Guest Blog: Persona-lizing the Customer Experience

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Guest Blog: Persona-lizing the Customer Experience

This week on our Friends on Friday guest blog post my colleague, Mark Smith, writes about how crucial personalization can be to the customer experience. When you customize or personalize the experience, even during the sales process, you are delivering a better level of service. – Shep Hyken

Personalization, according to the definition we are now familiar with, has been around since the dotcom bubble in the late 90s. Originally, retailers used this concept to make their services more appealing to consumers by showing products and services that might match their particular preferences. Today, modern consumers demand personalization in the form of varied yet tailored content across an assortment of channels that have become popular in the last decade. To achieve this demand for optimized personalized content, marketers must be up-to-date on the best ways to understand their consumers and where they are most likely to shop.

However, according to Gartner, less than 10% of top retailers in the US believe they are highly effective at personalization and nearly one-third report having limited or no capacity to support personalization efforts. But Why? While marketers today are challenged with making sure they have the best technology to leverage available data to drive more personalized experiences, many don’t know where to start.

Instead of drilling down to the individual customer level to achieve effective personalization, marketers can instead try “personification,” a term recently created by Gartner. The concept focuses on groups of consumers with similar characteristics rather than every specific individual. With this principle in mind, consider applying these 5 steps to your own marketing department:

Set your data free: A company’s data is useless if it can’t be leveraged towards business goals. Rather than spending lots of money on a brand new central database, make breaking down data siloes your company’s immediate priority. Unifying actionable data (taking it out of the various departments and locations where it is stored separately) in a location accessible to all, increases data availability and improves communication and collaboration across siloes.

Segment your core audience: As core audiences are not usually homogenous, it’s important to break down your audience into smaller, more manageable groups based on shared attributes. To do this, run basic analyses to determine which traits are most common in an audience and break the group into segments accordingly. Tailored marketing activities to these specific target audience segments will be more effective.

It’s time to persona-lize: Next, identify the target personas within those audiences. If a segment of a retailer’s audience is “18-24-year-old males,” a persona within that could be “college student” or “athlete.” Once created, it is essential to continually monitor behaviors within segments to identify commonalities and make predictions about future behavior, knowledge essential to crafting effective personalization.

Test the waters: With your audience properly segmented and effectively understood, it’s time to try out marketing tactics across various channels. While time-consuming, this step is critical to understand how to most efficiently reach and convert different groups in your future marketing campaigns. In this step, it is critical to set hypotheses – “18-24-year-old males will be more responsive to sponsored Facebook posts than search ads” – and then test them rigorously to which channels and which messages respond best to your persona-lization.

Score your performance: Finally, it is essential to define goals and specific KPIs to measure outcomes with these audiences moving forward. Basic examples of KPIs include visitor engagement, cart abandonment, bounce rate and conversion rate, but Google Analytics can be used to define and measure practically any goal.

With over 20 years of global experience in Marketing Applications and Analytical CRM, Mark Smith is a leader in building, growing and managing successful companies. Currently in “innovation mode” as the President of Kitewheel, Mark is focused on helping marketing agencies deliver better consumer engagement through solutions that unify the “logic” layer of today’s customer-facing technology for their large brand clients. Mark is a regular at industry conferences and events and shares his insights on customer journeys, omni-channel marketing, solutions sales leadership and high-tech marketing.