Section: Blog

Scale Your Business Online with Smart Selling & Personalized Marketing

Written by Stewart Balanchine | Aug 18, 2021 7:42:25 AM

Accelerating Online Business in 2022 

As recent events continue to push everyone towards eCommerce and Online Retail, all businesses need to develop digital marketing platforms. Even those who never had an online presence before must now find their place in the ever-expanding e-commerce world. Facing new competitors, companies that previously stayed local must scale their business globally to survive, especially in retail.

So how do you stay ahead of the competition? Selling smarter, not harder.

"The global pandemic has accelerated the shift toward the future of eCommerce, with digital investments in selling smarter becoming increasingly critical to meeting consumers’ new needs and fending off new competitors." - Cetrix

Staying ahead of your competition requires staying ahead of your customers. Your business must know how your customers act and think. You must conduct a customer behavior analysis to scale your business online.

Analyzing Customer Behavior Using Marketing Personalization Stats

However, analyzing your customers can even challenge the experts. As your customer base grows, you start making false assumptions about the seemingly unrelated customer journey and buyer personas. Luckily, you can use big data in eCommerce to gain the insights your marketers need. 

Big Data uses large amounts of data to inform your decisions. For the online retail industry, this is achieved using AI solutions for eCommerce websites, an important part of what we call Smart Selling.

Through big data analytics, you can

  • Collect customer data
  • Collate and generalize it into categories
  • Develop effective engagement strategies based on those categories
  • Become a Data-Driven Organization and improve decision-making across your company

You would be able to sell smarter by offering personalized messages for each customer journey stage. You may even see your revenues increase by 15% just through an extensive data personalization campaign alone. 

How to Personalize Marketing with Customer Behavior Analysis

Customer behavior analysis uses data to understand a customer's habits and desires to increase conversion and engagement. Behavior targeting recommends actions and experiences to help your customers act and make a purchase.

Behavior targeting, or predictive marketing, helps your company on top of the trends before they happen. It helps your customer feel understood and not just another sale,

Customer behavior analysis also helps your company connect with customers. You will truly understand why your customers make purchases. As a result, you can focus your marketing strategy on their desires.

Customer analytics and personalized marketing are also stages your company needs to go through in order to become a customer-centric organization. If you want your business to survive and ensure a big share of its market, we strongly suggest you dive in these trends!

Convenient Personalized Marketing Materials

Most customers want convenient purchases. They don't have the time to search hours or days for the ideal product. They want you to reveal it to them, especially if it is low-cost or needed regularly.

 

Conscience Personalized Promotion Techniques

People base brand choices on a company's global impact. With the many other options available, your customers want to know if your business has a stake in the world as a whole, not just your product.

When customers interact with personalized content, they're most likely to convert or to progress in the buyer's journey.

Quality Personalized Marketing Materials

Quality often drives conversions for high-cost or one-time purchases. Your customers want your products to work without additional investment in time or money.

As quality usually opposes convivence, you must understand that your customers weigh their values while forming your marketing strategy.

Collaborative Personalized Marketing

Customers want a say in the product or service that they choose. That means engaging them during development, offering options, or asking for feedback. By giving your customers a personal stake, they have a reason to return to your brand or refer it to others.

Ultimately, customer behavior analysis is to provide personalized marketing materials that might put you above your new e-commerce competition.

Benefits of Personalization in Marketing

Customer behavior analysis allows your company to develop a proactive rather than reactive marketing strategy. These personalized promotion techniques offer numerous other benefits such as:

  • Anticipate future trends. Understanding your customers allows your e-commerce company to anticipate how they may act in the future.

  • Predict customer value. Know your customers' retail value to better focus your personalization campaigns

  • Optimize content. Content is a major driver of online traffic. Know what topic resonates with your customer personas.

  • Retain customers. Develop personalized marketing materials and strategies to help retain customers and reduce churn.

A proactive behavioral marketing strategy using customer behavior analysis can your revenue as well. You could increase your sales by 10% and conversion rate by 22% on web traffic alone. Not to mention your email campaigns, SEO content, and advertisements.

3-Dimensional Customers: Factors that affect Personalization and Behavioral Marketing.

There are three dimensions of a customer that influence their behavior: personality, psychology, and environment.

Focusing your behavior targeting on these three areas will provide you with the best starting point.

  • Personality. How a customer acts in a given online or in-person environment can tell you a lot about how to reach them. 

  • Psychology. A person's psychological responses heavily influence their purchasing behaviors

  • Environment. The environment in which a customer lives their life has a huge impact on their purchases. 

Selling smarter means understanding all the factors influencing your customers.

How to Scale a Business Online with Customer Behavior Analysis

Behavioral marketing can increase conversion, customer engagement, and revenue. This is a very important aspect of becoming a customer-centric organization.

Here are 5 easy steps to get there with customer behavior analysis.

  1. Break down the personas. Each retail business has a variety of customers, and each may purchase for a different reason. Breaking down your customer base into big data personas helps you understand these behaviors.

  2. Identify the benefit. Each persona is going to see a different benefit in your product or service that will lead to conversion. Understanding that benefit helps you understand why they take certain actions...or don't take certain actions.      

  3. Organize quantitative data. Decide what data points you will need to fully understand your customers' behaviors. Don't stop within your own company, either. As discussed earlier, it is important to understand the external influences and overall trends that impact your customers. 

  4. Compare data to the customer experience. After collecting the data, go back to your customer journey mapping and analyze it. Find out which persona made a purchase at which stage of the customer journey. Then compare that data to the customer experience. 

  5. Start selling smarter. Once you have analyzed the data, it's time to take action. Develop a personalization campaign using the insights you discovered. Once the campaign is complete, analyze the success of the campaign to determine any next steps.

Customer behavior analysis gives you a comprehensive view of your customer through data-driven analysis of their tendencies. You can use that analysis to drive targeted behavioral marketing campaigns, rather than wasting time with leads that won't convert.

Why are Personalization and Behavioral Marketing Important?

Your customers want a personalized experience while interacting with you. They want to see products and services that reflect and solve their needs and requirements. They want this treatment from both your sales staff and your marketers. You provide this customer experience through personalized marketing. 

What is Personalized Marketing?

Personalized marketing (or one-to-one marketing) uses individualized content to attract customers. It works by treating each customer or potential customer as an individual through content explicitly made for them. 

To achieve this, you utilize big data analytics and automation technology to deliver the right advertising messages and experiences for each customer at the right moment.

This personalization can include:

  • Unique shopping preferences
  • Custom email messages 
  • Targeted discounts based on interests
  • Targeted advertising based on purchase history
  • And much more

The Benefits of Personalization in Marketing

Personalization campaigns do more than just bring customers to you. They also offer numerous other benefits for your business and your customers alike. Some of the more common ones include:

  • Improved Customer Experience - Your customers feel that you value them.
  • Improved Customer Data Collection - Your customers will provide their personal information if they feel they get something in return.
  • Drive Revenue -Using your customer's preferred channels lets you automatically guide them through your sales funnel.  
  • Increased Brand Loyalty - Personalized marketing strategies often lead to loyal, satisfied, repeat customers. 
  • Consistency Across Channel - Your company can seamlessly provide the same experiences across every device your customers use. 

Challenges of Personalized Marketing

Despite these benefits, personalized marketing campaigns are not without their drawbacks. 

  • Finding the Right Technology - You need the right eCommerce big data analytics tools to gather the required insights to make personalization marketing strategies viable. campaigns 
  • Time and Resources - Personalization campaigns need dedicated teams who have the time and resources to interact with your customers directly. 
  • Creating a Single Customer View - Customer data is often piecemeal and seemingly unrelated, making it difficult to compile it into individual customer profiles.
  • Implementing Smart Segmentation - Smart segmentation across channels is the key to behavior targeting success.

How to Achieve a Personalized Marketing in Your Company?

Successful personalized marketing strategies are not easy. They require numerous factors and considerations to pull off. The following list is just a small sample of what your organization must do to personalize your marketing efforts. 

  • Compare personalization platforms to find the right one for your situation
  • Capture and collect personal information from customers while remaining compliant with the relevant privacy regulations
  • Properly analyze your customer data to draw the right conclusions
  • Act on any actionable insights drawn from the data analysis as soon as possible

How Customer Behavior Analysis Help Businesses Achieve Personalized Marketing?

Any successful personalization marketing campaign needs the right customer data to pull off. However, gathering and processing that data can be challenging, making digital strae3egies difficult to execute, 

Fortunately, the right customer behavior analytics tools can help you deliver a truly personalized experience to your customers. With these tools, you can:

  • Gather personal information without hassling your customers
  • Engage customers with the right level of subtlety.
  • Efficiently structure and allocate enough resources.
  • Appropriately segment your audience
  • Concentrate your personalization to the right marketing platforms
  • Build long-term customer relationships

What to Consider When Choosing a Personalized Marketing System

There are many marketing platforms out there to aid you in designing your customer behavior analysis. Here are some factors to consider when choosing your ideal solution. 

Behavioral Targeting Templates

Does the service offer multiple templates? Honestly, you don't have time to start the process from scratch. Behavioral marketing is a time-sensitive matter with all that new competition in the eCommerce world.

Your company has already started something unique in your retail delivery or products, so no need to reinvent the wheel on this one. Find a solution that offers pre-made templates that can streamline the process.

Personalized Marketing Platform Integration

You also have online systems already in place that this solution will need to integrate with. When deciding on which solution to use, make sure you have options for seamless integration to your current eCommerce marketing platform.

Ease of use E-commerce Big Data Analytics

Some marketing software can do everything imaginable...if only you could figure out how. Find a solution with the options you need to scale your business while also being easy to use. Again, you're busy. Your business needs a solution that can be implemented effortlessly and quickly.

Personalized Marketing Materials Customization

On the opposite end of the spectrum, there are the one-size-fits-all solutions. Chances are, that won't quite work either. Find a solution you customize to fit your needs. You may not need all the bells and whistles, but the solution must fit your company uniquely. No retail company is created equal, and each needs some level of customization. This is all part of selling smarter, not harder. Only pay for what you actually need but pay for it if you need it.

Automated Personalized Marketing Platform

Sell smarter with smart technology. Nowadays, more and more things can be taken off your plate by automation. Find a solution that does just that. There are behavioral marketing solutions with conditional marketing actions. For example, if a customer clicks on multiple online products that have been labeled as "handbags" the software might offer suggestions of other handbags they might be interested in. Get a solution that saves you time and does the work for you.

How to Scale a Business Online with Omnichannel Automation

Your customers expect personalized experiences driven by their current preferences and recent interactions. At Cetrix, our solution enables e-commerce businesses to engage their online customers at optimal points along the customer journey, in real-time, and through the most effective channels.

As consumer behavior continues to shift rapidly in our pandemic-changed world, we are focused on improving the customer experience process with omnichannel smart AI operational capabilities to deliver the right marketing strategy to the right customer at the right time.

You need a partner that is ready to handle this ever-changing eCommerce environment. Here at Cetrix Cloud Services, we are already doing just that. We have a dedicated team to help your company navigate retail customer behavior analysis and take your profits to the next level.

For more information, visit our "Why Cetrix?" page or contact us at info@cetrixcloudservices.com. We look forward to hearing from you!