Tailoring to enhance: 5 useful tips on the customer journey

Digital users behave and get in contact with a brand in a much more variable and dynamic way than traditional ones. Instead of a linear customer journey, they find dozens of chances through an intricate labyrinth of platforms, communication channels, and devices.

Indeed, mapping the user’s journey from brand awareness to conversion just doesn’t cut it anymore in this ever complex and stimulating context. Tailoring is key in standing out and attracting the user’s attention.

Let’s discover why it’s important and, above all, how to actually create a personalized customer journey.

Tailoring is already a consolidated trend in digital marketing. More and more, today’s consumers have gotten used to the attention that companies give them through personalized communications based on their specific needs and characteristics.

Just like in any human relationship, users feel unique and special when they see their name in an email and appreciate when the company remembers their shopping habits or their birthday.

Just like all human relationship, showing that you care reaps more rewards than just looking cool in the digital world. The more a company shows interest in a prospect, the more its loyalty and likelihood for conversion will increase.

A tailoring strategy enhances more than just brand loyalty. It also enhances what’s known as brand advocacy, i.e. a user’s willingness to recommend a brand to others which then boots its reputation.

From the point of view of both companies and consumers, the figures speak for themselves: 71% of consumers say they’re frustrated when their shopping experience proves impersonal and 77% prefer to choose, recommend, and pay more for a brand that provides a personalized customer experience.

Marketers, on the other hand, report a 56% increase in sales when using and creating personalized experiences. Further, Email Marketing campaigns based on a segmentation strategy witnessed a 760% increase in revenue in 2018. Speaking of costs, Adweek data show that personalization can reduce acquisition costs by at least 50% and increase revenues by up to 15% while increasing a marketing campaign’s efficiency by 10 to 30%.

So a tailored consumer journey is no longer just a perk, it’s a must for every company in meeting their clients’ expectations. It’s how you set yourself apart in an increasingly competitive market.

How should we tailor the customer journey? The answer is simple: automation. Marketing Automation improves the customer journey since it lets you create automated messages based on user data and behavior. As a result, you can send the right content to the right audience at the right time.

Check out the 5 ways to leverage automation for personalizing the user journey.

1. Collect and analyze data

First, you must collect and analyze data to create personalized messages, content, and experiences. In fact, getting hold of users’ demographic and personal information while grasping their interests and behaviors is key in building customized paths with strategic touchpoints.

Data will let you reconstruct the ways in which each user comes into contact with your company. On this basis, you can understand which needs must be intercepted to leverage the customization process.

You can harvest these data through a newsletter or a service registration form. Request the users to enter more than their details, like date of birth, location, and profession, i.e. their preferences on your offered services, how often they receive your communication, and what they want to hear from your company.

You can use these data to set up an automated and personalized communication flow based on their preferences.

2. Take advantage of user behavior history

Collecting your customers’ data isn’t enough to understand their needs. It’s also essential to analyze how they’ve interacted with your company in the past and to try extracting preferences and intentions by their behavioral patterns. Once the behavioral patterns have been identified, just design automated email campaigns ready to fit users’ habits.

A customer who often visits a certain product page shows a likely purchase intention. Use this behavior to facilitate a conversion: send him/her a communication with positive reviews on that product or similar products, recommended just for him/her.

You can also create customized homepages, highlighting products that the consumer may find interesting based on past purchases or previous reviews.

You can create customized touchpoints based on users’ previous purchases and service use. These add to their trip and prompt them to make a new purchase or return to your website, as in the following examples:

You can easily benefit from Marketing Automation and put these best practices to work. Just leverage the potential of MailUp and Datatrics, the integrated Predictive Marketing platform.

We now know that the collection and interpretation of data and behavioral patterns are the basis for personalizing the customer journey. However, translating these raw data into clear campaign-orienting guidelines is often difficult for companies. It’s precisely here where artificial intelligence comes into play by rationalizing data. Predictive Marketing by means of AI isn’t just for multinationals—any company can afford it thanks to tools like Datatrics.

Datatrics aggregates data from both internal sources (CRM, Email, Social Network, E-commerce, Web Analytics, etc.) and external sources (demographic data, weather conditions, traffic intensity, etc.). Its algorithm forecasts the interests of the customers who interact with the website, emails, and marketing campaigns (Google, Facebook, Display Advertising, and other channels). This allows for creating dedicated, personal content-based customer journeys that both stimulate the purchase and feed and strengthen the one-to-one relationship between the company and the user.

Two main allies can help you enhance the customer journey:

•  Predictive Marketing, which provides you with the best interpretation of user data to predict behavior, needs, and intentions
•  Marketing Automation, which allows you to build automated email and SMS campaigns on the information you collected about your customers.

Let MailUp work for you and help you implement these strategies: ask our team of experts for advice to get solid advice on tailoring the customer journey.