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.

power of omnichannel marketing

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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.

power of omnichannel marketing

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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.

Overcoming Personalization Challenges in Retail eCommerce

Online shopping is easy and efficient. With the introduction of omnichannel-savvy retailers implementing in-store pickups and fast home delivery, eCommerce is more popular than ever.

We know personalization is effective for every type of business. Customers like goods and services tailored to their wants and needs. We’ve seen some of the world’s strongest marketers reap huge rewards from personalization programs and experts predict that personalization is the key to the future of marketing.

But in terms of online retail, personalization is not always executed as well as it can (or should) be.

The problem

One of the biggest speed bumps in retail shopping online is determining a customer’s perfect size and fit. When shopping at brick-and-mortars, customers can tell whether an item fits by trying it on. However, the inability to physically model the clothing yourself is a huge caveat of online shopping at today’s top retailers.

However, there are a couple different ways that companies are tackling this problem.

Voluntarily sharing personal data

Determining which size fits best is often done by looking at the clothing’s measurements or relying on past purchases from similar retailers. However, both of these options can be problematic.

Let’s be realistic – how many shoppers actually use those measurements to determine which size is their best fit? Oftentimes, this can be too much effort to figure out. This is why most customers simply rely on the size they typically wear.

But while many customers have a standard size, retailers occasionally size differently from one another. Someone who wears a size XS pants at one store may burst out of XS shorts at a different retailer.

A scale that shows whether pieces run small or large can help fix this problem; however, this is not the only solution.

The best way to confront sizing disparity is by implementing a personalized sizing feature into your site. Sites with features like these are often customer favorites. Customers can feel confident with their purchase without worrying about the hassles of returning products. This feature gives customers a sense of security about making orders, which increases individual orders and draws in new customers.

So how does a retailer go about implementing a sizing feature? Consider the work from an expert: Lilly Pulitzer.

Click on the images to enlarge and learn about Lilly’s True to Fit feature.

Lilly Pulitzer helps customers unsure about their particular size by asking for their personal data. This data includes a customer’s height, sizing in other brands, and body shape. Lilly Pulitzer uses this data to evaluate which size is best for the customer. This feature also considers other sizes for the shopper, and explains which parts of a clothing item may fit poorly. Shoppers can save their profile, which comes in handy when checking sizing for other Lilly products.

Virtual fitting rooms

Retailers who more digitally inclined may have the option to utilize a new, exciting service. The UK-based company Fits.me works with retailers to create a virtual fitting room for shoppers. This is similar to Lilly Pulitzer, but much more visual. The feature projects how different clothing items would fit on one’s specific body measurements. After a shopper selects the fit they like best, he or she can proceed to customize the clothing item.

Fits.me is an innovative concept that has yet to make its way into U.S. retail. These virtual fitting rooms are available in Europe, but with the United States’ strong eCommerce market I expect features like Fits.me to come across the pond soon enough.

Need more personalization?

If you love learning about marketing personalization, be sure to read up on increasing loyalty with personalization and how personalization can be used with disconnected customers.

3 Marketing Trends of 2014

Mobile Personalization

Marketing is just like any other tradition here in the United States: as time progresses it begins to change and adapt to new trends that emerge. In 2014, the marketing world has had a lot of new developments thanks to the innovations such as mobile apps, social media, big data breakthroughs, and other discoveries. As a result, there has been a noticeable shift in how marketers create their strategies to promote products and services. Today, we will discuss 3 of these new marketing trends that have emerged in 2014.

1. Don’t Just Personalize, Hyper-Personalize In 2013, personalization was the name of the marketing game. How was this accomplished exactly? By tracking spending habits and recording clicks while signed in to their website. Then the companies would take that information and use it to send personalized offers via email, text or through the website. Hyperpersonalization takes this one step further. By integrating various existing data sets such as personal information and social media data, companies are able to know more about their customers than just their spending data. For example, utilizing information from Susan’s Facebook page, a company might be able to learn that Susan is expecting a baby in a few months and to send her offers for baby clothes. Hyperpersonalization is like knowing what the customer wants before they actually want it

2. Measure Social Media ROI Accurately Measuring ROI from social media in the past has been anything but exact. Every company that has invested in social media has had a different method of measuring the effectiveness of their social media efforts with varied results. In the past, companies measured their social media success by how much revenue it directly generated for them. While this may work for other marketing avenues, it may not necessarily work for social media. In 2014, measuring social media ROI has evolved from looking at revenue generated to the buzz that is created from the efforts put in. Creating buzz around a company will increase a company’s audience and engagement by increasing word of mouth; hence the word “viral”. Understanding how to optimize content to go viral is key in the success of social media implementation.

Mobile Personalization

3. Real Time Geographic Marketing Geographic marketing is not a new innovation. It has been around since the early days albeit in a more primitive fashion; for example, a large billboard perched above a building has an arrow which points down, indicating it is a restaurant to stop at while driving. Over the past few years email has been the primary source of geographic marketing by sending offers to customers within certain distances from companies. In 2014 this will be taken one step further. With the rise in mobile device usage, real-time geographic marketing will be employed by sending SMS messages or emails to customers’ mobile devices when they are certain distance from a company. So if I am in a mall looking for a gift, I might get an SMS on my phone alerting me that a clothing store in the same mall has a sale. That is the power and convenience or geographic marketing.

Marketing will always have a place in any business strategy because it is the most basic form of communicating with potential customers. The best way to look at is summed up in the expression: “The players haven’t changed, but the game has.” By staying on top of the newest developments one can expect to enjoy the benefits of being top of mind.