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How can you boost brand affinity in the digital age? We explore how this can be achieved through customisation and personalisation tactics which you can use.
Personalisation in shopping has been a huge part of our lives for many years, such as searching for a keychain or fridge magnet with our name on it during your childhood holidays.
A tactic cleverly adopted by businesses; personalisation helps to hook consumers onto their offerings. The idea comes from the fact that, as consumers, we establish stronger emotional connection to products that appear as though they have been created entirely for us. For business, encouraging and nurturing these connections with customers results in brand love and brand loyalty, ultimately achieving a greater lifetime value.
The formula, in theory, is simple. However, in reality, success requires more than simply printing a name on an everyday household item. Instead, to be intuitive, brands must first allocate their resources to understanding their customers on a more granular level and developing offerings off the back of this knowledge.
Luckily, the internet provides a wealth of efficient and effective ways for consumers to personalise offerings on a mass level, with the likes of Moonpig, Getting Personal and Funky Pigeon leading the way, offering consumers the chance to personalise common gift items to create something with more significant meaning for their loved ones.
However, with more businesses waking up to the lucrative nature of customisation and personalisation, the market is becoming over-saturated with choice. Etsy, Not on the Highstreet and numerous photo printing and engraving services, combined with the businesses mentioned above, makes for an unlimited choice of personalised products.
Therefore, for personalisation to truly act as a differentiating factor for your brand, the level of tailoring and customisation you provide must go far beyond the surface level of the product.
Brand experience, content, and functionality of the final product or service must be designed in a way that keeps each individual end user in mind. To do so, businesses, especially those with digital offerings, must utilise the data and information at their fingertips to better understand their customers and what exactly it is that they want.
With this information, businesses are better positioned to personalise the way in which they communicate, interact with, and cater to their customers to evoke a greater feeling of connectivity with those all-important consumers.
An example of this would be personalised digital marketing tactics, including first names included in email campaigns. In fact, this has proven to generate a higher volume of click through rates than those without, so it’s definitely something to consider.
That presents a clear argument: that tailoring even the smallest parts of an email, by ensuring data is collected and stored in your database, can have a significantly positive impact on the success of your marketing activity.
On a similar scale, PPC activity can also benefit from personalisation. This is particularly the case if the ads are targeted to a user’s individual characteristics and preferences. Of course, PPC management can be a time-consuming process to manage alone. And with personalisation adding another layer to the process, there is strong cause for the use of an innovative software solution, such as VTEX, to help you collect and analyse data, and automate accordingly.
In addition to saving valuable time, the marketing tactic can also become far more efficient, lessening the amount of wasted budget on ineffective leads and poorly performing campaigns.
Now, with ads far more likely to be shown to users with a higher intent to click and purchase, due to their data suggesting a strong interest in your offering, there is also more opportunity to increase your click to conversion rates.
A data-centric approach can pose some complications in terms of knowing what information to collect, and then interpreting such information in a way that is both accurate and useful to the business.
For example, businesses that operate across a variety of sales channels may face increased difficulty with collecting data that is representative of all their customer segments – its online customers are likely to be different to its in-store customers. Therefore, an offering that is personalised to one audience may not feel as equally customised to the other, thus not being as appreciated as much in the latter case.
This closely links to the fact that as many as 74% of consumers feel frustrated when website content is not personalised to them, and so it’s important to ensure each touchpoint along a customer’s journey is appropriately customised.
Thankfully, this is another area in which VTEX can assist, as they can both collect and centralise data across multiple channels, allowing businesses to draw meaningful and accurate insights to better inform personalisation decisions.
However, personalisation is about being human and emotive in your approach, and comes down to understanding the intrinsic values of your customers and placing these at the forefront of your offering to develop more meaningful connections. This means that data and technology are only helpful to a certain point.
Alongside this, there also needs to be human input. This can come from your own personal experiences, as well as your expertise of the market and its consumers.
For example, in recent years, brands have developed an increased focus on mass marketing opportunities for annual days and holidays, such as Christmas and Father’s Day. In this instance, data and technology can be used to create personalised emails to promote gifts for the event which the majority of people will be celebrating.
A human approach, on the other hand, will tell you that many of your customers, such as those that have lost a loved one recently, may not want to see your promotional material and messages associated with the occasion. As a result, pre-campaigns can be created to give ample opportunity to opt out of communications associated with the event.
The key lesson here is to learn how to combine technology and human instinct in such a way that offerings become far more personal, and as a result, are more effective at boosting brand affinity.
By effectively creating and providing personalised experiences for your customers, you may see an increase in your sales of around 20%, which, when business are battling to thrive in the post-pandemic world, can be incredibly valuable to your future success.
The team at Diginius are not just experts at PPC optimisation, but we also know how to create tailored ads and campaigns to deliver a more personal touch to your audience. Simply get in touch with us today to find out more.
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Chester Yang is the Microsoft Program Manager at Diginius with a background in economics and quantitative research.
At Diginius, Chester focuses on nurturing partnerships with PPC agencies and integrating marketing and sales solutions.
