How to Create Personalized Digital Experiences for Today’s Customer

Personalized customer experience (CX) is when a business or organization creates a unique journey for each customer or audience segment. This often means tailored marketing messages and touchpoints but can also refer to personalized products and services.

Businesses can work out individual users’ needs and preferences by analyzing customer data such as demographics, online behavior, and past purchases. This information is then used to deliver targeted experiences through customized recommendations and messages. 

From the customer’s perspective, personalization can look like anything from an email addressing them by name to a special offer on a product they’ve previously searched for. It might also come in the form of a personalized content hub or a behavior-triggered call-to-action (CTA)  during a live event or webinar. 

Focusing on customers as individuals and not as one collective mass helps make them feel understood and appreciated. It also forges a sense of connection – and with 76% of consumers saying they would buy from a brand they feel connected to over a competitor, this couldn’t be more important.

Unlike the traditional one-size-fits-all approach to customer experience, personalized CX acknowledges that everyone is different. To meet each customer’s needs and ensure maximum return on investment (ROI), personalization is essential. 

Aside from the fact that customers now expect personalized experiences, there are plenty of other reasons why you should be implementing them. Here are some of the key benefits.

Improved Customer Satisfaction

Personalized experiences are all about meeting the customer where they’re at. By providing relevant content at the right point, whether it be an informational guide or a product recommendation, you remove friction and frustration from the journey. 

Doing this makes clear what the next steps are and gives customers the tools they need to make decisions, rather than bombarding them with generic messaging. Pain points are reduced, and processes are streamlined so that they offer more value to the individual.

Because of this, customer satisfaction tends to vastly improve when personalization is introduced. And satisfied customers have no reason to go elsewhere – which leads us to our next benefit.

Increased Loyalty and Engagement

Personalized experiences are designed to both meet the customer’s needs and establish a more intimate connection between them and your brand. When these goals are achieved, customers will have a more positive brand perception, which gives them the confidence to make purchases in the future. 

A positive experience also builds trust and helps to cement your brand as an authoritative source in its space. This means that customers will turn to it when trying to find answers to questions or general information on the topic, which provides further opportunities to drive loyalty.

But personalization doesn’t just reap dividends post-purchase – it’s also a key driver of engagement throughout the customer journey. Through personalized landing pages, emails, and recommendations, you can deliver content that’s actually of interest and captures engagement.

Higher Conversion Rates

Personalized communications come across as more genuine and are therefore less easily dismissed. It’s like the difference between receiving a generic Christmas gift and one that’s been hand-picked for you with your interests in mind – which are you more likely to get excited about?

Because personalized experiences feel more genuine and relevant to the customer, they tend to spawn more interaction. From email open rates to in-webinar CTAs, conversion rates across the board are positively impacted. In fact, 63% of marketers in a Statista survey saw increased conversion rates as the main benefit of personalization. 

Higher conversion rates mean more customers moving through the funnel. This naturally leads to increased revenue and greater ROI from marketing efforts.

Impact on Customer Decision-Making

Personalization impacts every stage of the customer journey and has a big influence on decision-making. During the awareness stage, personalized content recommendations can be used to educate customers on the solutions available to their problems. 

When customers have moved to the consideration stage (and bear in mind that this might happen at different times for different stakeholders within the same company), personalization helps break through the thousands of generic sales messages that they receive every day. 

It doesn’t make a difference whether you’re a B2C or B2B brand – people are still people and emotions play a huge role in decision-making. If you can anticipate your customers’ needs and respond to them proactively, you’ll reduce the stress of decision-making and make your brand feel like the smart choice.

Without customer data, personalization can only be achieved at surface level using demographics and location. Fortunately, once a customer has begun interacting with your brand, first-party data can be gathered pretty quickly. 

There are multiple sources for data collection, including:

• • Customer service databases
  • Social media channels
  • Browsing and purchase activity
  • Surveys and polls
  • On-site behavior
  • Email engagement

Once you have the data, the next step is to collate and analyze it. Combined, the insights gathered from different channels provide a more comprehensive customer profile. You can use a specialist customer data platform (CDP) or choose a customer experience platform with integration features built in so that this happens automatically. 

The data that’s gathered can provide information such as:

• • Personal details (e.g. name, industry, job title)
  • Highest converting channels
  • Most engaged with content and topics
  • Complete history of brand interactions
  • Qualitative data (e.g. feedback gathered through surveys) 
  • Customer lifetime value (LTV) and other important metrics

Customer Segmentation

Dividing customers into segments can enhance personalization efforts by making it easier to understand different customer needs and movement through the journey. There are a few different ways to go about segmentation, with the most common being by: 

• • Demographics 
  • Location 
  • Brand familiarity 
  • Stage of the journey
  • Rate of activity 
  • Interests 
  • Past purchases

The best way to segment depends on your business goals, but will usually involve using multiple criteria. The same customer can appear in more than one segment and be targeted using different methods for different purposes. 

For example, a customer might spend time viewing content related to a specific topic. This means they can be segmented with other customers who are all interested in that same topic and receive personalized content recommendations relating to the subject. 

That same customer might have registered for a product demo which they then failed to attend. This means they can also be segmented alongside customers who have dropped off at that stage of the journey, and be targeted with a personalized offer inviting them to a free trial.  

Customer segmentation is essentially the precursor to personalization. It enables you to understand different behavioral patterns so that you can tailor your strategy at an individual level.

AI and Machine Learning

The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) has significantly changed how personalized content experiences work. Using machine learning, AI models can analyze vast sets of customer data and identify patterns that are used to predict future behavior. 

This means that businesses and marketers can personalize more proactively, anticipating customers’ needs and quickly offering them solutions before frustration takes root. To top it all off, big chunks of these processes can be automated, drastically reducing the number of man-hours required while simultaneously increasing the scale of personalized experiences.

Personalized product or content recommendations are one of the simplest and most effective ways to personalize the customer experience. There are two main ways of going about this: 

1. Interaction history 

This method involves looking at each customer’s previous interactions with your brand. If they have shown an interest in a certain topic or indicated a recurring pain point, you can use this information to recommend content they might find valuable. 

Interaction history can also highlight opportunities for cross-selling. Informed by previous purchases (or near-purchases), products, services, and upgrades can be suggested to the customer. 

 2. Lookalike customers

Similar businesses often have similar needs. It therefore makes sense that what one business purchases, another might be interested in. 

Using audience segments like industry or stage of the customer journey, you can identify businesses with similar profiles and behaviors to the one you are targeting. The preferences and purchases of these businesses inform the recommendations you give your target business.

Tailored Marketing Messages

Your marketing messages are how you communicate directly with your customers. But as we’ve established, customers are all different, and messages should be tailored according to their current needs. 

Once you’ve chosen which audience segment to target, it’s time to create (and deliver) your personalized message. To do this, consider the following: 

• • Content – the content of the message should align with the customer’s current needs, interests, or behaviors. Dynamic messaging can be used to adjust email content and create personalized offers in real-time.
  • Medium – the delivery method is just as important as the content. Choose the highest converting channels for your type of message or audience segment.
  • Language – this sets the tone of the interaction and creates synergy with the customer. Language should be adapted for different industries or to create urgency in the later stages of the funnel. 
  • Regularity – there’s a fine line between regularity and annoyance. Behavioral patterns indicate the best times and days to send communications, or they can be triggered to send based on specific user actions.

Omnichannel Personalization

While on your side of the interaction it’s a haze of channels, messages, and segments, from your customer’s side all they see is one thing: your brand. This means that consistency must always be at the forefront despite the importance of tailoring messages to suit each channel. 

It’s jarring for customers to receive an email saying one thing, only to head to your website and see something else entirely. And not only that, but it’s also a huge missed opportunity. 

The customer experience is omnichannel – it spans multiple touchpoints across multiple channels and they all influence what the customer does next. Treating each channel as an individual component that should work in tandem as part of a larger whole is the secret to a flawless personalized experience. 

Modern marketers have a wealth of data at their fingertips, but there’s one big problem – it’s often spread across different platforms and systems. Without consolidating data into one central hub, it can be impossible to get a reliable and detailed view of each customer.

Data integration is the key to solving this challenge. There are specialist tools and platforms that do this using APIs, but they can be expensive when processing large amounts of data. Alternatively, you can choose your marketing tech stack strategically by making sure that real-time integration is built in – as is the case with ON24’s Intelligent Engagement Platform. 

Balancing Privacy and Personalization

Customer data privacy concerns are well-publicized. Many people and businesses are rightfully unhappy at the thought of their data being collected and used without their permission. But how do you strike the balance between customer privacy and the need for personalization? 

The answer is simple: avoid third-party data and be transparent about first-party data usage. Transparency creates trust and trust builds lasting relationships. Most customers will willingly provide their information if they know it’s being collected with their consent and will be used to improve the service they receive. 

Ensuring Consistency Across Channels

Connecting the dots so that customers have a consistent cross-channel experience is made harder when you bring personalization into the mix. Suddenly there’s a lot of information to keep track of – which brings us back to data integration. 

Customer service and sales reps, marketers, and product teams all need to be able to access the same set of data in order to ensure accuracy and consistency. Creating centralized customer profiles with real-time updates from all data sources is the way to do this. 

Different areas of marketing also need to make sure that their strategies complement rather than contradict each other. Consistent branding, messaging, and an omnichannel approach to personalizing the customer experience will cultivate seamless interactions that bring greater success.

Let’s say a product manager working for an online time-tracking tool has noticed that a segment of users on the tier 1 plan is regularly reaching the limit of trackable hours. 

Each week, an automated usage email is sent to all users. For this specific segment, the marketing team personalizes the email to include an upgrade offer detailing tier 2 features – which include no limit on trackable hours.  

Expected outcome: Incentivized by the offer and knowing that their current tier level isn’t meeting all their needs, a proportion of customers choose to upgrade their plan.

2. Personalized content hubs

Imagine that a project management software company is experiencing high rates of users signing up but then leaving after a month. The company realizes that new customers are struggling to understand how to use the platform. 

To tackle this, the marketing team set up personalized content hubs full of informational guides. The content shown is dynamically tailored to each user depending on their behavior and industry.

Expected outcome: Now that customers have easy access to relevant resources, they are able to utilize the platform to its potential. With this hurdle removed, the customer retention rate increases.

Metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) translate what customers are doing at an individual level into top-level data that can be used to make decisions. 

KPIs should be chosen depending on the specific goals of your campaign (e.g. increased leads). Metrics provide a more detailed look at what’s affecting these KPIs (e.g. form submissions).

Examples of key metrics and KPIs to track include:

• • Engagement metrics 
  • Conversion rate
  • Content views and time on page
  • Click-through rate (CTR)
  • Bounce rate or drop-off rate
  • Lead conversion rate
  • Customer retention rate (CRR)
  • Customer lifetime value (CLV)
  • Revenue growth

Depending on the complexity of your customer experience journey, there might be many different metrics to keep track of. However, KPIs should be as specific as possible to help you not lose sight of the overarching goal.

Tools for Tracking and Analysis

It’s likely that the tools and platforms you use to reach customers will have some form of analytics built in. On a day-to-day basis, these metrics will provide snapshots of what customers are doing and how they are responding to your campaign.

If you’re using social media platforms like LinkedIn and Instagram, you can use the built-in proprietary analytics dashboards to track important engagement metrics. 

For personalized campaigns distributed through email, you can use the analytics features built into email automation platforms to get insights into metrics like open rate, read rate, and click-through rate.

Then you can track how the users you acquire through your personalized campaign interact with your website through a website analytics platform. Google Analytics, for example, allows you to track average session length which provides valuable insights into how effectively your on-site content is engaging users.

For the best results, you can use a platform that allows you to collate data from multiple sources and channels into one dashboard. The ON24 analytics platform for example offers connected insights across live and on-demand content experiences, making it easier to see where your strategy is working best and where it needs improvement.

AI is rapidly changing the way that B2B businesses operate, and the transformation isn’t going to end anytime soon.

One big development is the advancement of natural language processing (NLP) models, which can read and understand the sentiment of text-based interactions. Using customers’ own words, businesses can quickly find and address common paint points. The feedback gathered helps to improve the customer experience on an individual level, at a scale not previously possible.

NLP models are also revolutionizing customer service in the form of AI-powered chatbots. Not only do these chatbots understand customer queries, but they also provide swift, personalized responses that enhance the overall experience. 

Evolving Customer Expectations

Customers are people, and most people lead busy, stressful lives. They don’t have time to sort through information to figure out what’s relevant to them – they want it done already with personalized interactions and content experiences.

As more and more businesses turn to personalization, the bar gets raised. Customers don’t just want to receive a tailored experience; they want their needs anticipated and met, with a connected journey across different channels.

They also expect their data to be collected, used, and stored in a safe and ethical way. Data security concerns are one of the biggest factors in decision-making. Although personalization is important, the need to win and keep customer trust is even greater.