There are many articles online that talk about the benefits of personalization, but few that actually explain how it works. So let’s break down what personalization is and why its so effective in boosting engagement & sales with your customers.
What are Personalized Experiences?
To get started, let’s define what “Personalized Experiences” entails. When most people think about personalization, they typically think about the emails we all receive everyday starting with “Hi (Name)”.
But as I’ve covered before in a separate post, that’s a very limited and narrow view of personalization.
Instead, personalization works best when it’s more than just a name. Personalization is most effective when it’s about creating a relevant experience for each customer that’s unique to their needs, interest, and circumstances, i.e. a Personalized Experience.
Traditional Comms vs Personalized Experiences
Take for example a typical comms we would all see every day. Perhaps it’s a holiday package to Bali. Or education about retirement. The fundamental rules of marketing tell us that, irrespective of the quality of the content, there will always be only a sub-segment of the population that will be interested in that piece of comms at any particular point in time, i.e. it will never be possible to create a comms or message that appeals to 100% of people at once:
So, rather than fighting the inevitable, why not use that fragmentation & segmentation to our advantage?
What if, instead of only being about a holiday to Bali, we could personalize that same campaign so that it’s about a destination that you are personally interested in?
For example, Canada, if you’re interested in a winter escape for a family of four vs Italy, if you’re interested in doing a food tour in a more moderate climate;
Or instead of receiving the same generic set of product offers every week, you could receive a personalized set of recommendations tailored based on your interests and purchase history;
Or instead of receiving education only about retirement, it could be about savings, ethical investments, financing, or topics you’re specifically interested in.
Or an FAQ that gives you answers to the particular questions you have in mind.
So many possibilities. All driven from within a single, personalized campaign. That’s a Personalized Experience.
This lets us think about comms & personalization in an entirely different way
Instead of a generic, mass-market campaign that, on a good day, achieves 1-2% engagement with customers, we can reach *every* customer with a unique piece of comms that is specifically tailored to them:
This means, instead of being relevant to just 1-2% of customers at a time – with a little bit of extra effort and personalization magic – we can lift that up to 60-70% – a 20-30x boost in engagement!
Therein lies the true potential of personalization when it comes to boosting customer engagement.
It’s not just about adding a name, but exponentially increasing the relevancy of the content delivered to your customers.
Driving Sales with Personalized Experiences
Of course, that’s the engagement side of the equation, which is great. But if you’re a sales-orientated organization, how does personalization translate into sales?
And the easy way to see how Personalized Experiences completely transform the sales journey is by looking at the sales funnel.
Let’s go back to the example of the holiday to Bali. No matter how popular Bali is, no matter how much we optimize our content, there will always be only a fraction of the customer base that will be interested in Bali at any one point in time.
And after customers have gone through the sales funnel – Awareness, Consideration, Purchase – we’re always going to be dealing with conversions that are a fraction of a percentage of the customer base, for example:
Where Personalized Experiences really make an impact when it comes to increasing sales is two-fold:
Boosting the level of relevancy & engagement, and
Pro-actively engaging customers much earlier in the sales funnel
Because Personalized Experiences are driven based on data about your customers, they are created in real-time – meaning there is no longer a need for us to passively wait as customers move through the funnel.
Rather, we can proactively place targeted & relevant offers in front of interested customers to shortcut the sales process & drive conversions:
And whilst it’s true that customers are wary of “too much marketing”, when we delve down into the research the problem really is with too much irrelevant or unwanted marketing and comms. (Do I really need to see that ad for the same cat brush 100 times especially when I don’t even have a cat?)
Instead, Personalized Experiences sidesteps this issue completely because they are inherently designed to contain content & offers that we know the customer is interested in, so even when it’s not a perfect match, they never comes across as something completely unrelated or uninteresting to the customer.
Conclusion
As you can see, when we start thinking of personalization as more than just a “Hi (Name)” and look at it as personalizing the entire experience to our customers to maximize the relevancy of our marketing & comms, that completely transforms the way we look at customer engagement & sales.
We can go from mass-market approaches that will always be limited in their relevancy to certain sub-segments of your customer base; to targeted, personalized experiences that are relevant to each individual customer – and which significantly boost engagement and give us greater control and opportunity to drive relevant offers & sales.
About Visuo
Visuo’s patented Smart Video Experiences helps organizations to deliver rich, interactive Personalized Experiences that help to boost customer engagement, retention & sales.
If you want to find out how Personalized Experiences can help your organization transform its customer engagement or sales, don’t hesitate to contact us to see how we can help.