Personalized Customer Experience: Tips, Best Practices

In a highly competitive market, affordable prices and favorable terms of cooperation are no longer enough. You need to offer customers something more - a personalized customer experience. Using a combination of proven psychological methods and modern technologies, you can build a trusting relationship with your target audience. We will tell you why you need to do this, which methods of influence you can use and which tools you will need for this.

What is a Personalized Customer Experience

A personalized customer experience is a system of relationships in which a salesperson views a customer as a unique personality, not just another cog in the wheel of their business. It takes into account a person's needs, wants, preferences and personality traits. 

Personalized experience is a successful sales methodology that is used both online and offline. It is associated with the existence of small stores in the era of global digital conglomerates. Small businesses give people a sense of trust, involvement and individuality. When customers are heard and understood, they want to return to that place again and again. 

The answer to the question what is a personalized customer experience was given by famous 20th century writers and sociologists Dale Carnegie, Dan Kennedy and Jim Kemp.

By studying research in psychology, they have formulated common rules for successful sales: make eye contact, speak confidently, often call the person you are talking to by name, etc. 

Of course, the personalized web experience is somewhat different from sales in offices and stores. It should be considered in terms of the key elements of the webpage - its design, structure, navigation and the mechanics of the targeted action. In addition to the personalized user experience, there must also be strong software technology. You don't have to be a technical genius to create it - there are ready-made solutions that can be plugged in within a few hours or even minutes.

The Benefits of a Personalized Customer Experience

Personalized customer experiences create a trusting relationship with customers. In such a relationship, a salesperson acts as a friend who doesn't just want to make money, but to recommend the best product that meets a person's exact needs. It's a very strong bond that lasts for years - it builds a stable customer base and helps businesses stay afloat in the hardest of times. Let's talk more about what are the benefits of trusted relationships created through personalized experiences on websites.

Increasing Conversion Rates

A study by Accenture consulting company found that 33% of users reject an offer that lacks personality within the first few seconds. By adding personalized ecommerce experience you can avoid such losses, and increase your customer base by a third.

Increasing of Average Check

Salesforce statistics show: if a product appears on a recommendation list, the likelihood of adding it to the cart increases by 4.5 times. And in Segment's research, 49% of online store visitors made impulse purchases thanks to a personalized web experience. Overall, personalized service increases the average check of online stores by 31%.

Building Loyalty 

Personalization allows you to engage emotions that are absent in the pipeline scheme of sales. One of the basic laws of psychology says that a person will always be eager to repeat a positive experience. Even the memory of it brings pleasure. This means that with a high probability the clients will not just return, but will recommend the product to their acquaintances as well. 

Increasing SEO Efficiency

Such personalized customer experience examples as calling by name, brand recommendations and mentioning a person's needs increase customer engagement. A visitor spends more time on a site, explores more pages during one session, and generates leads. For search engines, this serves as a positive signal - over time, they increase the rank of such authoritative web pages.

Personalized Customer Experience: 5 Tried-and-True Tips

To make your business as effective as possible, it's not enough to "remember" existing customers - you need to foresee how new ones will behave. This will reduce bounce rates, increase conversion rates and help you gain a serious competitive advantage. Here's how to personalize the customer experience using a combination of time-tested solutions and new technologies.

1. Segment the Target Audience

The first step to success is to understand your customers. To do this, you need to divide them into groups with common characteristics:

• demographic - gender, age, marital status;
• economic - income level, preferred price segment, monthly spending on certain products;
• sociological - place of residence, profession, level of education;
• psychographic - preferences, opinions, hobbies;
• behavioral - time spent on your site, frequency of purchases, depth of study of the web resource, etc.

All successful personalized customer experience examples include not only groups, but also portraits of the target audience. To create them, you need to imagine a typical representative of a certain segment. For example, Victoria, 29 years old, a writer and blogger, lives in London, has an income of more than 250 thousand dollars a year, and is fond of traveling. By creating a portrait, you can get to know your customers better, understand their way of thinking, and create a customized offer that exactly meets a person's needs.

2. Choose an Appropriate Tone of Voice

It is important to personalize not just a specific appeal, but the entire site as a whole. It will not be difficult to do this - modern technologies allow you to rebuild landing pages on the fly, adapting them to the needs of a particular visitor. You can even use artificial intelligence, which will generate a text for each person, not for broad segments. 

The tone of voice is selected based on the portrait of the target audience. 45-year-old top managers with families and children are more likely to listen to the dry facts, while 19-year-old students are more likely to listen to emotions and fashion trends. You should understand when it is acceptable to use specific terminology and when you should try to explain everything in simple words.

3. Rely on Data

Behind a personalized customer experience is always a modern, feature-rich CRM. This platform collects all possible information about a customer and summarizes it. By implementing such an application, you can build the entire process of interaction with a customer based on simple algorithms. For example, if a website visitor is over 45 years old and lives in Texas, charcoal grills will be displayed in the offered products section. 

The next step is to implement machine learning and Big Data tools. Today they are available to most users with minimal technical skills, not just a narrow circle of professionals. One example is the integration of popular CRM, Google Analytics 4 and BigQuery. Using ready-made SQL queries, you can find patterns in customer behavior and foresee their next steps with the accuracy of 90-95%.

4. Form Unobtrusive Appeals

A personalized web experience works effectively when an offer looks useful and relevant. That is, no pressure and no obvious push for a targeted action! The entire site, from the structure to the multimedia content, should be trustworthy. 

One of effective personalization tools is a simple registration form. It's always worth giving users a choice, but ideally you should add a quick social media sign up feature. They allow you to instantly read a user's profile, extracting relevant information from it - age, place of residence, tendency to travel, hobbies, etc. With powerful enough tools at your disposal, you can even analyze photos, geolocation tags, and posts in a feed. 

Another good example of personalization is pop-ups. Using them you can show information about promotions, new items or recommended products. After a certain time, they will offer a user the help of a consultant, and when trying to close the tab - make a favorable final offer. Pop-ups will become the most unobtrusive personalization tool. They appear only in certain scenarios - in most cases the screen remains free, which makes it easier to navigate the site.

It is important that popups can be added to a page in seconds. Claspo offers ready-made templates and a widget builder. You don't need programming skills to use it. It is enough to choose a suitable window call scenario and drag and drop the necessary elements into the development field. The tool is easily integrated into any popular CMS. CRM and data flow integration applications can be connected to it to personalize offers for each customer in real time.

5. Give a Choice of Communication Channels

Everyone has their own preferences. Some people like to talk on the phone, while others prefer short messages. Some users want to communicate exclusively live with people, while others are satisfied with short messaging with a chatbot. To reach the widest target audience possible, give customers the ability to choose how they contact customer support. 

A great example of a personalized experience is Amazon's Marketplace. In it, a user can contact a seller online, get support from a bot, or place an order without callbacks or messages.

Another valuable piece of advice is that personalization should not be confused with humanity. As practice shows, not everyone needs the latter. In today's world, communication is becoming a value that people prefer to share only with loved ones. Most users do not want to talk to consultants, preferring to follow automated algorithms. Therefore, obligatory calls and messages from company representatives will not be an effective tool to increase sales.

Personalized Customer Experience: How Claspo Can Help You

Claspo is a versatile marketing tool that can be used in any market segment, from retail and joint travel to medicine and business consulting. It allows you to create personalized pop-ups designed for each website visitor. Support for popular CRMs gives you the ability to add a user's name to a call-to-action, choose recommended products, and even give customized discounts. 

One of the advantages of Claspo is its simple integration. The tool can be connected by installing a plugin for a content management system or simply inserting the widget code into an HTML file. No programming skills are required - just follow the step-by-step instructions. The service also allows you to order a turnkey pop-up window - the company's specialists will perform all stages of work and provide you with a ready-to-use option.

Try Claspo for free and see how this tool really increases user engagement! You will be able to evaluate the effect of its implementation with the help of the built-in analytics service.