How personalization makes all the difference to your small business

Personalized experiences are all the rage, but they’re not just a trend of the moment — they’re here to stay. Think about the restaurant that remembers your food allergies and always takes care to provide you with delicious alternatives. This kind of experience is becoming more common and crossing over into many other industries like retail, grocery and even fitness.

The bar is high when it comes to meeting consumer expectations, and it only rises as time moves forward. If you’re not personalizing the customer experience in your small or medium-sized business today, chances are you’re failing to meet your customers’ modern needs.

What is personalization?

People don’t just want personalized experiences, they expect it. In fact, 50 percent of consumers expressed interest in purchasing personalized products or services, and 48 percent are willing to wait longer until that personalization is available to them before buying. So what exactly is personalization as it relates to local businesses, especially those who rely more on in-person transactions as opposed to e-commerce? And how do you do it in a scalable way?

Think of it as a unique shopping experience. Every customer that shops with you has their own set of interests, budgets and preferences. When you collect this data, you can use it to shape their buying experience even before they step foot into your store or add an item to their shopping cart.

What you know about your customers’ spending habits opens up opportunities on how you can boost your profit margins, while serving customers better and rewarding them for their loyalty. It all comes down to what you do with that customer data that determines your business’ success.

But personalization doesn’t mean developing a totally unique experience for your customers at every step of the way. It just means adding a personalized touch to the critical touchpoints that drive value. That could be when your customer spends a certain amount with you or makes enough visits to warrant a reward.

Although typically personalization refers to product recommendations or web-based content like personalized emails, it also refers to how businesses customize their offers and incentives through their rewards programs. Big brands such as Starbucks or PC Optimum leverage personalization in their own rewards/loyalty programs, but they’re not the only ones who can do it. Thanks to technology, this same level of sophistication are now being democratized for small and medium-sized local businesses as well.

The good news is you don’t need a big budget to create a personalized shopping and rewards experience. It may sound complex when you don’t have the marketing firepower, but personalization is achievable for any size company. With the right tech partners who can tailor your data and provide you with the relevant digital marketing tools, you can offer personalized experiences for your business, even at a local level.

Why is personalization important?

Imagine you’re looking for a new kind of face cream. A sales associate greets you, offers to take your bags to free up your hands, and then asks you about your skin type, allergies, lifestyle, and activity level. The engagement is deeply personal, but informative and feels like you’re just chatting with a friend who knows their stuff. They take a quick skin test, offer you samples, and before you know it, you’re walking out with three products and a brand new skincare regimen.

This personalized, one-on-one experience increases sales and leaves the customer with the sense that a business really cared about them and their individual needs. The whole point of personalization is to delight your customers. When they have positive experiences, they’re more likely to come back, let their friends and family know, and maybe even write a glowing review.

49% of buyers have made impulse purchases after receiving a more personalized experience, and it doesn’t need to be as extravagant or time-consuming as you think. Customers respond positively to unique suggestions, gifts and rewards when it directly adds value to their daily lives and when they’re able to redeem them frequently.

Personalization helps customers make faster and smarter purchase decisions too. When you know what your customer is looking for and your business helps them obtain those things, there are fewer chances of them returning those products.

By learning more about your customers, their motivations, and making the effort to give them an experience beyond the product or service, you can boost business and increase the lifetime value of your customers.

How to personalize your business offerings

First, you have to start with the right type of data. As a small business owner, look at your customer profiles, whether that’s information pulled from your email list, point-of-sale (POS), in-store sign-up sheets, or other similar channels.

You need to understand your customers on a strategic level. Do a deep dive into their transactional data and see your customers’ purchase history, patterns and frequency. This is made easy with Neo for Merchants, a digital marketing platform that helps businesses increase engagement and ROI with personalization.

Once you get a feel for their preferences and behaviour, then you can get an idea of how to best personalize your business. For your business, this could mean things like celebrating member anniversaries from when they made their first purchase with you or birthdays. Customized discounts and gifts incentivize customers all the more to buy with you.

Master online and offline channels

Small businesses that have full control over their data ecosystem have an advantage to leverage this data to create personalized experiences. Although the brick-and-mortar shopping experience is important and may make up the majority of your business model, it’s equally crucial to connect with your customers online.

Today, consumers interact with businesses on multiple channels. Notice how some of the brands you follow on Instagram are now shoppable in the app? Or how your grocery store offers click-and-collect service? Built-in shopping capabilities on social media and online grocery shopping are part of this growing mobile and e-commerce movement.

So it’s critical to overlap customer history between online and offline channels, if anything, to catch any missed opportunities. While these channels may have more differences than similarities to you as a small business owner, it’s all the same in the eyes of the customer, and you’ll want to engage your customers in every way possible.

Explore new partnerships to customize incentives, offers and rewards

Customers care about more than just the product or service they’re getting with your business. It’s about the collective experience from before the sale, all the way leading up to it and afterwards. But now, it’s becoming more common for brands to cross-over and collaborate with others to maximize customer satisfaction.

Take IKEA for instance, who’s renowned for affordable and beautiful home furniture. They’ve recently partnered with TaskRabbit to provide furniture assembly service for IKEA customers for a flat fee. Partnering with a tech company can help you tailor your customer data to reach your business goals. Together, you can customize the rewards offers for your customers, motivating them to spend with you more frequently and attract new customers.

Neo offers an online marketplace where consumers can discover new local experiences in the app, find ways to get rewarded by using their Neo Mastercard® and make smarter spending decisions every day. By leveraging people’s locations and recent transaction history, the platform can help curate personalized offers in context to what Neo members are doing and where they are.

For example, if you’re a business owner of a smoothie store and are located near a gym, a platform like Neo would tell users where they could get their post-workout meal nearby, and your business could pop up as an option, bringing more customers to your store.

Automation technologies can deliver personalized experiences across various stages of the shopping journey, making it a lot easier for you and your team to keep track of where your next customer opportunity could be. Tech can set up personalized offers and promotions, and select the best channel for delivery (online or in-person).

Empower your team to make informed product recommendations

Your business is only as good as the people in it. That’s why it’s so important for your staff to be on the same page as your goals, and to stay on top of product knowledge. They’re likely the first and last touchpoints who interact most with your customers whether your business is in-store or online. So that when there’s an opportunity to talk about your bestsellers, make recommendations, or teach customers how to use a product, they should speak confidently about the customers’ options and wow them with what they know.

Even better is when your team understands the role that online marketing programs and modern loyalty programs play to personalize the customer experience. Knowing the factors that drive people to your store, how often they visit, their average spend and other predictive behaviours are all things that your staff can leverage to gamify the experience, which inspires more engagement and new buying behaviours.

Knowing this, your staff can promote your business’ desired behaviour by collecting more valuable insights to personalize the customer experience even further. With Neo, our merchant partners can and should encourage customers to use their Neo Card at their stores, so customers are encouraged to make more profitable purchases and receive personalized rewards in return.

How Neo adds personalization to small businesses and their customers

Neo provides small and medium-sized businesses with the marketing personalization they need to take their in-store and online shopping experiences to a whole new level. It’s now possible to reach more customers faster and better than before to meet modern expectations, without the added work or the cost of traditional marketing programs.

With a thoughtful customer insights dashboard, Neo tracks your customers’ footprints in real-time, from when they visit your store and make a purchase, to how often you can expect them to come back and all the information you need to know in order to convert one-time shoppers into lifelong customers.

Rewards are based on your customers’ unique buying behaviour, and are offered to them by specific locations (wherever they are) and what they’re after or the mood they’re in, simply by searching by category. It’s a win-win situation, no matter which angle you look at it.

It’s time for change

If you’re not delivering personalized, mutually-rewarding experiences to your customers, now’s the time to get to it. Small businesses need to leverage personalization in their business models to not only survive in the age of digital transformation, but to thrive and expand customer growth and retention now and in the future. If things remain unchanged, you could be driving your customers elsewhere, even into the arms of your competitors, who may offer the personalized experiences they’re looking for.