Why Personalization Will Be A Key Differentiator This Holiday Season

Per­son­al­iza­tion is a key area for brands to up their game this hol­i­day retail peri­od. How can it make the dif­fer­ence for your brand?

Pat Hong By Pat Hong from Linkdex. Join the discussion » 2 comments

Per­son­al­iza­tion, the dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing indus­try’s favorite buzz­word, is once again being tout­ed as a key area for brands to up their game in the upcom­ing hol­i­day retail peri­od. And with good rea­son. The lat­est research reveals promis­ing stats about the ben­e­fits of per­son­al­iza­tion – mar­keters who have adopt­ed per­son­al­iza­tion tools are already expe­ri­enc­ing sig­nif­i­cant uplift. How can per­son­al­iza­tion make the dif­fer­ence this hol­i­day sea­son?

Ear­li­er this year, Brand Attrac­tion from Enriched Inter­ac­tion, pub­lished by the CMO Coun­cil, revealed some promis­ing stats, includ­ing:

  • 56 per­cent of mar­keters con­sid­er per­son­al­ized con­tent to illic­it high­er response and engage­ment rates.
  • 47 per­cent found per­son­al­iza­tion led to more time­ly and rel­e­vant inter­ac­tions.
  • And 43 per­cent believe per­son­al­iza­tion con­verts more cus­tomers.

A sim­i­lar study by AutoPi­lot found that con­sumers are four times more like­ly to respond to a mes­sage if it con­tains a per­son­al­ized offer, and also that 49 per­cent of con­sumers expect com­mu­ni­ca­tions that are rel­e­vant to their inter­ests. For those who have start­ed address­ing per­son­al­iza­tion, the results are already start­ing to speak for them­selves. In “Web Per­son­al­iza­tion: How big (and small) com­pa­nies are increas­ing con­ver­sions and boost­ing reten­tion”, pub­lished by VB Insight, ana­lysts found that 87 per­cent of mar­keters using per­son­al­iza­tion have seen a lift of “at least 5 per­cent” on the met­rics they con­sid­er most impor­tant. Even more impres­sive­ly, 39 per­cent of these mar­keters saw increas­es of at least 20 per­cent.

vbinsight-personalization

Personalizing For The Holidays

In the hol­i­day peri­od, when the lev­el of con­sumer spend­ing peaks, per­son­al­iza­tion becomes a cru­cial ele­ment of retail suc­cess. Meyar Sheik, CEO of omnichan­nel per­son­al­iza­tion plat­form Cer­tona, shared his insights on the mat­ter:

Retail­ers can­not escape the lev­el of influ­ence dig­i­tal retail has had on con­sumer behav­ior over the last few years, espe­cial­ly dur­ing the hol­i­day sea­son. Dur­ing this most crit­i­cal shop­ping peri­od, when con­sumers are inun­dat­ed with end­less prod­uct choic­es, offers, and pro­mo­tions, per­son­al­iza­tion is the dif­fer­en­tia­tor that sets a retail­er apart from the com­pe­ti­tion, and in doing so empow­ers them to reap the ben­e­fits of all their hol­i­day plan­ning.”

Andrew Smith recent­ly posit­ed here on Momen­tol­ogy that “con­tent shock” or “the emerg­ing mar­ket­ing epoch when expo­nen­tial­ly increas­ing vol­umes of con­tent inter­sect our lim­it­ed human capac­i­ty to con­sume it,” is in dan­ger of becom­ing a real­i­ty for con­sumers. Per­haps part of the prob­lem is that a large amount of con­tent is cre­at­ed for mar­ket seg­ments and demo­graph­ics, not for indi­vid­ual users. “By tai­lor­ing inter­ac­tions to each shop­per, it cuts through the noise to engage shop­pers and move them through the pur­chase process, which in today’s world usu­al­ly involves mul­ti­ple chan­nels,” Sheik said.

How Can Personalization Make The Difference?

Per­son­al­iza­tion enables a much greater lev­el of engage­ment with Christ­mas shop­pers, and mar­keters should look for oppor­tu­ni­ties, via tai­lored offers or oth­er­wise, to cap­i­tal­ize at a num­ber of moments. As Sheik said “offers are a fun­da­men­tal ele­ment of hol­i­day plan­ning, and retail­ers should focus on lever­ag­ing indi­vid­ual cus­tomer behav­ior and con­text to deliv­er the right offer at the right time.” Sheik shared three exam­ples of where brands can look to put per­son­al­iza­tion prac­tices in place:

  1. Lever­age pre­vi­ous browse behav­ior to per­son­al­ize home page rec­om­men­da­tions.
  2. Up-sell­ing and cross-sell­ing with relat­ed prod­ucts and acces­sories on cart pages.
  3. Slot­ting rec­om­men­da­tions aligned to offers across pages to increase order con­ver­sion.

Sheik added:

Behav­ioral data should be lever­aged. Either for sim­pli­fy­ing dis­cov­ery, syn­the­siz­ing behav­ior with key­word mod­el­ing to visu­al­ly per­son­al­ize cat­e­gories and rec­om­men­da­tions with­in a type-ahead search drop down menu, or for real-time behav­ioral dri­ven rec­om­men­da­tions that guide shop­pers through each page of your m‑site and web­site, or dynam­i­cal­ly deliv­ered with­in email.

Emerg­ing tech­nol­o­gy and plat­forms are open­ing up new oppor­tu­ni­ties to imple­ment data and per­son­al­iza­tion in all ele­ments of con­sumer ecom­merce jour­neys. Ulti­mate­ly, if brands get the align­ment between per­son­al­iza­tion and cus­tomer expe­ri­ence right, they can enhance con­sumers’ online shop­ping expe­ri­ences – and will soon­er reap the ben­e­fits.

Pat Hong

Written by Pat Hong

Editor at Linkdex/Inked, Linkdex

Pat covers the SEO industry, digital marketing trends, and anything and everything around Linkdex. He also authors Linkdex's data analysis and reports, analysing the state of search in various industries.

Inked is published by Linkdex, the SEO platform of choice for professional marketers.

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