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Nowadays businesses are doing everything to reach consumers. From franchises going global to the digital age of online consumer opportunities, it’s underscored the importance of personalization.
As described in a related CMSWire article by Alan J. Porter, “Personalization means using audience and data analytics to meet the individual needs of a consumer.”
In this article, we'll discuss geo-location, product recommendations and Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) as three ways brands can improve customer personalization.
Related Article: What Do You Mean By Personalization?
Why Geo-Location Is Essential to Success
The first thing any company should do is identify with some consumer data where your audience is located, along with gender and age, preferences and timezone. This would give you enough information to understand your consumers as not just a number.
David M. Wallace, research director at IDC, said using geo-location helps identify a target audience and serve them with the right content. “For the customer, receiving a communication from a brand they already know proves the brand understands their needs and the offers communicate ... increased convenience and saved time," Wallace said. "For the brand, it’s an opportunity to convert interest (browsing) to purchase (revenue and profits) more rapidly while also delivering products, services or experiences that customers are already interested in from their browsing behavior. And, it’s not viewed as creepy because the customer has already opted-in by signing up with the brand and by installing either the brand’s app or a third-party app for making reservations at restaurants.”
Related Article: Where Does Location Tech Fit in CX Roadmap?CDP Is the Statistical Tool of Consumer Retention
A Customer Data Platform is a collection of data in the form of a unified dataset that reflects single customer profiles. It’s cleaned, maintained and organized data all structured and stored as a marketing system.
Data for a CDP gets collected from various sources from mobile apps, websites, surveys and customer services, to name a few. Then these data entries will be formulated and analyzed to produce a system that matches their target audience. Advertising, emails, CRM, etc. all take into account your consumer data from their CDP.
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How do companies incorporate a CDP? The collection of data is becoming increasingly complex with many changes and strategies to increase efficiency as companies look to expand and improve. Due to the average amount of tools and resources needed to maintain a high-scale CDP network, it’s increasingly difficult. However, CDP is growing rapidly in the last few years; it’s estimated to have grown 48% across businesses according to research by Segment.
Related Article: What Is a Customer Data Platform (CDP)?
How Product Recommendation Tools Retain Consumers
Retailers and brands are moving away from human-tuned (or worse, cookie-cutter) product exploration toward intelligent, personalized, AI-driven product discovery experiences, according to Forrester Principal Analyst Emily Pfeiffer. These tools help to improve recommendations of what the consumer is potentially looking for or even not looking for but might purchase.
“If the products retailers recommend are irrelevant or unappealing, customers will simply shop elsewhere," Pfeiffer said. "The systems digital businesses use to personalize the product discovery process must respect both the shopping intent of the customer and the priorities of the merchant.”
Where Are We Now With Brands and Consumer Satisfaction?
With the rise of CDP, product recommendations and geo-location monitoring, consumer trends become increasingly important for brands to understand as consumers are not just a number.
Knowing your customer means more trust from the customer, according to Wallace. “Increased empathy leads to trust, which leads to increased brand loyalty," he said. "For the brand, increased loyalty means the customer is more likely to both purchase more from the brand and also more likely to continue as a highly-engaged customer, which generates higher revenue and profit for the brand.”