3 Personalization Plays Every Retailer Needs to Make
Consumers have turned to online channels as their primary means of shopping, but they are also looking for experiences that feel as personal as in-store shopping once felt. One recent survey by Business2Community found that 92% of marketers believe that customers expect a personalized experience. Moreover, 97% of marketers said that they’d seen a measurable lift in conversions due to personalization.
But what does it mean to deliver personalized experiences?
Hint: it’s much more than being able to insert someone’s name into a mass-generated email.
True personalization offers customers consistent end-to-end shopping experiences across all touchpoints—desktop, mobile and instore. In fact, findings from an Adobe and Econsultancy 2021 Digital Trends: Retail in Focus report noted that 75% of retailers believe personalizing in-store experiences based on online behaviors is important.
So, if you’re not yet delivering this type of seamless omnichannel personalization to your customers, here are the three most important MarTech plays you’ll need to make:
1. Know Your Customers
To meet customer expectations, you need a fully rounded view of them across different channels and in different environments. According to the 2021 Digital Trends report cited above, top retail performers are twice as likely as the mainstream to be using more than 10 different data sources to personalize the customer experience.
A robust analytics solution allows you to understand who your customers are and how they interact with your brand across channels. Adobe Analytics, for instance, can follow customers on your website and mobile app to determine which content they engage with most or how they’re navigating through your website. Adobe Analytics can even collect offline triggers by integrating your retail point of sale system. Using this data, you can generate insights that will help you create relevant content.
2. Create Content that Matches Your Customers Preferences
Once you know what content your customers are drawn to on your site, the next step of personalization is creating experiences that match their preferences so you can continue to deepen your relationship with your customers. To do this at scale for thousands or millions of customers requires creating multiple iterations of content for multiple audiences quickly.
Adobe Experience Manager helps speed content creation by allowing you to create single- page applications for website, mobile or other digital channels without needing IT support. Further, features like templates and content fragments make it much easier to quickly create multiple versions of content for multiple audiences.
Adobe Sensei, the artificial intelligence and machine learning technology, also powers several “smart” features that help speed content creation. With Smart Layout, the most effective layouts and assets for individuals and audience segments are generated automatically. Smart Tags also makes content creation faster by automatically tagging assets so that they are easy to find.
3. Deliver Real-Time Personalized Experiences Across Channels
The final personalization play requires you to deliver the experiences you’ve created to the right customers on the right channel at the right time. And it requires an orchestration of several integrated MarTech solutions to pull it off flawlessly.
For example, Adobe Analytics helps identify your customers and what experiences they are interested in, then Adobe Target segments those customers into specific audiences to further optimize the experience for every customer. Adobe Experience Manager speeds content creation and enables you to adapt and deliver those experiences to multiple channels for each customer and audience. And finally, Adobe Sensei works in concert with all Adobe solutions to further ensure speed and intelligent decision-making at every step.
Leap Ahead of Legacy Technology
What’s holding most retailers back from achieving the perfect state of personalization is often not that they’re missing a specific point solution, such as a content management system or robust analytics, it’s legacy technology. According to the 2021 Digital Trends report, legacy systems were seen as the greatest obstacle holding retailers back from delivering better experiences (35%).
While some retailers may be able to start over with a new, unifying platform, this isn’t the reality for most retailers. But moving to the cloud can make all the difference. You’ll gain agility, speed, and a solution that works in concert with your existing systems. Especially with a solution like Adobe Experience Cloud and its suite of products and services, which lets you easily manage the entire customer experience with real-time and scalable personalization across all channels.
About LeapPoint
LeapPoint Consulting is changing the way companies connect work, technology, and talent to solve big business challenges and drive successful outcomes. Established by Big 4 alumni who sought more flexibility and agility in meeting clients’ most critical business needs, LeapPoint is committed to making life and experiences fundamentally better for employees, customers and those they serve. As the go-to Adobe and Adobe Workfront partner in retail and across industries, LeapPoint’s break-through Connected WorkTM services are the essential framework for the Future of Work. To learn more about LeapPoint and its Connected Work services, visit www.leappoint.com.
