Customer behavior is unpredictable, and in the current technology landscape, e-commerce businesses are having a hard time keeping up. For marketers, it has become more important than ever before to engage customers throughout the customer journey. It has become necessary for retailers to rethink personalized experiences from the traditional cross-channel approach to a more integrated, holistic approach - an omnichannel experience that is reliable.

What is omnichannel personalization?

To understand omnichannel personalization, it is important to first understand omnichannel retail. Omnichannel retail focuses on providing customers a consistent experience across channels, be it in-store, online, or click and pick-up. Ensuring that the customer has a consistent opinion of a brand is a reliable way to assess and estimate the performance of a particular business.

Omnichannel personalization is focused on understanding customers through their behavior across all channels and targeting them proactively. From a customer’s point of view, this means tracking their preferences, history, and actions across all devices and platforms, and gathering data to understand their needs and present content which appeals most to them.

In a micro-moment, omnichannel personalization understands what the customer wants by guessing their interests based on their web browsing activities, collecting the results to create content, and deliver a unique page based on the same, regardless of the device used by the customer, from their work laptops to their personal tablets at home.

Omnichannel personalization has delivered remarkable results by providing customers a consistent experience across channels. Omnichannel personalization connects with visitors 4.3x faster than the business benchmark and 43% higher than single-channel promotions for the most part. A combination of using multiple touch-points and consistently displaying relevant messages on all the channels that are visited the most (or all highly viewed channels) promises higher engagement and conversion rates.

Why should personalization be seamless and consistent?

A customer's site experience can be customized by tracking their activities on the website. According to the site pages that are visited, a relevant product can be suggested through personalized recommendations, web message pop-ups, and so forth.

On the off chance that a repeat customer accesses the particular website by means of another device, be it a smartphone or a tablet, he/she is supposed to have a consistent experience, that builds on their activities on other devices as well. The same applies to scenarios where it is the digital channel that changes and not the experience. This is the situation in which a business succeeds with regards to accomplishing omnichannel personalization, as the equivalent experience is displayed to the client independent of the gadget and channel.

To deliver consistent and seamless experiences to customers, marketers must first ensure that all systems work together. A huge challenge in achieving true personalization that translates across channels and devices is the power to recognize and engage users across multiple touchpoints. They need to be proficient at collecting visitor data discovered and recorded across all channels to one central location. In short, the vast amount of data must be centralized. It enables the marketer to have a complete picture of the visitor's activities and hence create a complete profile of the same.

It only makes sense that omnichannel personalization, being a difficult, time-consuming process, should yield benefits that outweigh the time, effort, and capital invested in implementing the sophisticated system needed.

Advantages of omnichannel personalization

1. Improved conversions and ROI.
2. Higher average order value.
3. Higher customer lifetime value.
4. The consumer is highly satisfied with 1:1 relationships.
5. Personalized and well-timed promotions that result in conversions.
6. Improved brand value and customer loyalty.
7. Competitive edge over rival brands.

Adobe Target for omnichannel personalization

Collecting and managing visitor information is a complex task. When the audience for one’s site grows, it increases the chances for incomplete profiling. Thankfully, sophisticated systems are already in place to help accurately deliver a unique experience to every arriving visitor. This is where Adobe Target comes in, complete with profile and segmentation options that translate data into unified visitor profiles, which intuitively recognizes customers during each interaction regardless of the number of customer attributes stored in the profile, or the device used by the visitor. Tools like Adobe Target have made it possible to scale up the personalization process.

Personalization with Adobe Target

Adobe Target offers one-click personalization by utilizing its artificial intelligence and machine learning framework, dubbed Adobe Sensei. Automated personalization is another alternative feature where machine learning models of the marketer’s choice and preferences can be employed to create personalized user journeys on progressive customer profiles to create one-to-one customer experiences every time and drive measurable ROI as a result.

Another method of deploying personalization is through rule-based personalization, where audiences are classified based on attributes ranging from their geo-location to brand affinity. This helps formulate a customer profile containing intimate details, for targeting across multiple channels. By providing a perfect blend of automation and control that enables the deployment of strategies in line with business goals, Adobe Target provides a critical advantage over the competition; as it takes into account all customer behavior data.

Personalization would be incomplete without including behavioral targeting, which involves tracking visitor activity, such as sections of the site they visit, the time duration of the visit, how they arrive at the site in the first place, and most importantly, the services or products that they are interested in. Adobe Target takes this one step further by constantly monitoring visitor behavior and updating profiles, while maintaining consistency, to ensure relevant experiences are delivered to customers at all times.

Most importantly, Adobe Target offers a hassle-free solution, an opportunity to let it gather the information you need, to construct ever-changing and constantly evolving profiles that encompass visitors of every kind. It makes no excuses with respect to touchpoints and channels used. Anything and everything that the visitor does is considered by the profiling system. And it is all ready and available for you, to make things happen.

Conclusion

Customer expectations are at an all-time high. Brands are trying to lure customers with cutting-edge services and, it’s only obvious that consumers expect nothing less from anyone occupying market space, be it a well-established brand or a startup.

Omnichannel personalization is playing a key role in enabling seamless experiences across all representations of the brand, consistently, effectively, and reliably. Adobe Target easily proves itself to be a powerful tool to assist in perfecting omnichannel strategies that perform and dominate in the given market space. It is equally suited to customers that demand simplicity and convenience across the experiences that they encounter.

Often underplayed, omnichannel personalization has the potential to enhance customer experience and elevate brand loyalty. The time is right for companies to implement it, improve customer experience, and show customers that they are important. Stay tuned to know more about Analytics and AAM’s roadmap to personalization.