Personalizing the buying experience

In today’s world—where consumers trust the recommendations of retailers significantly less than they do those of other consumers—retailers must foster brand advocates who will promote their brand for them.

Such advocates and evangelists are created by deepening the relationship the consumer has with the retailer through increased trust and a differentiating brand experience.

Connected customers are transforming all industries, especially business to consumer.

The challenge of meeting the demands of connected customers has led Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) to look for new ways of marketing and selling to customers across physical and digital product lines.

Marketers are asking questions like—Do I know my customers? What are their needs and demands? How can I best engage with them? What products and pricing do I offer them? How can I deliver meaningful value to each and every customer?

Evidently, the clear answer is personalization.

Enabling a personalized buying experience can help marketers deliver greater value to connected customers—and capture greater revenue by providing more choice in how customers buy your goods across all sales interaction points, including mobile and social.

With a personalized buying experience approach, businesses can engage and interact with customers seamlessly through on-line, mobile and social interaction channels, and even coordinate these interactions with physical store and call center channels.

For retailers, the current consumer-driven marketplace demands marketers to look at new multi channel approaches capable of driving optimal performance. Rather than setting targets at specific numbers, marketers may want to tie performance to events and risk factors. Rather than planning on an annual basis, retailers may consider adopting shorter planning cycles focused on achieving specific goals.

With smart precision marketing tools and solutions, building unique storefronts to reach target customer segments or create custom micro sites for specific brands and geographical marketplaces can be a breeze.

Smarter analytics solutions allow marketers to deliver personalized content for each micro site based on defined business rules and policies.

This can ultimately lead to higher click-through rates for on-screen offers; higher conversion rates; lower cart abandonment rates; and higher attach rates for complementary items.

Many medium to large retailers are already using some degree of analytics to determine price elasticity, spot trends, address seasonality and report on the progress of different channels and regions.

Predictive analytics adds the leverage for marketers to transform retail organizations. By applying different analytic techniques, marketers in the retail industry have the ability to differentiate a shopping experience against that of their competitors.

Nothing embodies consumer empowerment more than the use of mobile devices.

In most Asian countries, forward-thinking retailers are devising mobile strategies to address each stage of the consumer cycle—awareness, engagement, consideration, conversion and loyalty.

Mobile apps create unique opportunities to engage with consumers, whether in a store, in transit or online.

An effective strategy for engaging customers with personalized content that they value enough to pay for means developing a deep understanding of the customer and how they make purchase decisions.

It also demands that marketers adapt and refine the buying experience as customer behavior changes, to continue to deliver value over time.

After all, marketing is about satisfying customer needs and wants.  (The author is country manager for Marketing of IBM Philippines)