It’s the Thought That Counts

Think about the feeling you get when someone you care about gives you a gift. Surprise… delight… overall, a pleasant feeling, right? That’s because a gift is thoughtful and gives the impression that some time and effort went into providing that special gifting experience.

That’s exactly what customers are craving for from their favourite brands. Customers don’t want to feel misunderstood or overlooked. They want personalised content, offers and recommendations which surprise and delight them.

Personalisation is not some abstract concept

Large, multinational, growing companies are investing more and more into personalisation each year. And the stakes couldn’t be higher during the holiday season. In 2018, Cyber Monday alone brought in $7.9 billion in online sales, surpassing all prior years. Black Friday also jumped from the previous year – there were $6.22 billion in online sales, according to a report from Adobe Analytics.

But these hoards of customers don’t magically appear out of a hat. In this competitive environment, retailers need to earn each customer. And a growing number of online buyers expect tailored offers and purchase recommendations from the sites they visit.

So how do you get ahead of your competition to attract customers? Two words: machine learning (also commonly referred to as ML).

Amazon, eBay, Wal-Mart, you name it, are all utilising ML. And if you’re not (that is, if you’re looking at customer data as a static thing), you will quickly lose out. Today it’s absolutely possible to map and predict customer behaviours based on real-time interactions. Every hover, click, scroll, and type builds a sequence of events unique to an individual user.

ML, together with Data Science, helps leverage data more effectively, automatically driving insight from the data and helping organisations to understand the customer better. There are ways to use insight and model output to power the various customer experience platforms in your organization. And the earlier you implement ML, the quicker you’ll deliver relevant content and convert customers before your competition does, and the sooner you can achieve peace of mind with your marketing campaigns.

Are you getting it right with your personalisation efforts? Feel free to share your experiences with me. What’s working and what’s not? You can email me or connect with me on LinkedIn.

Machine learning has become the standard for all winners in the online retail ecosystem.