To capture consumers’ attention, brands need to focus their attention on crafting unique user experiences to deliver 1:1 personalization based on data.

Personalization is not the newest trend in the marketplace, but it’s increasingly present in marketers’ digital communication efforts. One of the most important focal points to convert visitors into customers and build customer loyalty is 1:1 personalization. More and more customers feel less motivated to complete a transaction when they’re online shopping if their experience is impersonal. Let’s take a look at some data from Forbes:

• 80% of consumers are more likely to complete an online purchase with brands that offer personalized customer experiences.
• 72% of consumers explain that they only interact with personalized messaging.
• 66% of consumers share that coming across content that isn’t personalized would deter them from purchasing.

Customers want personalization. Think about when you walk into a physical store and an employee really listens to your needs, helps you find exactly what you’re looking for, or goes above and beyond your expectations to help you. That is exactly what customers want in the digital marketplace.

A unique, digital 1:1 personalization experience strategy gives companies the potential to customize messages, offers, and other experiences to each website visitor based on data collected about each user.

Digital 1:1 personalization starts with concrete data. Are you leveraging data to better serve and convert your visitors?

To help you answer “yes” to this question, we’ll take a deeper look at:

• What is 1:1 personalization?
• What data helps you know your customers better?
• How to find data?
• How to leverage the data you find 
• What messages should you personalize?
• Software to help you achieve 1:1 personalization

What is 1:1 personalization?

Delivering a unique (or one to one) experience to each online consumer is a technique known as 1:1 personalization.

By mastering the technique of 1:1 personalization, brands can deliver an exceptional level of customer service by providing personalized messages, product recommendations, offers and specialized content at the right time based on the user’s needs and expectations.

This type of unique user experience is only made possible thanks to the availability of extensive customer data. If you don’t get to know your customers based on their interactions with your brand and user behavior, you’re missing an opportunity to meet your customers’ expectations.

One goal of personalization is to create a “wow” effect. This means you should be making the customer think, “wow, they really know me.” The more information that a company knows about a certain customer, the more personalized the user experience will be.

Without extensive data, 1:1 personalization isn’t achievable.

What data can you collect to know your customer better?

On a wider scale, it’s important to understand the location of your customer, their demographic information (age, gender, education level), purchasing habits and website browsing information. However, in the hypercompetitive world of personalization, this surface-level data is not enough.

Brands need to move beyond knowing who the customer is and understand how the customer behaves.

Knowing that your customer is a recent college graduate who lives in New York City and spends a lot of time making Pinterest boards will not be enough information to create a strong buyer persona to achieve a unique and pleasant user experience.

Enhancing your customer’s profile will require you to collect relevant data about how your customer interacts with your brand on all channels, what motivates them to purchase and what makes them tick on top of knowing who they are.

More specifically, robust personalized data will help you better understand:

• Location and demographics
• Interests and hobbies
• Shopping and purchasing habits
• Device and channel frequency
• Where and how they prefer to shop and purchase
• Satisfaction level
• Likes and dislikes

All of this information will allow you to create a sophisticated customer profile. Understanding their motivations, preferences and expectations helps you characterize users into intricate market segmentations to give them the best possible experience imaginable.

Ideally, the customer will have a positive experience and feel unique based on the information derived from the robust data collection.

How do you find user data?

Extensive data can be found and refined by cross-indexing information stored on separate databases.

For example, you can harvest data from a customer’s interactions with your business by analyzing and storing comments on social media sites, ratings on review sites, mobile app usage vs. desktop usage, customer service interactions, download requests and more.

How to leverage 1:1 personalization with data

As you can see, personalization cannot exist without data. To achieve 1:1 personalization on your digital channels, your brand must have the ability to transform the collected data into action.

After monitoring and gathering rich data on your customer’s interactions, history and behavior on your site, it’s time to convert this data into a refined customer buyer persona to serve your customers better.

By segmenting your profiles, you will be able to better understand your customer’s preferences and pain points, which will help you craft these personalized messages and display them at the right time.

Personalizing interactions with customers

Once you have substantial data collected about your visitors, you can determine the best way to interact with them. There is a fine line between being helpful by displaying personalized messages and being invasive.

The difference in these two feelings will depend on the amount of prior engagement that the customer has with you. For example, a customer who is subscribed to every newsletter, has a company discount card, and frequently completes transactions on your website will expect you to know their preferences fairly well, like a regular coming into a coffee shop. On the other hand, a first-time visitor will not expect you to know much about them, but they will expect to be welcomed.

The best way to understand how to serve your customers is by asking yourself how you would want to be interacted with at their level of engagement with your brand. What would make you feel welcomed and what would make you feel overwhelmed or uneasy?

Real-life example

Before the booming holiday season, Clarins, a multinational cosmetics company, saw an 89% increase in their conversion rate and a 145% increase in the add-to-basket metric by implementing 1:1 personalization and gamification with AB Tasty.

On Single’s Day, a few weeks before Black Friday, Clarins saw a perfect opportunity to experiment and learn culture by implementing a “Wheel of Fortune” concept in certain countries. The gamification gifts were personalized according to each country’s local culture. Any visitor arriving at their website would play the digital game, spin the wheel, and receive a gift automatically in their inbox. This ease of automatic implementation was a great user experience, especially for mobile visitors.

Read the full story here: How Clarins Uses AB Tasty for Personalization and Retention

What messages should you personalize?

The possibilities for personalized messages can stretch as far as your mind (or your software capabilities) will allow.

Think about personalization in a broad sense. Let’s say a company wants to put its logo onto personalized gifts for its employees. The company’s logo can be put onto t-shirts, pens, stickers, coffee mugs, phone cases, backpacks, sunglasses, golf balls, holiday baskets– the possibilities are nearly endless. The same goes for personalized messages for your own customers.

In marketing communication, some of the most common outlets for 1:1 personalization are:

• Product recommendations
• Emails (subject lines and content)
• Intro and exit banners
• Pop-up messages
• Conversational marketing (chat boxes)
• Offers and discounts
• Language
• Landing pages
• Pricing
• Greetings

To attract and retain your customer’s attention in a market filled with saturated messages, your brand should focus on personalization as much as possible and in as many channels as you can.

What Is Omnichannel Personalization?

Employing 1:1 personalization across multiple channels, platforms and touchpoints is commonly referred to as omnichannel personalization.

Customers crave personalization wherever they are – on a mobile device, desktop, social media platform, mobile app or email. When customers receive a personalized experience, they expect this standard of communication across all channels or platforms that they are interacting with.

Achieving omnichannel personalization requires a seamless flow of customer data from one platform or channel to the next. By gathering information on user preferences, behavior, and interests from all virtual touchpoints, your customer’s profile strengthens.

By receiving this consistent level of personalization across all channels, consumers will be inclined to purchase more and to purchase again from the same brand that made them feel seen and heard.

What are the advantages of omnichannel personalization?

1. Higher conversion rates
2. Increased average order value (AOV)
3. Reduced cart abandonment
4. Improved brand value and customer loyalty
5. Higher customer lifetime value
6. Delivering messages at the right time and place

What platform should you use to consistently deliver 1:1 personalization?

The journey to a seamless 1:1 personalization experience for your customers starts with sophisticated and intuitive software to help transform your ideas into reality.

AB Tasty is the complete platform for experimentation and personalization equipped with the tools you need to create a richer digital experience for your customers — fast. With embedded AI and automation, this platform can help you achieve omnichannel personalization and revolutionize your brand and product experiences.

Everyone wins with 1:1 personalization

The data you collect equally benefits your brand and your customers. By understanding what your customers are looking for, you save them time by providing them with informed recommendations, personalized messages and unique experiences to solve their pain points.

Without proper data collection or genuine segmentation, it’s nearly impossible to provide users with a 1:1 personalized experience. Loyal customers want to feel like their brand really knows them and what they’re looking for. Achieve 1:1 personalized experiences by correctly analyzing and leveraging data. If you’re looking to serve your customers, increase sales and build brand loyalty at the same time, you’ve found your blueprint with personalization.

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Improve product findability for customers

King Living’s website was very content heavy, and customers often had to navigate through content blocks before reaching the product. The team hypothesized that this resulted in drop-offs because it took too long for customers to find what they were looking for.

With this hypothesis in mind, King Living chose to experiment by hiding secondary navigation and displaying products before content. This move resulted in 15% more clicks on product images and 90% increased revenue for all of King Living’s ‘Jasper’ packages.

Consumers are more likely to take action if the information they are seeking is clearly presented to them. In this case, images were more effective than descriptions in communicating what the product was.

Through this experiment, King Living also discovered that their customers do not need a button to go to ‘Products’, which influenced the company’s Product Listing Page and Product Detailing Page redesign.

We noticed that our users don’t actually need a button to go to ‘Products’, so that’s influencing our design decisions in the whole PLP, PDP redesign.

Improve customer conversion by building stronger call-to-action

King Living noticed a substantial number of drop-offs on their check-out page, and pinpointed a few areas for improvement regarding their call-to-action (CTA) – inactive appearance, usage of internal speak and lack of focal point. These factors combined resulted in a CTA difficult for customers to comprehend.

In this experiment, they bolded the important points and translated internal speak into understandable language for consumers. King Living also made their call-to-action appear more visible by shifting away from grey, which is known as the colour of inaction. Through this experiment, King Living’s revenue grew by an astounding 15%.

Having an engaging CTA is important, even at the end of the purchase journey. Consumers are more compelled to follow through with their purchase when the CTA “speaks” to them. This makes a huge difference in minimising drop-offs.

“We had a 15% increase in revenue while that test was running – millions of dollars when you look at it in an annual sense,” Vanja says.

We had a 15% increase in revenue while that test was running — millions of dollars when you look at it in an annual sense.

Experimentation via AB Tasty helped King Living minimise drop-offs, increase conversions and grow business revenue.

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CHALLENGE

Mor Furniture cut its A/B testing program a few years ago. With website traffic now increasing, they wanted to return to a data-based approach to website optimization but didn’t know which A/B testing tool to use and didn’t have the resources to run the testing program. PeakActivity was tasked with not only finding a tool with robust features and reporting, but to run the program, as well. 

SOLUTION

PeakActivity recommended the AB Tasty platform, based on its advanced features and functionality, including a widgets library for commonly tested elements and functionalities, and out-of-the-box tracking for scroll depth and element visibility. PeakActivity integrated the tool and developed a test plan to show the potential ROI of having a dedicated CRO team.

RESULTS

Soon, we were conducting an average of 4 tests per month and seeing 3X ROI. Now, Mor Furniture is all-in with PeakActivity CRO and AB Tasty. Guided by a “fail fast” mentality, the team learns quickly, iterates where needed, and moves on to testing the next hypothesis. Winning experiences are prioritized for full development, and even “losing” experiences provide valuable analytics and insights.

TAKEAWAYS

Now that the initial proof-of-concept phase has concluded, the iterative test and learn process continues with a hefty roadmap of experiment ideas with high potential ROI.

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Challenge

In the luxury industry, there’s always been a strong emphasis on the buying experience. Retailers have imbued it with a sense of ceremony—exclusivity paired with exceptional customer service to create a one-of-a-kind exchange. One of the challenges luxury retailers face today is translating the in-store experience to digital platforms.

For the Frette team, bringing the brand ethos online meant creating a frictionless user experience. Their website needed to be receptive to visitors’ interests while having an elegant design and easy-to-navigate interface. Frette focused on optimizing the website’s top navigation bar and the call-to-action on the shopping cart pop-up to ensure synchronicity between the UX and online shoppers.

Test Idea

Frette conducted a simple A/B test to see if modifying the top navigation bar would optimize the customer journey and increase traffic to certain pages. Noting that bathrobes were the top search item on the site, the team decided to clearly reference them in the header. So, they changed “Bath Linens” to “Bath Linens & Robes” and implemented action tracking to chart the results.

Then, Frette focused on the purchasing funnel. When users would click on the shopping cart in the top corner of the site, a customary pop-up would appear with a preview of selected items and the option to “Proceed To Checkout.” Luxury shopping is generally marked by long lead-in times, so Frette decided to tweak this language to the less definitive call-to-action, “View Shopping Bag.” The goal was to create a more fluid transition from browsing to purchasing in which customers didn’t feel rushed.

Results

While these website modifications were relatively minor, they had a significant impact on engagement and sales.

By adding “Robes” to the Bath Linens title in the top navigation bar, Frette was able to increase clicks to this category by 29%, and visits to bathrobe pages grew by an astounding 101%. As for changing the checkout semantics, the wording “View Shopping Bag” increased clicks by 5% and bumped total revenue by 8.69%.

These two A/B tests each took approximately 15 minutes to implement, without any IT support. Having the autonomy to test and learn is crucial for website optimization; it allows for precision in your strategy so even subtle changes have a pivotal effect on visitors’ satisfaction.

“We had been using [a previous conversion optimization] tool and it wasn’t user-intuitive, you really needed to work with an agency to do something very simple—you couldn’t really customize it to track specific things for a campaign, not in the way that AB Tasty allow you to. What we’re doing with AB Tasty now on our own, we would not have been able to do before.” – Vivienne So, Sr. Manager of E-commerce at Frette

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They already had a recommendation engine in place to display recommendations on various shopping pages of hagebau.de.  To evaluate the performance of the recommendation engine and test out real-time personalization, Baumarkt Direkt decided to compare AB Tasty’s AI-powered engine against the other tool already in place.

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As a leading furniture and bedding company in the United States, Ashley Furniture generates a high volume of visitors to its online store, AshleyFurnitureHomeStore.com. For this reason, optimizing its purchase process was a key step in improving conversion rates for new visitors.

Issue

How to eliminate frustration during the purchase process to ensure hassle-free checkout conversions?

Objective

Reduce the amount of time spent in the purchase funnel and lead the user to a faster and more effective conversion.

Implementation

We hypothesized that Ashley Furniture was struggling to convert new visitors due to their lengthy checkout process. On the original site, if the user did not enter their delivery and billing address while creating their  account, they would need to add in this information during the conversion funnel.

We decided to remove this step from the conversion funnel and test if that would improve conversion rates. The question was where in the customer journey this step would be implemented?

We tested a variation where, if the user had not entered their address information during the initial account creation phase, they would be prompted to log in to their account, then led to a form where they would be asked to fill in their delivery address.

The objective of this test was to get the user to fill in their personal information before checkout, thus saving them time and simplifying the purchase process. We know that checkout is already a lengthy process with a number of different steps such as logging in, selecting a delivery option and payment method before finalizing a purchase. Our goal was to simplify this process as much as possible.

Results

With this test, we eliminated client frustration by shortening the checkout process, thus reducing cart abandonment rates during the checkout process and creating a more fluid transition to the payment step. By removing this form from the purchase funnel, conversion rates increased by 15%.

“We use AB Tasty to execute A/B and multivariate tests and personalization of our online store AshleyFurnitureHomestore.com. Currently, our UX teams use AB Tasty to gain knowledge of user experience to solve a range of problems and to build new functionalities. With this tool, it is easy to A/B test our ideas to learn whether our hypothesis increases conversion rates, before implementing them on all of our traffic.” – Matt Sparks, eCommerce Optimization Manager, Ashley Furniture

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