In our multichannel world, a customer will interact with a brand many times, across multiple touchpoints (inc online, offline and in-store), before they buy. Each journey will happen over a series of hours, days or even weeks.
A customer may research a product on their mobile, pop into a store to try it on, view it on their laptop during their lunch hour, speak to customer services about it, browse product reviews on their tablet on the train on the way home from work and ask for friends’ opinions on social media; before buying on their laptop the next day.
The retailer’s challenge is ensuring each interaction is personalised to the individual and their behaviour, and therefore sincere. Showing that they:
Understand each customer’s journey to the point of purchase. This understanding should combine behavioural insight with any available transactional data to provide a full 360 ° picture of each indivdual.
Can apply this understanding by communicating with each customer in a personalised and relevant way throughout that journey, however the customer choses to interact with the brand.
Do all of the above in real time, increasing brand loyalty: “yes - this retailer really ‘gets’ me”; whilst at the same time moving the customer towards a purchase.
Personalised customer journeys get a lot of coverage in the retail and marketing media at present, but there are few best practice examples. So the personalisation people at Persomi have put one together here LINK.
When undertaken well, the impact on a retailer’s bottom line is unarguable. Who wouldn’t want to see 4 x more conversions from personalised recommendations, for example?
Ecommerce Manager at Ellis Brigham offers a cautionary example of how getting this wrong can be damaging a retail business:
“Researching a product on a phone and then buying it later on a laptop is common these days, for example. Before we used Persomi we had no fool-proof way of tracking this journey across devices you could end up following the visitor around the internet, and for example delivering ads to their phone for a product they already purchased several weeks ago”, he explains. “This can seem intrusive because the message is no longer relevant and the result can damage your brand.”.