Personalization is more than just adding a name to an email or a website. It's about creating relevant, engaging, and meaningful experiences for your customers across different touchpoints, from awareness to retention. But how do you personalize customer experiences across touchpoints? Here are some tips to help you.
The first step to personalization is to map out your customer journey and identify the key touchpoints where you can deliver value and influence behavior. For example, you might want to segment your customers based on their needs, preferences, goals, and pain points, and then tailor your messages, offers, and content accordingly. You can use tools like customer journey maps, personas, and analytics to understand your customer journey and find opportunities for personalization.
A new way to map the customer journey is to apply a jobs to be done framework. Try to find what role each touchpoint have in the journey, the weight it gets for each persona, and how to evolve based on real customer insights - talk to real people.
While you are charting the consumer journey, one metric to look for is the ‘drop-off rate’ at each defined milestone. An evaluation of this gives an accurate indication of the need-gap and therefore the requirement of customised experience enhancement in the value chain.
When business grows, standard customer journey started to be set to avoid confusion and seek business efficiency. However, in BtoB SaaS solution, mapping out standard customer journey and CSM just following it is not right way at all?? Customer's challenges, situations and momentum are slightly different case by case. CSM needs to sense such nuances and tailors out YOUR CUSTOMER's journey referring to the standard one. I would say, follows standards 70%, but 30% should be tailored by addition, opting out or re-design by CSM for each your customer.
The next step is to choose the right channels and formats for your personalized content and messages. You need to consider where your customers are, what they are looking for, and how they prefer to consume information. For example, you might use email, social media, webinars, or chatbots to communicate with your customers, depending on their stage in the journey, their behavior, and their feedback. You also need to think about the format of your content, such as text, video, audio, or interactive, and how it fits the channel and the context.
A critical component of personalisation is to also understand the appropriate channel or format of consumption preferred by the customer. And integeating A/B testings in your design can be a very effective way to determine this preference. For eg. a while back when we introduced an interactive feature to replicate an offline experience on an online site, through some A/B tests we concluded that it is most effective to do it on the product page itself instead of a separate landing page to impact maximum conversion.
The third step is to use data and technology to enable and enhance your personalization efforts. You need to collect, analyze, and act on data from various sources, such as CRM, web analytics, surveys, and feedback, to understand your customers' behavior, preferences, interests, and needs. You also need to use technology, such as personalization platforms, AI, or automation, to deliver the right content and messages to the right customers at the right time and place. You should also test and optimize your personalization strategies based on data and metrics.
Keep trying new personalized expression, sentence, channel, journey by utilizing full skills of your sensitivity and creativity. Then, you improve your way by analyzing the result data, how much your customer satisfied, what went well and not well, where can be improved.
Try to personalize each message with something relevant to the customer. It may be a different offer, but sometimes just changing the wording and weight on the attributes helps. Keep the guesswork away by applying A/B testing along the way.
The fourth step is to be consistent and authentic in your personalization efforts. You need to ensure that your personalized content and messages are aligned with your brand voice, values, and goals, and that they are relevant and helpful for your customers. You also need to respect your customers' privacy and preferences, and avoid over-personalizing or being intrusive or creepy. You should also seek feedback and consent from your customers, and give them control over their personalization options.
Rather than looking for something from your contact, I have found it helpful to think about how you can help your prospect or customer. This might be in the form of referring a candidate or potential customer to them. Send authentic, congratulations to them for the milestones of what is happening in their business. Try to make the communication about them and not about you.
The final step is to learn and improve your personalization efforts based on your results and feedback. You need to measure and monitor the impact of your personalization on your key metrics, such as engagement, conversion, retention, loyalty, and satisfaction. You also need to collect and analyze feedback from your customers, such as ratings, reviews, comments, or suggestions, to understand what works and what doesn't, and what they want and expect from you. You should also keep an eye on the trends and innovations in personalization, and experiment with new ideas and approaches.
Be authentic in personalization, align with your brand, and respect customer privacy. Seek feedback and offer control over personalization. Thanks!!!