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As the online world becomes an increasingly competitive place to run a business, personalization becomes a necessity. In fact, personalization should be one of the key pillars in your business plan, as you can’t expect the modern consumer to fall in love with your brand if all you have to offer is an amazing product or service. You can have the best products on the market, but if the overall customer experience is generic and unimaginative, customers will abandon your brand for a competitor that invests in personalized experiences.
With that in mind, you should always be looking for ways to improve personalization, especially in the digital realm. Doing this will improve brand relevance and authority, build trust and loyalty, and of course, set the stage for long-term success. Let’s take a look at the personalization trends and tactics that will help you achieve these goals.
Weaving AI into predictive personalization
Artificial intelligence and machine learning solutions are set to take over the business world in the years and decades to come, and even now we are witnessing the use of these technologies on a grand scale. From sales and customer support all the way to inventory management, marketing and beyond, artificial intelligence is facilitating automation while making big data analytics cost-effective and efficient. When it comes to personalization in marketing, sales, and experiences in general, AI can prove invaluable.
One of the key ways AI can help is through predictive personalization, or in other terms, AI can help you choose the best method of communication with customers and online audiences with ease. Whether this means choosing the right email template for the individual or tailoring your ads for every stage of the customer journey, artificial intelligence makes data gathering more efficient and delivers personalized solutions faster than any manual method.
Developing customer journeys across all touchpoints
While the majority of businesses focus solely on building one comprehensive customer journey, it’s important for future-oriented businesses to start developing customer roadmaps for all marketing and sales touchpoints. Why? Because addressing the unique needs of customers on all touchpoints allows for better personalization and for the creation of tailored solutions. In other words, you need to start creating customer journey roadmaps for every sales and marketing interaction in order to personalize the experience per customer group, not just your demographic.
To do this, your marketers need to work side-by-side with data scientists to analyze customer behavior at every stage of their journey, identify the touchpoints they are using, and create a comprehensive plan for every touchpoint. This will boost engagement while showing the online world that your brand goes the extra mile to address the specific needs of every customer.
Personalizing your domain for higher brand awareness
In the modern online world, it’s important that you personalize your whole digital presence, not just your marketing messages or sales tactics. Many business leaders will forgo the importance of personalizing your website, which starts with domain personalization.
Instead of going for a traditional top-level domain, you can personalize the online experience and make your domain more memorable by switching to a personal domain like .me to improve brand stickiness and help your visitors connect with the brand on a more personal level. Once you have a personalized domain, you can start re-tailoring the content on your site to address the needs and pain-points of specific customer groups, making sure that different customers get a different version of your site based on their browsing and purchase history.
Displaying user-generated content in emails
Email marketing has grown to become one of the most powerful marketing tools in your arsenal, and you can elevate its effectiveness even further by weaving social proof into your email strategy. Nowadays, people want to see that other customers are putting trust in your brand, which means that you need to build social proof.
Given the fact that email is a personalized way of communicating with customers, you want to weave user-generated content like reviews, testimonials, and visual content into your emails for better personalization. This will help build trust and loyalty, and it will show the recipients that other customers are satisfied with their experience – that said, remember to use different user-generated content for different customer groups.
Introducing multivariate testing to replace A/B testing
Last but not least, another powerful way of improving personalization is to replace A/B testing with multivariate testing. Essentially, multivariate testing allows you to test a product or any digital item through multiple versions at the same time, instead of testing just two versions simultaneously.
What this does is it allows you to find the ideal solution and product version that fits the exact needs of your customers or even identify a set of product versions to appeal to multiple consumer groups. That said, running multivariate testing is labor and cost-intensive, so be sure to leverage artificial intelligence to do this efficiently and effectively.
Wrapping up
Personalization is the driving force behind long-term success nowadays. With these personalization trends and tips in mind, you should be able to improve the customer’s experience across the board and take your business forward in 2020 and beyond.
