How The Personal Touch Could Be The Key To Your Business Success

Customers are now so used to being addressed by their first name in emails, or receiving offers based on their interests, that it should come as no surprise that, according to our research, 79% of consumers said they are more likely to engage with a personalised offer, with 78% of customers stating that relevant content increases their likelihood of a purchase.

In addition, 88% of marketers said they had seen measurable improvements as a result of personalisation, with more than half saying that they had seen a greater than 10% increase in revenue as a result of adopting personalisation into their strategies.

But what exactly do we mean by personalisation?

Personalisation can be as simple as an email using a customer’s first name and although this has its merits, the real value lies in an end-to-end personalised experience. However, this is something that only 28% of marketers are currently putting to good use.

Amazon, which uses personalisation to make recommendations based on customer purchases, and Netflix, which recommends content based on what has already been viewed and a customers’ demographics, are two companies currently leading the way in personalised onsite experiences, but it is something that businesses of all sizes can harness too.

Being able to deliver personalised content in real-time through your website allows you to deliver an improved customer experience and relevant messages to your customers. This, in turn, will lead to more effective marketing that will help to improve acquisition and retention.

Be consistent

Consistency is essential for any personalised marketing strategy because customers expect to have the same experience across every channel.

That means having data on every customer and prospect whether they’ve interacted with you before or not, and having that data available throughout the user journey, wherever and however they engage with you.

From that very first branding advert, all the way through to conversion and beyond, it’s important to apply all data consistently. However, that can be tricky given that typically up to 40% of visitors to ecommerce websites are unknown or unrecognised until they actually transact. By this point it’s often too late as you’ll have missed the opportunity to influence that transaction, or to convert a visitor earlier, who may otherwise have clicked away from the site.

Unfortunately, marketers are often finding that they don’t have enough data to combat this or that the data that they do have is inaccurate. This all boils down to identity. If you don’t know who someone is, it’s very hard for you to determine what data you have on them and how it can be applied.

Combating the identity conundrum

At Experian, we can provide an accurate view of the UK population. Our database of approximately 51 million UK adults, aggregated into about 25 million households and 500 attributes per person, provides an accurate view of the UK population. Using this we can help marketers drive sales and, more importantly, create a more personalised customer experience. Many of these records are currently linked to approximately 130 million cookies and device IDs too, allowing marketers to automatically create a cross-device, cross-channel experience for the customer with further opportunities to action the data as soon as a customer reaches your site.

Using our Audience Insights data we’re able to power the customer experience in real-time.

In short, we believe data is the key to effective personalisation and creating an experience tailored to the persona each one of your customers represents.

Click here to find out more about how Experian could help you harness a more personalised approach to marketing.

Alternatively, hear from Experian expert Alastair Bulger, via a recent webinar, on some of the key challenges to effective personalisation on the web, including; how to plug the insight gap, how to recognise individuals you have never come across before and how to know what message, offer or advert to show them if you don’t know anything about them.