Why Personalising User Experiences is the Path to Enhancing Profits
UX explained
Google those three words — ‘personalisation’, ‘user’ and ‘experience’ — and you’ll come up with multiple results about software. Personalised…user experience. But, before you bounce off to a product demo, take a moment to ask and understand: What are its benefits, precisely? How does one go about…doing it?
Because it’s not just a buzzword. UX (user experience) is now the nexus of decision-making for many consumers.
Why? Because…
- The Internet has the strongest influence yet on consumer purchasing decisions (89%).
- UX is just one part of the larger scheme of CX (Customer Experience)
From the client-facing side, here are what customers are ranking as pressing priorities:
Meanwhile, digital marketers and UX designers say these are their objectives:
This is where personalised user experience has the ability to close a major gap.
While marketers are focused on ‘engagement’, customers only really care about response times — in other words, “Who’s going to respond to what I need, ask me what I need and interact with me based on what I need?”
The case for personalised user experience
On the surface, user experience is all about creating a design that best suits a user’s needs, anticipating what they require and delivering it to them in a seamless and beautiful package. At its core, however, UX is really about interaction.
It’s all about how a user interacts with something, whether it’s a web page, an experience, a workflow or a product.
Personalised user experience, then, is not only an enhancement of this interaction but an ability to understand what a user’s most important need is, anticipating what action their ‘interaction’ might call for next. This is the art of engagement.
For business owners who care about engagement, personalised user experience offers three distinct benefits:
1. Higher conversion rates
What is the ROI of ‘getting personal’? As it turns out, consistently high.
Personalised user experience allows you to craft highly targeted experiences that create an incomparable human feeling of being heard, understood, valued and connected.
- 9 in 10 customers say personalisation has an impact on their purchasing decisions
- One-third of consumers want more personalisation in their e-commerce experiences
For businesses that implemented marketing automation solutions to personalise customer experiences:
- 50% more leads were generated — at a 33% lower cost, on average
- 20% experienced conversion rates of 4.5% or more, which was up from the 2.6% of others who did not.
2. Increased revenue
Personalisation has a payoff that is directly related to the bottom line.
Those who jump in on personalisation, according to Capgemini, are 26% more profitable overall, resulting in a 12% greater market cap.
Part of the share in revenue increase is because personalisation often calls for engagement delivery solutions and data platforms that are specifically created to serve this purpose. These platforms help ‘cut the fat’ and streamline otherwise bloated campaigns or workflows.
Secondly, personalisation helps to ‘purify’ leads. This means that leads are higher quality and qualified, warmer and more readily willing to convert.
3. User retention
Personalisation — that warm and fuzzy mix of engagement, outreach, real-time communication and personalised offers based on customer actions — reduces attrition.
In fact, businesses have a 60%-70% greater chance of selling to an existing customer than to a new one. For loyal, existing customers who have already formed a relationship with a brand, personalisation is the key to having them return and spreading the word.
Getting started with personalisation
1. Web personalisation
In a cheekily titled article, Moz proclaims, ‘The homepage is dead’.
Instead, web personalisation rules the day: Two or more versions of the same website homepage are created, based on where the individual user is coming from. It could also be based on other variables like what time of night they’re browsing or what industry they’re part of.
Of course, web personalisation requires background research on ‘who’ these specific user personas are.
2. Localisation
In the context of digital experiences, localisation means offering different versions of a website based on where the user is located. This means that everything, from the copy to the advertisements and even the colloquialisms in the advertisements, matches up to the user’s location.
A common example of localisation is Amazon or e-Bay country web pages. The Canadian, Singaporean and Australian versions of the site all have the same look and feel while the products, prices and offers are personalised to the country of sale and to the individual customer account.
3. Recommendation engines
Speaking of customer-specific personalisations, recommendation engines are the magic tool behind this form of customer-centricity.
Primarily used for e-commerce transactions and shopping cart analysis, recommendation engines allow online retailers to analyse past purchases. Based on this history, these engines then ‘suggest’ products that are ‘similar’ to what a user has purchased.
Other parameters for recommendations include personalised suggestions based on others’ purchases and up-selling, which suggests complementary products to be purchased in a bundle.
4. Personalised eDM campaign
The first place users might see the results of the analysis of ‘recommendation engines’ is in their personalised emails.
Personalised user experience should also focus on delivering offers within the content of the email that are specific to a user’s purchase history.
Based on this, it becomes easier to get predictive and ‘tell’ what a customer really cares about or is likely to commit to.
5. ‘Responsive’ design
It’s a testament to just how fast the digital world moves that only two years ago, everyone was talking about the importance of ‘responsive’ design as being mobile-friendly.
And, this is still just as true today — with one small caveat: Now, ‘responsive’ design is not a perk, it’s a staple.
So, we’d like to turn your attention to a new kind of ‘response’: That of automated chatbots.
Chatbots that use natural language processing (NLP), add a human touch to another ‘automated’ service, and create meaning through customer experience.
What potential does this have for your business?
Contact us today to find out more.
