Every company wants to get inside their customer’s heads, right? Knowing what a customer likes, dislikes, what motivates them and what behaviors they exhibit could be the key to figuring out what, when and where customers want their content in the omnichannel experience. This is where personalization comes in. Personalization can be represented as “Is this how my customer would like it to look?” and includes the tailoring of products and offers to customers’ unique lifestyles, behavioral patterns, social networks and tastes.
Customers are using the Internet to get what they want from companies. Customers need to find information that is relevant to them in order to make buying decisions and feel confident about those choices. One way for a company to efficiently fulfill this purpose is personalization. Personalization includes creating personas based on segmentation and then ultimately creating content that would cater to those specific audiences.
Personas are fictional customers that are created based upon market research that help companies empathize with their customers and understand their needs. Personas in the omnichannel world do much more than just provide insight on a certain customer that a company would typically have. Personas in the omnichannel world guide messaging and channel orchestration based on interactions and touch-points one might have with a customer. When creating personas, research and surveys will go into crafting them. This is important, because a company may not know who their customers are and what percentage of their customers tend to fit into a certain persona type.
Customer journeys are vital to an omnichannel strategy. Once companies have their personas defined and validated in their market place, they can start to create the customer journeys. A customer has the ability to go through a variation of journeys, however, it is best to start with just one journey and then adopt variations from there. Customer journeys create an integrated experience of a customer’s journey throughout the company and touch points. Most importantly, customer journeys create a visual flow and walk-through of the process that a customer may experience.
The key to creating successful omnichannel experiences is understanding the roles and touch points of your customers along their journey. Personas help companies understand their customers, transitions help companies know where their customers are in the process, and journeys help companies understand what it takes to get from point A to point B in a seamless manner for their customers.
Within a customer journey are messages. Messages are what a company wants to make the customer aware of that could lead them to making a purchase. For example, if a customer has clicked on a safety video of a car seat and watched the first 10 seconds, the company may want to follow up with that customer via email which includes a blog post on how the car seat surpassed safety ratings across the board. For this specific customer, the persona may be a new time mom who is concerned with choosing the right car seat which is the safest on the market. A company who sells car seats would have this persona as one of their customer personas and create messaging that would guide this new time mom to buying their car seat. If the persona tends to use social media as a preferred channel to make purchases and is easily influenced by “mommy influencers”, the company may partner with these influencers to spread the message to this specific persona. These are just a few examples of how companies personalize content and channel orchestration.
However, messaging is not easy to craft. With each message, the company may be trying to overcome a barrier that the customer specifically has to making the purchase. Barriers for this new time mom could be that they are not aware of how special this carseat is and how it is the first of its class to fit in all sized vehicles unlike competitors. The car seat company would then cater its messaging to those specific barriers in order to help the customer overcome the barrier and to move through the customer journey and to make the purchase.
Barriers and messaging are just two components of what marketers incorporate into their content matrix. A content matrix is a map of all the content that a company would have for their customers to educate them on the products and services. The content matrix is customized to a company’s specific needs, but in general, it looks like what is shown below.
Content in an omnichannel world must be flexible and adaptable to each individual touch point. Creating personas will help companies understand their customers which assist in creating these messages that are relevant and helpful to the customers during their journey. In addition, it will also help companies develop channels that cater to the persona’s unique interactions with a company. The key is becoming adaptive and agile so that there is no stone left unturned when it comes to personalizing your message and channels to your customer’s needs.
A content matrix is a crafted for marketers to keep track of what assets to use for what messages and through identified channels. Since omnichannel is so complex and needs to be synchronized, content matrixes help keep them on track. Once personas are created, marketers can create their persona-based content matrixes and split the content and messaging for each persona, some which may have overlap.
Using the messaging created, marketers can overlay these messages through the journeys they created for their personas. Within the customer journeys, each touchpoint can have specific targeted messaging based on what the customer engages with. When a customer opens a specific email after opting into the email network for the company, the company can follow up based on what messaging was in their original email. One can compare omnichannel to meeting a neighbor in the grocery store who tells you about her son’s soccer tournament. The next interaction you have with that neighbor, you will not want to ask if they have a son because you are already aware of that information. Instead, you will focus on another topic or even ask how their son’s soccer tournament went the last time you saw them. Omnichannel is the same, in that companies should not bombard their customers with the same messaging over and over again until they’ve had enough. Companies should focus on that conversation with their customers and keep the goal of engaging them.
The conversations that companies have with their customers will look differently for every specific customer. There may be a group of customers, for example, within a specific persona that will receive the same email messaging, however, there will be customers who engage more with the company’s app instead of email who will receive their messages through a different channel and the message might be slightly different depending on their preferences.
Customer preferences tie all of what we’ve spoke about together. Preferences are the bow on top of the present that is what the omnichannel experience lives on. Without customer preferences, companies would not be able to cater their messaging or create persona based journeys and content matrices. Customer preferences are not easily shaped because everyone is unique and everyone seperately have different preferences. In the example of a car seat company, there are people who are into safety ratings, other people that prefer to stay with the tried and true, and people that simply prefers more comfort for their child versus safety. However, these customer preferences can shape an omnichannel view of what customers will purchase.
The most important aspect is to not overwhelm customers in the omnichannel messaging and content they receive. Instead, companies should create a first touchpoint experience and then follow up with messages tailored towards the customer’s specific needs through three main channels: email marketing, social media marketing, and mobile apps (as mentioned previously).
In the end, every customer journey will be different and no customer journey is ever uniform. Companies can personalize their engagements with customers by changing the channel orchestration and messages that take place during the experience to make the experience enjoyable and low effort for the customer. In the end, customers want to be guided to the right product or service and omnichannel makes that a reality.