Omni-channel personalization is the future of marketing: The onset of a new era

• With market saturation and competition, brands need to stand out and stay relevant to the target audience and connect to them more emotionally, encouraging loyalty, word-of-mouth, and a strong bond.
• In this exclusive column, Girish Chaturvedi, Chief Business Officer at Netcore Cloud writes how omni-channel personalization offers a competitive edge to brands, the key to building a successful omnichannel strategy and where is omnichannel expected to diversify with the growing popularity of gamification & mobile commerce.

In today’s hyperconnected world, customers constantly seek a unique, personalized experience, irrespective of how they interact with a brand. The rapid penetration of mobile and connected devices has allowed marketers to access customer data and provide a seamless brand experience across various channels.

With market saturation and competition, brands need to stand out and stay relevant to the target audience and connect to them more emotionally, encouraging loyalty, word-of-mouth, and a strong bond. According to a ZenDesk report, brands that prioritized customer experience pre-pandemic are already at an advantage. Companies with a mature customer experience strategy are over six times more likely to exceed customer retention targets than those that failed to prioritize the customer experience.

How does omni-channel personalization offer a competitive edge to brands?
An omnichannel strategy helps build customer experience, loyalty, and brand recall. Let's look at why:
● According to a recent study, omni-channel personalization has shown 90% higher customer retention rates than a single channel. Hence, this strategy is core to long-term business viability.
● Brands get the added advantage of profound insight into their customer's actions, allowing them to serve one-to-one contextually relevant products, content, or offers.
● A unified personalization strategy at scale provides brands with an opportunity to amplify their customer's shopping cart activity. In such cases, brands can engage customers on the purchase journey to increase the average order value through targeted offers and intelligent product recommendations.
● Personalization can lead to higher ROI on a brand's marketing spend. Brands can significantly boost their overall conversion rates with dynamic content based on customer behavior, clickstream data, context, product recommendation, and exclusive personalized offers.

Enhancing the customer experience
Capturing, engaging, and delivering a consistent experience across all channels is crucial for most brands. Brands must enhance their data-driven marketing efforts and personalize for customers at all touchpoints. For instance, a customer who browses an online store for a pair of jeans leaves without purchasing. So the brand now retargets the customer at various touch points like SMS, email, and social media, offering the product at a discounted rate, which intrigues them to buy. Knowing the customer and enhancing the buying experience will help brands retain customers and build loyalty.

Building a successful omnichannel strategy
Omni-channel personalization for brands in the current scenario has become an essential part to provide consistent and unparalleled service across all touchpoints. Therefore, brands need to prepare a successful omnichannel strategy to opt for a personalized experience.

Define a clear strategy and build a feedback loop for learning:
It is essential to have a clear vision of the critical moments in a customer's journey. In most cases, the journey can be broken into three stages:
● generating awareness pre-visit
● conversion during the visit
● customer engagement post-visit

Insights derived from each stage can be leveraged to develop user journeys that meet defined objectives and bring value to the customer and profitability to the brand.

Connect multiple digital touchpoints
The most crucial step in building omni-channel strategies is to connect with the customers' digital footprint. For instance, an e-commerce brand would need to focus on all five customer touchpoints where potential convergence happens: mobile app, website, digital ads, social media, chatbot platform, and point of sale. To achieve the best of these touchpoints, brands must consider delivering a great personalized customer experience consistently.

Think automation
Automation opens new opportunities for brands to provide personalized experiences across all the touchpoints at scale. By deploying AI-powered automation, brands can leverage omni channel orchestration based on customers' channel preferences.

Future of omnichannel personalization
In the era of digital disruption, brands must adopt newer strategies to engage with customers. Some of them include:

Gamification: Gamification along with personalization can make the entire shopping experience fun. Whether it is the e-commerce or the insurance sector, the platform becomes more attractive to end-users when it is gamified. Gamification coupled with omnichannel personalization can redefine user engagement for brands.

Mobile Commerce: With greater adoption of mobile phones, mobile commerce will see massive traction in the coming years. Chatbots have been estimated to be vital to pushing transactions and conversions, and a major part of these transactions in India are expected to take place through the mobile-channel in days to come.

Customers expect deeper connections with brands, and omni-channel provides a quick and efficient way to deliver superior shopping experiences. Hence, companies need to look at how this technology can automate their workflow, help them drive sales and build competitive advantages in their markets.