Page 384 - Social Media Marketing for Dummies

In the next sections, we look further into how you may apply these tactics to your
organization.

Rethinking the Customer Experience

Are you considering whether to more fully personalize your customer experience?
If so, you will probably be rewarded for your effort. In today’s marketplace, an
enticing customer experience is a distinct competitive advantage. According to
research done in 2018 by Epsilon (https://us.epsilon.com/), called “The power
of me: The impact of personalization on marketing performance,” 80 percent of
customers are more likely to do business with a brand when it offers a personal-
ized experience. That’s a very high percentage. Customer expectations continue to
rise, and you need to be competitive by offering a satisfying and unique customer
experience.

According to Epsilon, your data plays a vital role in executing a personalized
experience. To compete, you need to think about tying online and offline data
together so you can deliver real-time messaging and facilitate how your campaigns
are improving the bottom line.

Personalizing the CX

The stakes are getting higher for companies that are lagging in providing mean-
ingful, personalized experiences to their customers. There is no longer a debate
about whether customers care about a personalized experience.

» 86 percent of customers say that their decision to shop is influenced by
personalization (https://www.marketingcharts.com/industries/
retail-and-e-commerce-39301).
» 43 percent of customers expect to receive personalized communications
(Broadridge Financial Solutions survey, 2019).

» 25 percent will no longer do business with a company who delivered
a mediocre personalized experience (Broadridge Financial Solutions
survey, 2019).

What are some things you can do to create a personalized experience? One possi-
bility is to use personalized engine software (or recommendation engine soft-
ware). This software can collect individual customer profiles that track and
analyze behavior patterns and choices. They do this by collecting, storing,
analyzing, and filtering data. So, what are some of the things that personalized
engine software allows you to do? You can:

368 PART 5 Old Marketing Is New Again with SMM