How Personalized Experiences Lead to Repeat Customers
Maximizing the lifetime value of each existing customer can help retailers create incremental gains in the millions over time. To do this effectively comes down to strategy, and ultimately understanding your customers, their behaviors, and what drives them to purchase. It’s about leveraging the valuable data you have on your customers in your marketing efforts. Getting a customer’s initial purchase is the hardest and arguably the most expensive part of this process. Every time after that should get increasingly easier and less expensive if you take the right approach.
Customer experience demands are on the rise. In fact, did you know that 86% of marketers surveyed for Merkle’s Q4 Customer Engagement Report have defined budget to execute personalized messaging? Furthermore, 84% of consumers say being treated like a person, not a number, is very important to winning their business. Are you making the right moves to cater to this growing demand?
The Changing Customer Expectation
Instant gratification is the new norm in customer expectations, and brands need to operate with the most current set of information about their customers in order to compete. The path to purchase must be both fast and frictionless, making every step of the buying process easy. While most marketers have embraced personalization, they are using a fraction of available data to drive the most relevant customer experiences.
“84% of consumers say being treated like a person, not a number, is very important to winning their business.”
As the market shifts, there is no longer a debate on “if” we want to deliver personalized customer experiences. We are now focusing on “how” best to deliver them. Brands are focusing not just on acquiring new customers, but on generating more valuable, lasting experiences for existing customers — and driving revenue through repeat purchases. Self-reports show that most marketers are not using the full breadth of data available to drive personalization; much is being left on the table.
When combined with new technologies that enable advanced personalization, the competitive advantage potential is significant. By knowing their customers, speaking to them at the right moment, and serving up interesting and applicable content, brands can tap into huge gains in revenue and loyal, long-lasting relationships.
As an example, we work with a large retailer who uses a post-purchase program that encourages first-time buyers to convert a second time. How do they do this? They use a multi-touch journey to recommend products based on their interests and first-time purchase history. This resulted in a 46% lift in conversion rates. When new buyers were sent a follow-up journey, sales were 51% higher than when those new buyers only received promotional and ad-hoc campaigns.
“Data-based personalization tactics drive upwards of 17% more revenue than marketers who rely on more basic methods like first name and subject line personalization.” — The Relevancy Group
So, how can you make better use of your customer data? Collecting information from customers on their preferences within a marketing channel allows a brand to predict key moments and reasons to interact with subscribers. Discovering new reasons to engage with customers could help increase the ratio of personalized content compared to mass sends in your total marketing mix. Personalized content still accounts for a smaller percentage of total volume in the marketplace, but it drives a significant portion of the total revenue. It is vital to build out your customer life cycle and find these key moments. A small shift in percentage can make a big difference and have significant financial impact for brands. According to The Relevancy Group, retailers who use real-time, data-based personalization tactics drive upwards of 17% more revenue than marketers who rely on more basic methods like first name and subject line personalization.
What Salesforce Users Need to Know
As a Salesforce user, how can you easily deliver personalized customer experiences? Salesforce offers a unique tool within the marketing cloud called Salesforce Journey Builder to manage the customer life cycle: the progression of steps a customer goes through when considering, purchasing, using and maintaining loyalty to a brand. Journey Builder helps you identify key moments within customer journey and better align your messages.
Salesforce also offers an interactive email inferred preference feature. Remember those ‘choose your own adventure’ books? It is similar to those. Responses to questions drive the next set of content that is displayed. Salesforce users should consider using interactive email to increase engagements and collect valuable data to leverage in future touchpoints with customers. In fact, we have seen engagement levels and results were 4X higher than averages across standard mass sends.
Want to learn more? Check out the Q4 Customer Engagement Report here, and be sure to check out Merkle on AppExchange.
