What is personalization and why does it matter? It’s much more than your name at the start of a marketing email or text message. It’s also more than retargeting emails (“Oh, we see you bought a winter coat. Do you need boots?”) hitting your inbox or “related products” populating a page you’re scrolling online.
Done right, personalization helps retailers reap the rewards of sales growth and increased loyalty from customers. Shoppers like when they feel that a brand gets them, and that feeling needs to be evident from the moment they land on a website. Just as an individual’s social media feed is uniquely theirs because of the people and accounts they follow, retailers need to be able to deliver each consumer a tailor-made experience that will boost engagement and, ideally, drive more sales.
Along with personalization, retailers need to meet customers when and where they want to be engaged if they want to offer a seamless experience. Omnichannel retailing means retailers engage shoppers and meet their expectations no matter the digital platforms and physical stores they choose.
As customers shop across more channels — using social media’s text, video, and audio capabilities, as well as websites, brick-and-mortar stores, online marketplaces, and online purchase for in-store pickup — their data and applications must move with them to ensure a positive, consistent experience with the brand. Consider:
Luxury brands generally have a reputation for outstanding in-person customer service. Shoppers will soon expect a similar level of care and attention when browsing and buying online. A sophisticated chatbot can offer recommendations, answer FAQs and connect the shopper to a human quickly when needed.
62% of consumers surveyed go online to check product availability before they go to a nearby store to buy it, making it the most popular omnichannel activity, according to Digital Commerce 360’s 2024 Omnichannel Report. It’s crucial for retailers to optimize their inventory management through using predictive analytics and historical sales data to anticipate future demand for products.
The same omnichannel report also notes that curbside pickup for online purchases remains a big priority for major grocery retailers and office supplies chains, though demand has fallen off for other retail categories.
It’s important to integrate and synchronize data in real-time across platform-specific software systems using application programming interfaces (APIs). Doing so enables a retailer to know, for example, when shoppers add products to their cart in the mobile app, and then have that activity reflected when they continue their journey on the website and complete the purchase on their laptop.
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