Across the English-speaking world, as far back as most can remember, union activists and protest marchers have rallied around a single, easily customised chant:
Set yourself up for personalisation success in omnichannel – no one will protest
Are your customers being satisfied?
Whilst personalisation is an increasingly popular consumer demand that isn’t always being satisfied, we’re unlikely to see hordes of shoppers marching down the country’s high streets waving placards and demanding it in quite such a militant fashion.
But giving consumers what they want, when they want it is what personalisation is all about. For completeness, we should probably also add where they want it to the mantra; acknowledging the growing need to be able to access what they want seamlessly through whatever device is appropriate to their context – omnichannel, in other words.
Of course, personalisation isn’t just a one-way street with benefits only for the consumer. Product recommendations engine, Frosmo says that brands and retailers who offer personalised customer journeys with recommendations for relevant products or services, can expect as much as 41% conversion increase and 40% higher sales. There are also benefits in terms of increased repeat business.
If your brand doesn’t currently deliver a personalised experience, your customers won’t march in protest – they'll just walk. Nearly two thirds of consumers surveyed by Twilio for their 2022 State of Customer Engagement Report said they’d likely take their business elsewhere if brands fail to offer a personalised experience. In their report the previous year, 85% of businesses believed they were offering personalised experiences, but fewer than 1 in 4 said that they were successful in tackling omnichannel personalisation, with siloed organisational structures and outdated technology being the key barriers.
So how can brands set themselves up for personalisation success in omnichannel?
1. Know what you want to achieve and employ the right marketing tactic to get there
As with any high-investment initiative, we know that setting objectives up front is critical. Different business outcomes will require different personalisation priorities and solutions.
By way of example, to grow your customer base - building brand awareness and getting more customers to consider your business - personalisation is likely to involve targeted communication through paid or earned media with tailored offers based on broad segmentation using third party data.
If increasing frequency of purchase is your goal, individualised offers for relevant products will be targeted via email and personalised landing pages based on past customer behaviour within your digital estate.
2. Unite channel silos for a seamless customer experience
Although implementing personalisation may not seem like a big operational change, doing so across multiple channels requires a degree of organisational transformation – and that means reviewing People and Process.
Changing an organisation from product-centric silos toward a highly collaborative, experienced-focused matrix structure is a long journey, which begins by forming cross-functional teams and processes.
For a customer to experience consistency and continuity across multiple channels, it necessitates a high degree of synchronisation within the business, ensuring teams responsible for each touch point can develop and deliver updates as one.
3. Think content first and consider which technologies can best serve you
Technology choice will always play a part but should never come first, although organisations will likely struggle with a more traditional, “monolithic” approach. A headless or composable CMS will make both omnichannel experience delivery and personalisation more straightforward.
In headless, the content is not created for a specific front-end, so it can be published to any channel. And because of the way the content is structured, it can be reused more easily and effectively across multiple channels.
Having an API-connected platform architecture also increases the capability to integrate specialised personalisation tools and technologies, which help to orchestrate the experience; driving content choice and next best actions based on gathered data.
With the financial benefits of personalisation proven, and a strongly expressed need for seamless experiences, brands need to invest in giving their increasingly omnichannel consumers what they want, when they want it – and what better time to kick things off than right now?
We offer a range of strategy consulting and transformation services that help to build a clear linkage between the business capabilities you want to achieve and the technology to implement. We can help you with an assessment of your existing operations and work with you to identify what needs to be in place to be ‘business ready’ for personalisation success in omnichannel.
You may also like to read our recent guide to composable content management systems – Headless: hot or hype?
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