Digital Customer Experience: Why personalised content is key to keeping customers engaged

As per a McKinsey study published in October 2020, the current level of computer-based interactions with consumers is three years ahead of the trend expected by 2023, and businesses have enhanced their products to be partially or fully digital seven years ahead of the curve to maintain their competitive edge.

The pursuit of competitiveness also motivates businesses to create unique experiences on their digital platforms to retain their customer base.

Digital natives expect personalised and meaningful content when they engage with a brand. Businesses, with the help of digital transformation agencies, can leverage the power of content to shape perceptions about their brand and the value associated with it.

When a business injects personalisation into its content marketing strategy, it sets itself to lead and dominate the industry.

Why personalisation is a mandate for digital businesses?

Personalisation is critical for the success of digital businesses since it helps customers feel valued, and not bombarded with mass messages. When these customers feel listened to, they respond accordingly. A large number of digital users feel extremely annoyed if their favourite brands use old-world strategies such as using generic ad messages repeatedly.

Personalised content is even more important for ecommerce brands as they operate in a highly competitive online space for the customer’s attention. For these brands, personalised content and experience increase sales and reduce cart abandonment rates.

Overall, there are five key benefits for marketers to invest in personalised content in 2021:

• Increases social media engagement with customers
• Higher lead generation and conversions
• Improves stronger consumer relationships and loyalty
• Expands brand awareness and affinity
• Reduced information overload and brand noise

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Below are some of the overarching strategies to create personalised content for a unique digital experience for customers: -

Know your audience

It is impossible to personalise the brand content without in-depth client data that goes through a rigorous analytics mechanism.

To start with, digital marketers should look to partner with digital agencies to inculcate competency in data analytics. Such a partner can help brands create audience personas, ie, how their ideal customer looks like, and then compare this with the existing customer persona gathered from the business’ website and social media channels.

Some of the characteristics that define customer persona on online platforms are demographic, interests, social media activity, browsing, and purchase history etc. Once a business has these audience insights, it can design hyper-segmented content based on these personalities.

Respond to the conversations

Another effective way to personalise the consumer experience is by actively replying to user comments on social media. It also helps to know the customer sentiment about the business. Customers often fall in love with brands that provide a friendly and fun experience.

Think of brands like Netflix India or Durex and we know how it connects the dot between customers and brands. Their responses to user comments show how they care about their customer relationships.

User-generated content

A 2019 study by Hootsuite suggests that people are 2.4 times more likely to perceive user-generated content as authentic, as compared to branded content. Brands should try different approaches and measures to encourage people to generate interesting content that is cherished by both sides.

Contests, live chats, and virtual events where customers are appropriately rewarded for participation are some of the popular ways to trigger user-generated content. Once a brand cracks the code, it becomes an automated machine for personalised content strategy.

Go omnichannel

Digital natives do not restrict to any single platform for connecting with the world. They fiddle with the search engine, surf websites, spend time on social media, check out apps, and much more. Therefore, brands have to tap all the channels where their target audience are present.

These consumers should be able to get a uniform experience on each of these platforms whenever they engage with the brand. The omnichannel strategy improves customer retention and loyalty.

Retargeting

A retargeting campaign is an effective way for brands to deliver a personally customised message to their potential customers. Retargeting is done based on people’s browsing and purchase history, their interaction with brand ads and visiting the homepage of the website.

For instance, if someone visited a brand’s website, added a product to the cart but eventually did not check out, the brand can track this user, send a retargeting message, and encourage it to complete the purchase.