How to Meet Consumer Expectations

According to research conducted by Wunderkind, 66% of senior eCommerce retailers said that personalization is a critical move in their current operations, while 71% recognize its increasing importance over the next five years.  

However, 70% of consumers say that branded communication from retailers feels generic.  

If you look at both data, it seems that retailers’ efforts to match consumer expectations when it comes to personalization weren’t necessarily translated into enhanced customer experiences.  

Fortunately, small businesses like you are already in a position to offer a more personalized experience to their customers, which means you’re one step ahead of your big-box competitors.

But being a step ahead doesn’t mean anything unless you use it to your advantage.  

Are you using personalization in your approach towards communicating and engaging with your customers online?

In this article, we will discuss the four different ways you can close the gap between what your customers expect from you and what you can deliver.

Without any more delays, let’s get started.

Personalization: Closing the Gap Between Your Consumers’ Expectations and Your Capabilities‍

Segment Your Audience

The first step towards successfully closing the gap between what consumers expect and what you’re capable of delivering is to gather information about your target audience so you can segment them.  

Segmentation is the process of dividing a target audience into smaller, definable, accessible, and actionable groups.  It is an important step towards perfecting personalization because it allows you to better understand what your ideal customers need and want. And, with this information, you can create more tailored campaigns that each group will likely be more responsive to.

There are four types of market segmentation:

• Demographic

• Psychographic
• Geographic
• Behavioral

Once you’re done segmenting your target audience into smaller groups, it’s time to focus on creating a marketing message that resonates with them. You can do this by aligning your products or services to each of their needs, wants, and challenges.

However, given how distracted modern consumers are today, with all the information and advertising bombarding them from left and right, it’s also essential to build a marketing communication strategy.

Marketing communication strategy involves different processes and tools that help make sure that the right marketing message is delivered to the right people at the right time and through the right channels to get the best results.  

So, before you create your campaign, you should be able to identify the most efficient channels to get your marketing message across to the most receptive audience.  

Now, your marketing message can only be effective if your target audience can understand the way you want them to digest it. You need to consider the type of content your target audience is most responsive to.  

People love stories. An infographic by OneSpot reveals that 92% of consumers want brands to produce more ads that tell a story when consumed.  

Based on the finding, you want to appeal to each segment by creating different narratives that effectively communicate your marketing strategies.  

With the right marketing message, the right narrative, and a solid marketing communication strategy, you can now create a campaign that attracts qualified leads.  

Use Historical Customer Data

Now that you’re running more targeted campaigns, expect to get more leads and customers.  

The challenge, however, is to convert these leads into customers and turn regular customers into loyal brand advocates. And this is where personalization comes in.  

Personalization is the process of identifying a specific individual within a segment and analyzing how your brand can fulfill this person’s need. It also involves determining a user’s intent and building a personalized experience around it.

In other words, personalization is giving your customers and ideal customers what they want before they even thought about wanting it.  

For example, Belle is a first-time cat owner. Provided that she has no experience with taking care of a cat, she depends on the internet to tell her what to do, which products to use, etc.  

Let’s assume that your business is a subscription business that aims to help first-time cat owners and non-first-timers take care of their furbabies with ease by delivering cat essentials each month. You need to figure out Belle’s thoughts by asking the following:

• Is she just starting her journey and is still looking for different options?
• Is she ready to find the best deals online and make a purchase?

• Does she have a concern about the item she’s thinking of purchasing?

Obviously, there’s no way of knowing a user’s thoughts unless you ask them directly. The thing is, it’s just not practical to interview each of your customers and collect data manually. Fortunately, you can use historical data to better know and understand them.  

With the help of Google Analytics event tracking and performance analytics, you’re able to discover the information you can use to provide a more personalized experience to your audience.  

In case you don’t know; event tracking is an advanced feature that allows you to monitor a user’s interaction with your website or webpage. It basically tells you what users do on your website, how they navigated it, what videos they played, and more.  

Historical data also allows you to identify if your customer segment is changing, allowing you to adapt and come up with new offers. And, it also gives you the power to predict changes in your customer segment’s consumer behavior in the future.  

Use an Omni-Channel Approach to Marketing

Personalization is all about elevating the customer experience at every touchpoint. That’s why you should adopt an omnichannel marketing approach, especially because 90% of consumers expect to get consistent interactions from brands across multiple channels.  

Omnichannel marketing focuses on providing a consistent and seamless experience to consumers across all channels and devices. Meaning, you could be shopping on your phone then switch to a desktop and the experience would be integrated.  

Here are some examples:

• Sending retargeting ads to customers who accessed your app to check an item but didn’t buy.  

• Sending an email to those customers telling them that the item they checked out is on sale.  
• Sending a push notification that the item they want to buy is almost out-of-stock.  

Use Automation

Personalization is just not possible without automation, which is why it’s important to invest in them. Below are three of the automation we think are worth investing in:

• Chatbots provide prompt responses to customer inquiries, concerns, and push customers farther down the sales funnel. Plus, you can use them to prioritize leads.  

• Product recommendation AI tool helps your customers find what they need quickly by showing them products or services that are related to their search. It may even recommend complementary or supplementary products that will not only make their lives easier, but also convince them to spend more.  
• Website content personalization tools to convert highly-segmented customers. For example, when a first-time visitor checks your website, this tool automatically rearranges the content of your site to make sure that your best-selling items and special product offer appear first in front of that visitor.  

Conclusion

There’s no doubt that creating an excellent customer experience that exceeds customer expectations is the key to closing the gap between what consumers want and what you can provide.  

If you’re struggling with personalization in your marketing efforts, we can help! At Digital Resource, our team of digital marketing experts will assist you in building a personalization strategy that will get you the leads you need to start growing your business. Contact us for a free assessment!  

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