We spoke with over a hundred ecommerce operators, agencies, and ecommerce tech companies, and asked for their opinion on the benefits of quiz funnels and personalized marketing.
First, here is an AI analysis and summary of all of their thoughts:
Benefits of Having a Quiz on an Ecommerce Store:
- Personalization: Catered suggestions make the shopping experience feel individually tailored, creating a positive first interaction with the brand.
- Data Collection: Collecting first-party and zero-party data informs tailored messaging, audience segmentation, and more personalized interactions, leading to increased conversion rates.
- Product Matching: Quizzes help customers find products that match their needs, potentially reducing returns and improving customer satisfaction.
- Engagement: An interactive quiz adds a fun element to the shopping process and increases time spent on the site, enhancing brand connection and loyalty.
- Segmentation: Allows for granular customer segmentation, resulting in highly targeted and effective marketing campaigns.
- Discovery and Education: A quiz can act as a discovery tool for customers, guiding them to products and providing educational content.
- Quality Leads: Creates opportunities to educate and immerse customers in the brand, leading to better quality leads and deeper brand relationships.
- Tailored Recommendations: Products and messaging can be tailored based on customer inputs, aligning with their specific circumstances and preferences.
Importance of Personalized Marketing:
- Customer Relationships: Creates meaningful connections by understanding customer preferences and behaviors, resulting in increased retention and repeat purchases.
- Data Capture: Using tools like quizzes to collect demographic and preference information enables personalized marketing messages.
- Customer Experience: Delivers targeted content based on real-time customer data and behavior, improving customer engagement and satisfaction.
- Better Retargeting: Conversion tracking and enriched event data allow for precise retargeting with products or offers that customers have shown interest in.
- Data Utilization: Personalization requires quality data and insights to effectively tailor content and offers to individual customer profiles.
- Customer Journey: Personalization isn't limited to marketing but extends across the entire customer journey for a consistently relevant experience.
- Privacy Balancing: Respecting customer privacy while offering personalized experiences, with transparency and control over data preferences.
- Content Adaptation: On-site content, such as text blocks and banners, can be dynamic and adapt to customer data like quiz results or shopping preferences.
- Segmentation and Targeting: Various segmentation strategies enable personalized content for different customer lifecycle stages or based on specific behaviors or demographics.
- Customer Service: Empathy and understanding through customer service interactions can root the shopping experience in a genuine personal connection.
In summary, quizzes and personalized marketing are pivotal for ecommerce brands as they enhance customer engagement, improve the relevance and effectiveness of marketing efforts, and ultimately lead to stronger customer relationships and increased conversions.
Here is exactly what experts had to say on "Why should ecommerce brands have a quiz on their store?"
Jared Shaner, Partner x CRO @ Trellis
Personalization, personalization, personalization ... it allows folks to feel as though in that first interaction your brand is driving a catered suggestions. long-term allows brands to capture valuable 1st party data that they can use to segment and personalize the ways in which they interact with these consumers
Jason Wong, CEO at Doe Beauty
The value of having a quiz on our store is collecting zero party data to help us better market to our customers.
Founder, Zettler Digital
Data, data, data. Being able to understand more about customers to be able to tailor messaging from owned marketing channels, as well as provide product recommendations.
Joseph Hsieh, Founder at Retention Commerce
Zero party data for better segmentation and personalization.
Phill Manson, Founder at PAASE
To enrich customer data, to create a 'concierge'/shop assistant process that can aid customer product selection
Founder, Punchline Copy
The Internet can be a joyful, delightful playground. BUT it can also be incredibly boring. Giving people a chance to interact (push buttons!) and receive an unknown result (mystery! novelty!) that also feels personal (ooh I'm special!) is such an easy ask. It feels like fun, because it is fun, but it's also secretly serving your brand data — and hopefully triggering custom email flows. 😈
Connie Cen, CEO at Rocketeer Media
TO GET ZERO PARTY DATA!!!!
Cassidy Coleman, Head of Client Success at Fluency Firm
Your communication is only as good as what you know about your audience, and the way you collect data on your audience is only as effective as the value it creates for the subscriber. A quiz is such an engaging way to collect information that doesn’t feel dull to the subscriber as they participate, and gives them a little value in exchange whether that’s through a promotion, personalized results, or just better targeted content in their inbox.
Martin Connelly, Digital Director at First Pier
First and foremost we see the quiz driving conversion. Everything else, from data to segmentation is gravy.
Deborah Mecca, Founder at Causeway 305
The value of having a quiz on your eCommerce store is to give your customers a more personalized product that matches their needs which will likely result in a reduction in returns. Another benefit is to collect first party data to better tailor future product recommendations to your customers.
Danielle Schwolow, Founder at Fylter
Users want to know which Disney character they are and when your site has a quiz they are able to find out the answer but for your brand. Users want to know what products you offer that are most relevant to them based on their shared pain point. The value of having a quiz is making the user feel like there is a personalized recommendation they can connect with on an emotional level because they've told you about their needs and you've told them how you think you can help.
Kat Garcia, Founder at Email Science
Imagine you have a physical store.
If you have enough selections to warrant going up to a prospective customer and ask, ""can I help you find the right product for you?"" — then you need a quiz. (This also includes a small inventory that has considerable depth or nuance between the products.)
Quizzes done right is like that nice, unobtrusive, non-hovering, and super helpful saleslady in your store. She doesn't push you to buy any particular product—she listens to you and recommends what she thinks is best for you. You feel seen and understood. She helps you get the information you need, and lets you do your thing after.
Alex Back, CEO at Couch.com
Every retailer needs a hook to engage consumers in their product or brand. A quiz is a great way to add immediate depth to a shopping experience and increase engagement ASAP upon entry to the site. Secondarily, it can open a literal plethora of personalization opportunities- even if the personalization tech stack on a given website or retail store is slim, the very presence of something that FEELS personal to a consumer like a quiz can make them inherently feel more connected to their shopping experiences.
Val Geisler, Director of Retention and Lifecycle at ByHeart
A quiz gives the customer a reason to share their email address without a discount up front. They get value from the quiz content and you get to establish a relationship built on education, not discounts. Plus you get all of that sweet sweet data you can use to build that relationship even further.
Chris Mikulin, Head of Growth at Füm
I love how they have the ability to create better quality leads. It’s a great opportunity to educate the customer and personalize their experience to immerse deeper into your brand beyond just a single pop-up.
Rafi Tanzim, CEO at Fuego.io
Quizzes act as an amiable guide for the customers upon your digital emporium. But beyond that, Quizzes could also be a strategic tool that helps you understand what your customers are looking for. It's essentially a data collection mechanism that's more interactive than a simple survey. Platforms like Fuego.io allows you to add quizzes natively to your store's mobile app with ease.
CMO @ Heatmap.com
Having a quiz is: a) interactive, it allows the customer to be a part of the brand story rather than just absorbing the brand story. b) customization: data you wouldn't receive anywhere else to customize the experience to drive purchase velocity.
Co-Founder at Pacific IQ
How do you get the right product in front of the right customer at the right time?
Enter product recommendation quizzes.
A trend that's set to explode in 2023, these quizzes are more than just a marketing gimmick. They're a sales powerhouse, a conversation starter, a customer engagement tool, and a data goldmine rolled into one.
For starters, they provide personalized shopping experiences. Customers no longer have to sift through hundreds of products. With quizzes, they're guided directly to what they want, increasing the chances of a purchase.
Next, they offer valuable customer insights. Every answer is a piece of data that helps you understand your audience better. You learn their preferences, needs, and shopping behaviors, enabling you to tailor your marketing strategies more effectively.
Lastly, they're interactive. In a world of passive scrolling, quizzes stand out and engage. They make shopping fun and interactive, encouraging customers to spend more time on your store.
Valerie Caron, BLANQI cofounder
It has allowed BLANQI to interact directly with targeted audiences in a more engaging way than just sending them an email or sms asking for a response. It’s a fantastic way to share the brand experience while segmenting and learning more about our customers needs and problems that we can solve.
Deb Mukherjee, Head of Marketing, Numeral
Two reasons:
- You get to collect invaluable zero-party data that you can use to launch targeted campaigns via email, SMS and other channels.
- You get high-intent customers who are likely to convert faster than your regular visitors because they have gone through the pain of filling out your quiz to find the perfect product. It's also useful to convince online window shoppers to find the right product because window shoppers ""want"" it but might not ""need"" it. A quiz can be enticing if they can find the product that they'll actually use.
Marnie Madras, CEO at Rumbly
Feels like a more personalized Shopping Experience
- Product Discovery
- Increased Conversion Rates
- Data Collection and Customer Insights
- Segmentation and Targeting
- Engagement and Brand Loyalty
- Social Sharing
- Lead Gen
Bridgette Salley, Retention and Lifecycle Consultant
The value of having a quiz in an ecommerce store is nearly immeasurable. Having a quiz is an easy way to collect useful data from your potential or current customers without being invasive plus it's a fun way for potential customers to interact with and learn more about your brand.
Jacob Sappington, Dir of Email Strategy at Homestead Studio
List growth + great content/product record for people who are still mid to top of funnel.
Israa Alrawi, The Winbox
To gain insight on cold traffic/new subscribers so that you can tailor your messaging and personalize their experience. Brands would benefit from a quiz because it would allow for personalization based on data. It also would allow them to understand how their products are truly being used and solving their customers problems.
Bunny Ghatrora, COO, Blume
To get data / give customers personalized options.
Ben Schreiber, Founder at Brand Caffeine and Head of Ecommerce at Latico Leathers
Helps with education and decision paralysis.
Victor Green - Managing Director at Flight Digital
Get that data - to better know your customers enabling better product, marketing and business decisions in future. Also just to show you care by engaging with your customers.
Matt Young, CRO, Underground Ecom
HUGE! it's always great to understand what you current and prospective clients actually want!
Ned MacPherson, Founder & Head of Growth at Endrock Growth & Analytics
Beyond the obvious of making a curated recommendation, quizzes have a sneaky way of really hammering home the brand/product/service USP. Site users are typically quite superficial in their browsing behavior, so a quiz virtually guarantee's a substantial bump in engagement time and depth.
Brandon Amoroso, Founder & President at Electriq
Zero party data and guiding the customer journey.
Daniel Okon, CEO at ACTIV
A quiz is really an excellent tool to help people find the perfect product they may want or need in the buying journey. We’ve found excellent revenue per session numbers when the quiz is on the home page, showing that a warmer audience can have the most valuable LTV.
Founder and CEO at Rocketeer Media
If you want your customers to be educated on your products, you should have a quiz.
If you want to give the right product for your customer, you should have a quiz.
If you have more than 10 SKUs, you should have a quiz.
If you want your customers to feel confident that they're buying the right products to improve their life, you should have a quiz.
If you want increased revenue that is guaranteed by having loads of zero-party data, you should have a quiz.
Ashvin Melwani, CMO & Co-Founder of Obvi
The value of having a quiz on your store is to segment your audience down to the T. What do they care about? Someone who may be interested in a weight loss product is different from someone who is interested in a hair loss product. Treat them differently and give them a more personalized experience. A quiz allows you to bucket these people accordingly.
Here is exactly what experts had to say on "What is the importance of personalized marketing?"
Ben Zettler Digital
Personalization is everything when it comes to building meaningful customer relationships.
Let's break that down: meaningful customer relationships. What are we really talking about when we say that, aside from it just being the "buzzwordy" phrase in ecommerce at the moment?
At the end of the day, the goal for any ecommerce business is to sell products or services by either getting more people to buy something or getting people that already have bought something to buy more.
That's it.
We shouldn't tip-toe around that as if the point of doing what we do isn't to make money.
But, there's a lot of nuance for how best to go about selling more and making more money in today's environment. Gone are the days where brands can:
Post the same content across all of their social accounts with a link out to a new product and expect to drive an impactful level of traffic to their website.
Pick off a few interests in Facebook targeting, spend $1,000 and drive a few hundred website purchases.
Send an email just with some product imagery to an entire list of users and get a massive portion of users to open, click and purchase from that message.
Why can't the above be done anymore? A lot of reasons—social platform algorithms, competition, spam filters, iOS updates…and the list goes on.
So, what can brands do to support the growth of their business?
Personalization.
Personalization is the key to community building—the process of engaging with customers to help your brand play a key role in making customers happy.
Okay, too broad.
Community building is humanizing social posts from brand pages, coordinating events (virtual or in-person) like one-on-one or group conversations with brand ambassadors/partners and top customers, creating referral programs where frequent buyers can be rewarded for showcasing what they love about a brand to their social audiences and many other things.
So, how can personalization help power those efforts? Let's use an example of a workout supplement company using personalization to grow their business. Personalization for them could mean:
Creating an Octane AI quiz asking about a potential customer's workout habits, dietary restrictions and fitness goals to recommend products that may be most relevant to them.
Tailoring email automations to past purchasers of X product to to showcase Y complimentary product.
Serving dynamic on-site content based on purchase history and quiz responses
Provide exclusive offers and experiences to users that join a loyalty program or a paid memberships program
Conceptually each of the above revolves around a fairly simple principle: serve content to users that they are more likely to be interested in. The more relevant your brand, your messaging and simply your products are to someone, the more likely they will be to buy.
YOCTO
A true testament to the power of personalization is our work with Myoovi, a brand dedicated to women's health, offering solutions for a variety of menstrual problems. We created a finely-tuned, individualized experience starting with an Octane quiz. This quiz dives deep, not just gathering data but truly grasping each woman's menstrual cycle phase, duration, and specific hurdles.
We then merge the Quiz responses seamlessly to Klaviyo. The result? An impressively complex flow that charts a distinct and personalized path through all 4 stages of a woman's menstrual cycle, starting from the stage she’s going through right now for a hyper-personalized feel. As each user navigates through her unique journey, she receives content tailored to her current phase and challenges, coupled with relevant product suggestions that address her specific needs.
"Octane allows us to move beyond promotions and truly grasp the depth of our users’ issues, providing the right remedy at the precise moment." - Bobi Jonceski, YOCTO’s Email Marketing Specialist
IN SOCIAL
WHAT IS THE MOST ANNOYING THING ABOUT THE INTERNET?
Being forced to interact with anything that is irrelevant to you!
How many times have you received an email about a sale for a product you purchased (full-price) 2 weeks ago? How about getting ads for a men’s beard oil when you’re a single female (looking, but have not yet found a man you’re interested in buying beard oil for!) Or what about landing on a website with 3000+ SKUs without having a clue of where to start? The worst is when you get recommended a product, add it to your cart, and then find out in checkout that it doesn’t even ship to your country!
All those internet annoyances come from a lack of personalization.
WHAT IS PERSONALIZATION?
Marketing personalization is when the marketing messages you receive are tailored to you: your interests, your demographics, your geographics, and your previous behaviors.
Yes, it’s creepy, and yes there’s a ton of legal drama around the ability for online brands and softwares to be able to track you, but, without even realizing it, customers may actually prefer being tracked so that brand marketing messages are something they may actually be slightly interested in.
(No thanks Fisher-Price - I’m a 40 year old man without kids in a 50 mile radius of my life!)
HOW CAN YOU USE PERSONALIZATION?
As an online shopper, you know that getting marketing messages that aren’t meant for you can make any online experience a pain.
As an online marketer, you know that messages without personalization don’t perform even close to as well as ones with it.
So how do you ensure your marketing speaks to the audiences you are trying to convert?
Start with Data Capture
You can’t personalize your marketing if you aren’t using tools to capture the information you need to create the personalization.
Data can be collected through 0-party collection, 1st-party collection, 2nd-party collection (though, not ideal), and 3rd-party collection.
The most effective way to capture personalization data is through 0-party data which is when a customer hands over their information to you. Using tools like an online Quiz (hey Octane!) is a way to ask customers to provide demographic information about themselves, as well as providing more information about their preferences and routines. Boom, that information can be used to send out personalized marketing messages that speak to exactly the information they’ve shared with you.
They gave you their birthday? Happy birthday, here’s a discount!
They gave you their skin type? Check out this marketing email where we recommend the exact products for your type!
They told you they live in Canada? Come see our website in CAD! (None of that terrible USD conversion or import duties!)
Look at that, those marketing messages are directly related and relevant to your customers based on the information they willingly supplied you!
1st-party and 3rd-party data are great, too, but they come from intermediary sources and aren’t always super accurate. 1st is more accurate than 3rd (they gave you their email in a popup and you can track their browsing behavior and ping them if they leave without buying), but 3rd it’s still a great idea to work them into your marketing (tracking which ads on IG they engaged with to show them similar ads to drive conversion).
Segment!
Capture the data and then segment it per whatever marketing message you are planning to send:
Exclude emailing customers who just bought the product that you are about to market is on sale (also, exclude them from any ads you’ll be placing!)
Show them similar products to the ones they’ve been perusing on your site (better yet, show them those same products come as a cheaper bundle)
Message ‘em about what they want to hear
Not only do you have segments of people grouped together based on certain behaviors or purchases, you also have the ability to lean into dynamic elements.
Some tools like Klaviyo (hello!) allow you to insert custom blocks into your emails based on other data, such as what’s been collected from Octane!
You had 400 people fill out your “What’s my sleep style quiz,” but there are also 20+ different answers? All you need to do is build an email campaign that dynamically inserts recommended products based on their answers! Suddenly, your quiz takers will get products recommended to them that are actually suited to their needs - why wouldn’t they buy?
BUT HOW CAN “I” USE PERSONALIZATION?
If you’re a brand reading this and thinking “where do I even start?” Well, you’ve started!
That said, there’s so much potential when it comes to personalization that knowing what to focus on can be hard. It may be worth investing some time reading into Octane's resources (conveniently found on their website!) If you don’t have time to learn a whole new marketing strategy, don’t be afraid to leverage external Ecommerce agencies (like In Social, an Octane partner!) to help you.
FJ Solutions
In today's dynamic business landscape, personalization is a game-changer in marketing and customer interactions. Brands that understand its significance aren't just meeting customer expectations; they're building meaningful connections. Here are three simple strategies brands use to nail personalization:
- Data-Powered Insights: Brands dive into data to understand customer preferences and behaviors. With this knowledge, they create marketing campaigns and product recommendations that feel tailor-made for each customer.
- Smart Segmentation: Recognizing that everyone is unique, brands group customers based on factors like age, purchase history, and online activity. This way, customers receive content and offers that truly resonate with them.
- Tailored Content: Picture emails that use your name, suggest products you'd actually love, or address your specific needs. Brands use personalized content to create a more relatable and engaging customer experience.
In a nutshell, personalization is a must-have in today's marketing world. Brands that embrace it are forging deeper connections with customers, making their experiences more enjoyable and relevant.
LEAF
In the world of performance marketing, some of the more broad brush approaches involve localizing things like product feeds and ad messaging, using region specific currencies and languages, but our key tip for personalization is proper Conversion Tracking.
By enriching the events that you track on your website with all the right product data parameters, you can retarget web visitors who have undertaken specific events - view product, add to cart etc - with the exact product (size, color, model etc) they have interacted with, thus increasingly the likelihood of conversion. PMax and dynamic retargeting campaigns will take care of this on Google, and DPA/Catalog retargeting campaigns provide this functionality on Meta, provided all the right parameters are being sent via the tags.
Conversion tracking and customer segmentation also works for post-lead and post-purchase campaigns:
- For post-purchase campaigns you can retarget customer segments piped in from a zero or first-party data platform, who have purchased a specific product, with relevant accessories, or upgrades.
- For post-lead campaigns, using zero-party data, you can go one further. Imagine a furniture brand retargeting people who have filled in a form, in which they have volunteered data to the brand on what kind of space they live in and whether they have pets or kids - you can retarget that segment with furniture that is suitable for the space, made from materials that would withstand doggy claws, toddler drool and random smeary food detritus.
Blend Commerce
To curate a highly personalized experience on your site, begin by harnessing the power of on-site copy personalization. Blend Commerce advises tailoring messages for various audiences. Strengthen relationships with a warm 'Welcome back' for returning customers, and go further by addressing logged-in users by their first name. Prioritize educating new visitors by adjusting your on-site copy for their limited knowledge about your brand and products.
Blend also recommends implementing an intelligent recommendation engine that analyzes user behavior and purchase history to boost cross-selling and upselling, creating a seamless, personalized, on-site experience that enhances CLV. During your personalisation journey, prioritize gathering valuable data with multi-step forms, conversational pop-ups and on-site quizzes to enhance your personalized content.
Octane AI's Conversational Pop-Ups and Klaviyo’s Multi-Step Signup Forms are ways to create interactive and innovative experiences designed to collect opt-ins, ask your customers about their needs and preferences (collecting invaluable zero-party data) and make personalized product recommendations that can be added to the cart - right from a single pop-up.
Octane AI allows brands to humanize their shopping experience and learn more about visitors through a store quiz. Through this quiz, you can get to know each person who visits your store and ask them questions about their goals, interests, and pain points, allowing you to recommend personalized products to the right person for the right reason based on each visitor's unique answers. All while collecting and storing data at each and every step.
This data can then be used to further segment and personalize your email campaigns and flows based on each customer's unique profile properties.
Want to see the Octane AI Quiz in action? Take a look at how we worked with Hunter & Gather to increase their flow revenue by 258%
Like with all email flows, segmentation is essential. But specifically with Welcome Flows, you need to understand where your customers are in their journey. Segmentation will increase their customer experience, increase their personalization, and find areas of your store that they perhaps didn’t know existed.
Start by segmenting customers by their source. It's all very good and well to know they’ve signed up, but knowing WHERE they’ve signed up from, will give you a unique insight into how different customers interact with your store after the sign-up process.
For example, by segmenting your Welcome Flow based on whether a customer signed up from a discount offering vs a customer who signed up through your Newsletter form, you’ll be able to target the messaging to those two different customer types, as well as differentiate a customer who is truly here for your brand, or a customer, who really just wanted the discount and is more likely to unsubscribe in the near future.
You can also use your flows to segment your subscribers based on their unique quiz data, and direct customers who haven't completed the quiz to do so. By segmenting customers based on their preferences, interests and goals, you can tailor the messaging on each flow path to be specific to them, giving them personalized product recommendations if they haven't purchased before, or cross-selling complementary products based on their preferences and previous purchase history.
You can then use this information to segment your Welcome Flows, Abandoned Cart Flows and Winback Flows and give each subscriber a tailored and personalized email experience, which will delight and engage your customers.
If you love the information we have shared but don’t have the time to work through the implementation, Blend would be happy to help you leverage personalisation within your Klaviyo flows to maximize your return on investment.
Sienna AI
Siena's is an empathic AI customer service agent that redefines the customer experience by placing personalization and genuine connection at the forefront. It achieves this by understanding each customer's unique context, emotions, and preferences, creating interactions that feel like engaging with a trusted friend rather than a machine. Siena doesn't just provide answers; it actively listens, empathizes, and responds in a way that resonates with the customer's individual needs.
Imagine a customer who contacts a brand with a question or concern. With Siena, they're not met with generic responses or scripted replies. Instead, Siena remembers their past interactions, acknowledges their specific circumstances, and offers solutions that are tailored to their situation. This level of personalization fosters a sense of being genuinely seen and heard, which is often missing in traditional customer service interactions.
Moreover, Siena's Persona Studio feature allows brands to further enhance the customer experience by crafting AI personas that align with their unique brand voice and values. This means that every interaction, whether it's through email, chat, or social media, carries the brand's distinctive personality, creating a cohesive and memorable experience. Siena's impressive CSAT score of 4.81 out of 5, based on feedback from over 50,000 satisfied customers, reflects its commitment to delivering outstanding customer experiences and solidifies its position as the go-to solution for brands looking to humanize their customer service.
Swanky Agency
With more choice than ever before for consumers, taking a one-size-fits-all approach to your marketing and customer experience simply won’t cut it. To cut through the noise and really connect with shoppers, it’s important to leverage what you know about your customers and their likes, dislikes, needs etc. to provide a personalized, relevant experience. When executed well, personalization can help you increase retention of your loyal customers.
However, there are some best practices that are important to keep in mind when personalizing your marketing and customer experience.
For example, any personalization strategy should begin with the collection and analysis of customer data. Your goal? To build rich and unified customer profiles. This is vital to deliver a truly relevant experience that actually drives results. Your data needs to come from various touch points - not just your ecommerce site. Think emails, in-store interactions, social media interactions, customer service tickets, and more. These profiles will help laser-focus your personalization efforts.
Furthermore, when it comes to deploying personalization tactics, don’t take a ‘spray and pray’ approach. Whilst it can be tempting to run with lots of different approaches, think about which strategies make sense for your objectives. Test your ideas and let the data do the talking - which of your efforts do customers respond to best?
Melusine Studio
How can brands personalize their marketing and customer experience?
When the digital realm often feels inundated with an endless stream of content, standing out requires more than just innovative products or catchy slogans. It requires a connection—a personal touch, to make customers feel valued (and validated). Here's how we bring personalization front and centre in your marketing strategy to improve the customer experience and foster loyalty.
Adopt a Customer-Centric Content Approach
Before drafting that email or social media post, pause and ask: “Is this for us or for our customer?” Successful brands embrace the principle of crafting content with the customer in mind, ensuring that messages resonate with their audience. Instead of focusing on what you want to promote, zero in on what the customer really wants to hear.
Know Your Customer Inside-Out
It’s not enough to know what your best selling products are; you need to know why your customers go for that specific design time and time again, how they found your brand in the first place, and what is going to draw them in next. At Mélusine Studio, we use tools like pop-ups, quizzes, and preference centres to complement behavioural tracking and offer insights into engagement levels and points of drop-off.
Gaining a deeper understanding into what makes your customers tick and what is acting as a barrier to driving conversions fuels growth. Abandoned cart or browsing triggers can prove particularly insightful.
Deploy a Data-Driven Strategy
While collecting data is crucial, its true value is in its application. Many brands are data-rich but insight-poor. Extracting patterns, discerning common traits, and creating personas are all essential steps in our marketing solutions. At Mélusine Studio, we adopt a design-thinking approach, where empathy with the customer is foundational. Understand their journey, pinpoint their pain points, and then determine how your product or service can be the solution.
Translate Insights into Action
Timing is Everything. Behavioural segmentation will engage your customers when they're most receptive. A perfectly timed abandoned cart reminder can mean the difference between a lost sale and a loyal customer. And don’t forget to add the personal touch. Address customers by their name, offer messages from the brand's founder, and adopt a more humanistic content approach. It's the little things that deepen relationships.
For our brick & mortar clients, the emphasis is always on ensuring the in-store experience is mirrored digitally. If floor staff wouldn't pressure a customer, digital communication should be equally respectful and inviting.
At Mélusine Studio, we’ve mastered the art of tailored content. By gathering actionable insights through tools like personalised quizzes, we’re able to target customers with products that suit their specific problems or desires. Approach your marketing strategy like this and each customer interaction will strengthen brand loyalty.
Personalization is more than just a marketing buzzword. It's a commitment to understanding and valuing your audience. When done right, simple transactions are transformed into enduring relationships. Dive deep, connect genuinely, and watch your brand flourish.
Proto AI
Personalization plays an increasingly vital role in connecting businesses to their customers. To make your customers feel valued, it's essential to give them a tailored experience that resonates with their individual needs and preferences. This is where personalized customer experiences come into play.
Personalization isn't marketing fluff; it can be transformative for businesses. But how do these experiences influence people to act and why are these tactics so effective for businesses?
Over and over, it has been demonstrated that strong customer experiences make customers more likely to do business with that company. At its core, personalization is about delivering the right content to the right person at the right time.
The Proto AI platform is built on these principles and takes them a step further by leveraging real-time user behavior to give businesses the power to deliver truly personalized product recommendations. In this new era of online shopping where consumers are flooded with content and options, those hyper-personalized experiences stand out. At Proto AI, we've seen firsthand how well-timed and properly targeted marketing can turn passive customers into buyers.
Leveraging personalization to build better customer relationships
With the right strategies, your business can continuously optimize customer experiences. Proto AI leverages next generation AI to solve for the individual user to deliver better, more accurate product recommendations that generate measurable ROI. Most AI and product recommendation engines offer alternatives to something users are already looking at – for example, a blue couch rather than a green one and often recommend the most popular “best sellers” based on past purchases. By contrast, Proto AI continuously learns - and unlearns – customer behavior to keep customers engaged. By surfacing items that compliment what a user is looking at – like a console table for a customer looking at blue couches – Proto AI recommends the right products at the right time throughout the journey to improve accuracy and drive upsells. Average engagement for customers on a website is between 2 and 5 minutes and most products are never seen because they are buried in your product catalog. From the moment a customer enters your website our goal is to make recommended products accessible across every page, from your product catalog to checkout, leading to a better shopping experience for your customers and higher average order value for your business.
To fully understand how effective our personalization strategies are at driving sales, we need tools that give us comprehensive insights into customer interactions. With Proto AI determining the success of your personalization efforts isn’t a guessing game — our analytics dashboard includes quick, top-level reports in metrics such as AOV, Conversion Rate, Cart Success Rate, Attributable Purchases, and more, along with a complete set of drill down reports that provide deeper insights. Potential customers tend to respond positively when they see content tailored to them, resulting in increased customer satisfaction. By understanding user behavior, tailoring content, and making every interaction meaningful, businesses can boost customer satisfaction, foster loyalty, and continue to drive ecommerce revenue.
Longplay Brands
How can brands personalize their marketing and customer experience?
Brands can personalize their marketing & customer experience through segmenting their email marketing to speak to customers at different stages of their customer lifecycle.
First off, brands should personalize & segment their audience through both zero-party and first-party data. Zero-party data is information collected directly from the customer through surveys & quizzes. First-party data is information collected about the customer indirectly through their behavior such as the products they viewed or purchased.
When it comes to developing a strategy behind customer segmentation, the main question to ask is “WIll creating unique, personalized content for this audience have positive ROI?” meaning:
- Is there a way to splice our customers in that, if we send them down a different journey with different content, we’d get more lifetime value out of them?
- Is the ROI on the effort it takes to do that worth it? This depends on the segment size, the estimated lift & the revenue of the business. This is why $100M+ brands can benefit from more segmentation that isn’t worth it for a $1M brand… because it’s the same amount of work, but a 1% lift is $1M for a $100M brand and only $100K for a $1M brand
The common mistake brands make is over-segmenting their audience. For example, we could segment customers based on whether they bought a red t-shirt or a blue t-shirt as their first purchase. But if the effort of creating a different variation of a campaign doesn’t actually meaningfully increase engagement or conversion rates, that’s not a useful segmentation.
Here are a few different ways to segment your audience:
- Purchase Behavior: Whether the customer has made a purchase or not
- Purchase Frequency: Whether customers have only made one purchase, multiple purchases, or a subscription
- By Product/Collection Type: The types of products or collections a customer has bought from
- By LTV: High LTV vs Low LTV
- By Customer Type: This data can be collected through a quiz like Octane AI, or in your email pop-up
- By AOV: Whether a customer has a high AOV vs low AOV
- By Buyer Intent: Whether a customer has viewed a product, added it to cart, or abandoned cart recently
- By Engagement: Whether a customer has opened or clicked an email
Hawke Media
We're in the midst of a personalization revolution. Previously lauded innovations are fast becoming standard expectations. And it's not just the tech titans leading the charge. With AI and machine learning tools becoming increasingly accessible, companies, big and small, are joining the fray.
The bar for excellence? It's not stationary; it's perpetually rising.
AI and machine learning are your allies in this journey. These technologies dive deep into datasets, from purchase patterns to social media footprints, crafting individualized experiences. According to a study cited in VentureBeat, successful AI-driven personalization increased accuracy (47%), speed of real-time data (44%), and customer retention or repeat purchases (44%).
Start by identifying a robust AI platform suitable for your business scale and needs. Explore tools like HawkeAI, IBM Watson, or Google's AutoML, which cater to varying levels of expertise.
Understanding Before Execution
Data is your goldmine. But remember, it's not about quantity, but quality and relevance.
Conduct regular data audits. Ensure that you're capturing pertinent information and that your data pipelines are clean and efficient. This will set the stage for meaningful insights and fruitful interactions with your target audience.
Beyond Just Marketing
Personalization is an end-to-end process. Every touchpoint, from first contact to post-purchase interactions, should resonate with your customer.
Map out your customer journey. Identify potential areas where AI can enhance the experience, be it through dynamic web content or AI-powered chatbots.
The Balancing Act
While personalization is the goal, privacy is paramount. Regularly review and update your data privacy policies. Make them transparent and easily understandable for your audience. Consider periodic check-ins with your customers, giving them control over their data preferences.
In this dynamic landscape, where personalization is the norm and not the exception, standing still is not an option.
Because
Turn your static Shopify site into a dynamic conversion machine! Hi, we’re Because, a female-founded Shopify app that gives you the power to convert more site visitors on every step of the on-site journey with no-code, dynamic messaging. Merchants who use Because typically see a 5-15% conversion increase during their 14-day free trial and then further optimize to 30-50% after the first 90 days, by using the power of rapid content changes and A/B testing on-site without the need for a developer.
Because can help you both add new and replace existing text and image-based content across your site through well-known implementations like text blocks, badges, banners, top bars, and images. While you might already be familiar with most of the content Because supports, you’ve never seen it used in such a dynamic way. Use our rules engine to determine when, where, and to whom, your content shows on site. Tap into your valuable first-party data from Octane quiz results and recommended products, Klaviyo data, like Segments, Campaigns, and Flows, Shopify data like product tags and collections, Cart data like $ value and what’s in the cart, and finally, Site Visitor data like UTM’s.
As an added bonus, every page type, content type, and data type you just read above can be fully A/B tested with Because. You can go live with new content on your site in a matter of minutes and turn each campaign into an A/B test to understand your real-time impact on key metrics like conversion rate, add-to-cart rate, AOV, and more.
Your fastest way to make more revenue this year is by increasing your on-site conversion. Because helps you convert the site visitors you already have by giving them the messaging they need to move from one step to the next in their on-site journey. From your home page to your collection page to your product page, to your cart. We believe site visitors should have a unique experience on-site based on who they are, where they’re coming from, and what products they’re viewing. Because uses your first-party data to adapt your text and image-based content across your entire site.
When you book time with our team, we’ll ask you questions about your conversion goals, take you through a high-level overview of Because, and assess the potential conversion impact on your business.
Attentive
Personalization enhances customers’ experiences, increases engagement and loyalty, and gives a competitive advantage to brands who get it right. Providing personalized content to each subscriber based on their preferences can be difficult, especially without the right tools. To stand out and deliver the best experience for your customers, you need to be able to collect accurate data and easily use that data to both build targeted audiences and send personalized messages. Attentive™ SMS provides smart segmentation features that allow you to target the right audience with the right text.
Most consumers want companies to not only understand their unique needs and expectations, but also tailor their messaging accordingly, with 56% saying they always expect personalized offers. Each audience segment should receive a text message that’s highly relevant and personalized to their actions, preferences, demographics, and any other information you know about them.
Ways you can segment your SMS subscribers
1. Engaged/unengaged
Just like with email, creating a group of engaged subscribers is many marketers’ go-to SMS segment. An engaged subscriber is actively opening and clicking your text messages, so they’re more likely to click your next text.
2. Past purchasers/non-purchasers
Another effective message segment strategy is identifying groups of subscribers who have—or haven’t—purchased recently. Attentive™ allows brands to track and segment customers based on the purchase and product browsing behavior. Both represent potential marketing and personalization opportunities. For the past purchaser group, you can create effective upsell and cross-sell campaigns based on the item they purchased most recently. The approach will vary based on your brand, but may include time-sensitive discounts, enticing product imagery, or rave reviews on best-selling products. If you want to get even more granular with your non-purchaser group, you can also target new subscribers (e.g., joined in the last 14 days) who haven’t converted since opting in.
3. High-intent
You likely have a subset of subscribers who haven’t purchased (yet) but have shown a high level of interest in your products. These subscribers may engage with your brand without clicking or purchasing. Instead, they browse products on your site or add them to their cart, but navigate away before completing their order. These subscribers get as close as they can to purchasing without actually clicking “buy,” which makes them an ideal audience for personalized follow-ups.
Make sure you’ve activated triggered browse and cart abandonment reminders to capture this otherwise lost revenue. You can personalize the follow-up content further by including information and imagery in the text message based on the specific product the subscriber showed interest in.
4. Geo-location or time zone
Location-based segmentation is useful for targeting weather-related or location-specific events. For example, if you sell items that are more useful in the winter, you can target subscribers in areas with a snowstorm on the way. Attentive™ collects valuable identity markers - like geolocation - that help brands better target their audience. If you have location-specific events, such as a new store opening, you can geo-target subscribers by specific zip codes to invite them to the opening or share a relevant offer.
Jack in the Box - an Attentive™ customer - uses geo-targeting to send special offers to SMS subscribers within local markets—based on their nearest location or delivery coverage zones—to order food online and receive free delivery through food delivery services.
5. Content or shopping preferences
The more you can learn about your subscribers’ unique interests or preferences—through Attentive™ ’s two-way text messaging, preference collection forms, or quizzes—the more relevant text messages you can send them.
Think about ways you can get hyper-specific with your target using zero-party data. For example:
- If you're a beauty brand, learn about someone's skin type (e.g., dry, normal, oily, combination) and send them the best products or recommendations for their needs.
- If you're a clothing brand, learn about your subscribers' favorite products, categories, or styles (e.g., dresses vs. pants, work wear vs. casual outfits, men’s vs. women’s clothing) and message them about relevant items.
- If you're a food and beverage brand, ask subscribers about their favorite items or flavors, and let them know when related products are on sale, or when you're launching something new that they might like.
6. VIP or loyalty status
Determining how a subscriber becomes a “VIP” is up to you. In some cases, brands already have a formal VIP or loyalty program where the conditions and rewards are clearly defined. Other brands may choose to define their segment of VIP or loyal shoppers through actions and behaviors. This criteria can include total dollars spent, amount of purchases made over time, or number of clicks in the past month.
PAASE
Personalization has been a buzz word for many years, and let’s be honest, which brand wouldn’t want to deliver relevant content to their customer base at scale. How you deliver personalization in a commercially viable way is a very different question. Here’s some top tips from PAASE:
- Data-Driven Segmentation: Begin by segmenting your email list based on factors such as demographics, purchase history, browsing behaviour, or engagement levels. Segmentation allows you to send relevant content and offers to different groups of subscribers. For example, sending exclusive discounts to loyal customers or product recommendations based on past purchases.
- Dynamic Content: Use dynamic content within your emails to customise the message for each recipient. By utilizing placeholders for names, product recommendations, and even location-specific information, you can create a highly personalized experience that feels tailored to each subscriber.
- Personalized Subject Lines: The email subject line is the first thing recipients see. Personalize it by including the recipient's name or referencing their recent activity. This can increase open rates.
- Marketing Automation: Implement triggered emails based on specific actions your subscribers take. For instance, if a customer abandons their basket, send a reminder email with the abandoned items and an incentive to complete the purchase. A customer who makes a purchase can automatically be sent a post-purchase email, with content and cross-sell products relevant to their purchase. These behavioural triggers can significantly improve conversion rates. Invest in email marketing automation tools to streamline the process of sending personalised emails.
Personalization is not just about using the recipient's name but about delivering relevant and timely content that meets their specific needs and interests. By utilising these methods, brands can create highly personalized emails that resonate with subscribers, drive engagement, and ultimately lead to better results.
Nosto
Our Commerce Experience Platform offers a breadth of personalization modules for brands to create highly targeted experiences for online shoppers that increase relevancy, aid product discovery, and drive purchases.
From Personalized Search and Category Merchandising, to Product Recommendations and Content Personalization, through Nosto, merchants can create a multitude of experiences across their online stores—all working in harmony to ensure their shoppers’ journeys are consistently tailored to them, from the minute they land on store, right through to checkout.
We’re helping a spectrum of global ecommerce brands do exactly this, including some of the biggest names on Shopify (think Kylie Cosmetics, Chubbies, Supergoop!, and more).
By empowering these brands to enhance the customer experience through personalization that showcases the very products and content their shoppers seek, our clients see uplift across a breadth of key ecommerce metrics.
Some recent examples of brands on Shopify that have seen substantial gains having implemented Nosto include: A.L.C, who saw a 2x increase in online sales from search pages through Personalized Search; Chelsea Peers, who saw a 2x increase in conversion rate of category pages through Category Merchandising; and Dermalogica, who saw a 7% increase in AOV through Product Recommendations.
The Growth Foundation
Customers don’t just want personalization – they demand it throughout the buying journey. Personalisation can come in many forms, i.e. messaging, channel, content, audience etc.
You can achieve this in a number of ways:
Adopting improved customer segmentation - you can target specific groups of people with custom content and offers based on their interests, behaviours, and needs through either a one to many, one to some or one to few approach – enabling marketers to adopt a personalised approach and in turn to drive revenue through increased conversion opportunities and customer lifetime value.
Optimizing the customer experience to deliver the right message via the right channel to the right time from email to mobile to targeted ads or website – where possible look to move towards a full multi-touch, omnichannel experience.
- Example 1- forms of website personalization include notifications, menu personalization, product or content recommendations based on a visitor’s interactions or purchase intent or overall messaging such social proof, reviews etc.
- Example 2 – through CRM specifically, we can send personalised product feeds through email based on their purchase, and viewing history.
Leverage AI and automation to craft meaningful experiences that drive customer value at scale, i.e. using technologies that offer a single view of the customer that can not only ingest but also analyse and engage customer data to enable any/ all of the following:- precise targeting, real-time granular personalization, predictive analytics and insights, advanced modelling like RFM.
Cross-channel preference optimisation i.e. if someone is more inclined to open an email rather than respond to an ad, ensure this is served at the appropriate time.
Seek and act on customer feedback - giving the customer a voice can also help with personalization. Allowing the customer to fill out surveys and give feedback on their products and services can help brands make better, more informed decisions and tailor their services to customer needs. Listening to customers is crucial for improving the personalisation of their experience.
Bemeir
Brands can personalize their marketing messaging by utilizing the insights gained from the shopper journey either through on-site behavior or self attributed data submitted via interactive website features such as quizzes or surveys. With this information in hand, and through the power of segmentation, brands can better target their email marketing, SMS automations, mobile push notifications, and even direct mail at the exact right moments in their customer lifecycle. Additionally these brands can retarget shoppers with more accuracy leading to better cost metrics for advertising.
When it comes to personalization within the customer experience, this is where creativity and brand voice really come into play. By speaking to both the specific customer and what a brand knows about them and their avatar, a brand can really brighten someone’s day or forge unforgettable memories that create affinity for the brand by authentically communicating with the customer at every step of the way. Consider the language used in communicating common interactions such as adding to cart, error messages, success messages, policies, and other often ‘boring’ parts of a site, and how a user’s interpretation of that experience could result in delight. Think of personalization as also a route to personification because when a shopper begins to attribute values to a brand, that brand is coming to life, and as a result the shopper builds trust, wants to learn more, engage, and ultimately interact with the people behind the brand.
Personalization within the on-site assortment and merchandising of a brand’s website presents an opportunity for a user to feel heard in their needs, which if accurately delivered sends a comforting message to the user. This once again builds trust and results in more success in customer acquisition and retention.
The last way and often the most humane way a brand can personalize a shopping experience is with customer service and satisfaction. When a brand trains their staff to empathize with their customers and why they need their products, the staff can engage in a deeper, more meaningful way, knowing that embracing this value system is tantamount to their success as individual contributors.
As consumers we have all experienced, what was otherwise an incredible shopping experience could be tainted by a poor interaction. Fortunately this can be prevented with the ability to integrate chat bots, help desks, and phone systems deeply tied into customer data. Using these systems and now also with the power of AI, brands can empower their teams with knowledge at their fingertips allowing them to always deliver excellent personalized customer experiences in even the most high volume and challenging retail environments.
