with sophisticated technologies that will help manage customer data, personalization automation, and omnichannel personalization so that you don’t have to do all the heavy lifting yourself.

Strategies to increase holidays sales of your online store – Part 1

The Key to Boosting eCommerce Conversion Rate This Holiday Season (Part 1)

While the total retail growth may be slowing down, the US retail eCommerce sales jumped 17.8% during the 2016 holiday season and are expected to climb 15.8% in 2017.

holiday sales

Image source

As an online retailer, how can you capitalize on this trend?

To answer that question, we need to look at customer expectations.

More and more consumers are looking for a personalized shopping experience from their favorite brands.

A recent survey has found that 86% of customers say personalization affects their purchase decision while another study showed that 74% of shoppers get frustrated by seeing irrelevant content or product recommendations.

holiday sales

Image source

Thankfully, you don’t need to do all the heavy lifting to deliver a personalized shopping experience to your customers.

With the aid of technologies that allow you to collect and analyze customer data and automation software that helps you deliver the right message to the right customers at the right time, you can leverage the power of personalization to increase your online store’s conversion rate:

Product recommendations

Using information such as the customer’s preferences, shopping habits, and past purchases, you can recommend products that are timely and relevant.

One merchant has seen a 248%  increase in conversion rate by displaying personalized product recommendations on the homepage.

For the holiday seasons, during which customers are likely to be shopping for gifts, make sure to factor in their real-time interactions with your website and offer recommendations that are related to the products they’re looking at or searching for.

You can do so by mapping their real-time browsing behaviors to aggregated consumer data to predict the type of items they may be interested in.

holiday sales

Image source

Don’t forget to feature new and popular products that are your bestsellers. Chances are they’d make a great gift and you’ll be saving your customers a lot of time and headache!

Upsell and cross-sell

Displaying items related to the products that shoppers are looking at or have put into their carts is a powerful way to increase your average order value.

holiday sales

You can recommend items often bought together with the product, complementary to the product, or offered as a bundle with that product.

Past and recurring purchases

Make shopping easy for your customers by displaying the past purchase list so that they can pick up their favorite items quickly.

You can pair the past purchase list with personalized product recommendations to help shoppers discover new products that are likely to be relevant to them.

In addition, for items that need to be replenished periodically, you can offer a subscription service so your customers can “set it and forget it.”

Your customers will appreciate the convenience and be more likely to buy more from you while you will generate a recurring revenue from these subscriptions.

Streamlined checkout

For shoppers who already have an account on your eCommerce site, you can streamline the checkout flow so that they can complete their purchases quickly and conveniently.

Use the customer data on file to offer one-click checkout, pre-populate forms, allow shoppers to choose shipping addresses (e.g. for sending gifts directly to recipients,) offer the ability to add recommended products, or apply loyalty points to their orders.

A faster checkout experience will not only improve customer loyalty but also reduce cart abandonment and increase your conversion rate.

Seamless customer experience made possible by personalization

A robust customer data management system and personalization software is the key to delivering an outstanding customer experience that will help you increase sales this holiday season.

In the next installment of this series, we’ll look at how you can use targeted content and email marketing with personalization automation to boost your conversion rate.