How personalised content influences customer growth

Solid customer growth, engagement and retention requires far more than exceptional customer support and service, but rather a customer-centric approach on all fronts. Showing that you are dedicated to ensuring your customer’s needs are met involves a number of factors, including delivering personalised content at exactly the right time.

An example of personalised content done right is Spotify’s Discover Weekly feature. It’s an aggregated playlist of songs they think you’ll appreciate based on your listening preferences.

It introduces you to new content, which is both enriching and exciting, but also encourages you to make better use of the app, knowing that there’s something in it for you. 

It’s an automated feature that has a simple function — to make the customer feel like they’re being considered, thus increasing engagement and retention.

Accenture Interactive published a report stating that 91% of customers are more likely to shop with brands who acknowledge them, remember who they are, and provide offers that are relevant to them. The same report also noted that 83% of customers are willing to share their personal information to receive personalised offers.

The groundwork in defining personalised content

Having great content is one thing, but it’s important to understand your customer first to ensure content is personalised, relevant and valuable. Helping customers engage with what you have to offer comes with a few critical components:

• you need to understand who your customer is and what their needs are, and
• you need to understand where your customer is in terms of their relationship with you.

You can do this by examining your transactional and contextual data sources and creating a data profile for your customer. 

Transactional data will, among many other things, assess whether your customer is a high-frequency buyer and what sort of products they prefer. It will help you ascertain what their buying habits are based on when they purchase and what their average basket size is.

Contextual data, such as wishlist items, abandoned carts or their most-viewed items, will help you understand their preferences and get a holistic view of their relationship with you. 

Using data profiles to create personalised content

Once you have a profile for your customer, this data can be synced with your communication platform to drive engagement programmes and deliver personalised content in the following ways:

• create a relevant, compelling offer tailored to your customer;
• deliver it when they are most likely to engage;
• drive frequency and cover different channels; and
• test variations in creative, content, different timings, and find exactly what works for that customer.

Your marketing platform can do all the groundwork and heavy lifting for you while you focus on creating worthwhile content and campaigns for your customer. 

Maintaining loyalty between customer and brand

It’s worth remembering that your customer is likely to be constantly bombarded with information. You need to cut through the noise and catch their attention with the right timing, personalisation and the type of value that makes them feel special. You can do this through a process of automation.

While you create the content your customer will appreciate, you automate the process of gathering data, align it to your customer profile and create context for your customer. You can implement your communication programmes on automation platforms to ensure that you are always on when it comes to conversations with each customer.

These platforms allow you to create triggers, cues and sequences that apply a predefined treatment the moment each customer chooses to engage with you or when your systems and models indicate the customer is mostly likely to receptive to your messaging.

This combination of customer data, personalised content and automation ensures you’re always communicating with your customer in the right context. Consistent management in this way will raise their awareness and appreciation of you and increase the likelihood that they’ll engage with you in the future.

Final words

Data and research are important when it comes to understanding how to connect with your customers. Without it, we couldn’t have a quality, human relationship with our customers at scale. With platforms such as Everlytic, you can have contextual, autonomous, machine and data-driven relationships with millions of individuals at the same time. 

But first, you need to plug in the reliable, accurate data sets that describe your customer, their needs and preferences. 

When properly integrated and automated, this becomes an extremely powerful marketing asset that helps you deliver the most relevant message to your customer, at precisely the right time.

This can be done across multiple channels to help guide your customer through various actions that align with their needs. It is the perfect formula for customer satisfaction, that in turn results in customer growth, engagement and retention. 

Join JD Engelbrecht, Everlytic MD on August 18 2020 at 10am for the Future of Media digitised event: “Platforms, Integration and Future Consumption”.

Click here to register.  

This article was paid for by Everlytic.