It’s no secret: people want customised experiences when they’re shopping. According to our Consumer Benchmark report, 23% of people say they feel valued when brands offer them a personalised product or service.
What’s more, businesses that deliver tailored experiences come out on top. McKinsey found that nailing personalisation can deliver eight times the ROI on marketing spend, and lift sales by 10 percent or more.
Take Amazon, for example, whose product recommendation system is one of the most successful in history. The e-commerce giant pioneered Also-Boughts – where people are shown items frequently purchased alongside the one they are currently viewing.
Also-Boughts reportedly contributed to 30% of Amazon’s revenue by 2015. Ten years' worth of data will only have made the algorithms more effective.
So how can you learn from the likes of Amazon and create your own tailored experiences?
It all starts with data: operational versus experience
That’s right – data is a direct line to the customer’s mind. Without it, you’re in the dark as to what people need and expect at each stage of their journey with you.
When it comes to personalisation, there are two types of data you need to be looking at: operational and experience.
Operational data is produced by your organisational processes: sales, inventory, customer interactions and so on. From operational data you can denote win rates, profitability of different products, and where sales are coming from.
On the other hand, experience data represents the human factor: the opinions, beliefs and emotions of your customers. Experience data bridges the gap between what you think is going on and what is really happening on the ground.
Looking at operational and experience data together will help you understand your customers in depth and what they think of their entire journey with you. You’ll see not just what they bought, but how they felt about it. From there, you can start to create interactions and offers that align with what they want, when they want it – in essence, a more personalised experience.
Customer feedback: the key to personalisation
The simplest way to get hold of experience data is by collecting reviews. Ask customers how they feel about your product, service and brand. This insight will help you segment your customer base and develop buyer personas centred around real motivations and pain points. So you can create targeted messages that resonate with specific customers on a personal level – and subsequently drive more engagement.
Customer feedback is even more powerful when you combine it with behavioural data, which paints a picture of how people are interacting with your business. By understanding which devices they’re using and key decision points in their journey, you can improve targeting quality and communicate with people through their favourite channels.
Using reviews to improve targeting
Customer feedback doesn’t just help you develop your personalisation strategy but enhance it as well. By analysing reviews and categorising them into themes, you can uncover any hidden issues. For example, reviews may suggest your customers are seeing the same advert too many times, or an advert they feel is not pertinent to them. By addressing such issues, you can perfect the relevance and frequency of your communications.
Feefo’s Customer Sentiment Insight tool can support you here. It uses AI to automatically identify themes in your reviews. If certain topics are constantly mentioned in a negative context, this will be highlighted to you, so you can find out what’s going wrong and how to make it right.
Showing people the feedback they want to see
Of course, collecting reviews is as much about providing your customers with insights as it is about providing your team with insights. According to our Consumer Trends Report, 96% of people use reviews in some way, and 64% read them before buying. But what does this have to do with personalisation? Simply put, you need to show your customers the reviews that are hyper-relevant to them – those that answer their most pressing questions. It’s a sure-fire way to convert them faster.
Feefo’s Dynamic Topic Display does this really effectively. Powered by AI, it tracks customer sentiment across all your reviews, identifies the most popular themes, and groups reviews into topics. This allows your customers to find the information they’re looking for, quickly and easily.
Find out more
There’s no question that reviews are essential if you want to craft experiences that truly speak to your customers. Whether you're just starting out with personalisation or are a seasoned expert, we’re more than happy to advise you on how to reviews can help – just drop us a line.
