While research suggests that consumers expect highly personalised experiences, businesses must think on a bigger and more impactful scale in order to retain their customers and continue to generate increased revenue.

Customers are searching for increasingly personalised and relevant experiences when it comes to their buying experiences, and your business must keep pace if it wants to stay ahead of the game. However, simple personalisation is no longer enough. It’s time to level up web personalisation strategies and implement personalisation at scale.

Why Personalisation at Scale?

To tackle the ‘why’, we must first understand the ‘what’. Personalisation at scale refers to organisations being able to present an elevated personalisation system. This means consistent personalisation across multiple platforms (in-store, mobile devices, email, IoT, etc.) while delivering experiences that are tailored to each and every individual based on their actions and preferences.

Scaling personalisation has a number of benefits including:

• The ability to meet rising customer expectations (71% of customers expect personalisation)
• The potential to generate 40% more revenue than companies that don't excel at personalisation
• Attraction of new customers, as 76% of consumers report that receiving personalised communications was key in their consideration of a brand
• Increasing customer retention (78% of consumers report that personalised experiences increases their likelihood to repurchase)

These figures are simply too beneficial to ignore. In fact, since 71% of customers feel frustrated when a shopping experience is impersonal, it is clear that businesses must implement new strategies to cater to customer demands. More specifically, their expectations for relevance in both services and products need to be met.

Personalisation of the Past

Recently, a survey showed that 76% of consumers get frustrated when companies fail to deliver personalised interactions. This now also extends to personalisation that is not detailed enough, meaning they could take their business elsewhere should the business’s personalisation strategies not meet their expectations. Basic personalisation features no longer work in an ever-evolving technological world. Examples of ‘basic’ features include birthday messages or adding the customer’s first name in an email.

Executing a successful web personalisation strategy for several audiences is certainly not simple. Implementing the right technologies that will enable you to deliver personalised experiences to all of your customers is the key to success.

4 Necessary Features for Personalisation at Scale

Interdepartmental collaboration, dedicated personalisation teams, clear goals and roadmaps, and the right technology are all vital if you want to achieve success in your endeavours towards personalisation.

Here are some of the processes that will be vital to your personalisation at scale strategy.

1. Data Collection

Obtaining and using your data effectively is absolutely essential when it comes to creating a strong personalisation strategy. Better data means better insights, leading to more powerful personalisation.

As a business, you should know:

• Your customers’ individual needs
• What they’re looking for
• What they’ve done (by tracking past behaviour and engagement)
• How to anticipate their future needs

Using your customer data, and connecting and combining it across all systems and channels, will help you create a single customer view. To keep up with today’s dynamic business environment, ensuring agility and flexibility – through connecting new systems and data sources to your existing infrastructure – is essential. Artificial intelligence, machine learning, and automation capabilities can further help collect and leverage your data.

2. Data Privacy and Protection

Local and data protection laws may mean that there are limitations to the data that you can collect. These limitations, however, can help build customer trust and ensure that your business doesn’t run into any legal ramifications further down the line.

There are tools available that you can utilise to protect and manage your data effectively and legally. Having a strong internal privacy policy on your customer data will also help ensure that your business sticks to these guidelines. Such policies should include purpose, use, and retention policies, options for consent and transparency, guidelines for third party data sharing, and finally, transparent and clear language. This will allow your customers to clearly understand what they are agreeing to and create a sense of trust.

3. Omnichannel Capabilities

Strong omnichannel engagement strategies can result in the retention of 89% of customers compared to just 33% for businesses with weak strategies.

Headless solutions can help when it comes to the deployment of a strong omnichannel marketing effort. This will enable developers to manage web content headlessly, which allows content to be created once, then shown through a presentation layer across multiple channels. This removes the need to create the same content multiple times, inevitably leading to more responsive user experiences across all platforms from a single CMS.

4. Integration with Existing Systems

Any tools and systems you implement should form a seamless technology stack, and both integrate with and extend the technologies you currently use. The benefit of this is that you won’t need to replace the legacy technology; a DXP can sit over the top and use that data, all while presenting a better CX for the end user. Together, this will ensure that data and system silos are removed, streamlining your business.

What’s Next?

These features will allow your business to adapt and keep up with rising customer demands. As businesses continue to move towards approaches that are increasingly customer-centric, you need to make sure that your business is also offering a web personalisation strategy that is going to keep your customers interested and satisfied.

A clear, customer-focused strategy, along with the right technologies and analytics, will allow your business to deploy - as well as your customers to enjoy - the benefits of personalisation at scale.