Top 5 Ways of Building a Personalization Strategy for your Consumer Goods Brand Without Rebuilding the Website

The ‘New Normal’ world has opened up several opportunities for consumer goods brands to grow in the online space. However, the CPG brands have to compete with the marketplaces that offer convenience to tech-savvy customers in multiple ways. The traditional approach of discounts and offers is outdated today. Having a customer personalization strategy for your DTC business is essential if you wish to offer unique experiences tailored to individual customers.

It won’t be wrong to call personalization a ‘Deciding Factor’ as online pioneers like Amazon have proven how it impacts the loyalty of a customer. Every customer-obsessed CPG brand must find loopholes in their marketing techniques, study various personalization stats for marketers and come up with a strategy that fits best in the post Covid world.

Today, consumers are happy to share their information with brands and expect personalized services. However, even after collecting this data, brands struggle in using it throughout the customer journey lifecycle for good. With the increasing customer expectation in the digital world, brands also face various challenges in fulfilling them.


Fig: Various factors in the challenging retail environment

In order to meet the new normal customer demands, here are the top 6 essentials a CPG brand must consider for creating personalization strategies for retail.

Know the Shopper Well, Know the Context Better:

The core of a personalization strategy lies in centralized, harmonized and relevant data for offering a better customer experience. To create a customer personalization strategy, every single bit of data is important. Right from brand affinity data to engagement on social channels and personalized experience, everything is essential to get a shopper context and brand specific-customer journey.

Studying the existing data, gathering the latest information from CRM and putting everything together to understand the analytical know-how is a must for understanding the buyer persona. This helps marketers in understanding what may work and whatnot with a specific set of customers. Zooming into specific details can help in creating personalized recommendations and testing their performance. If it doesn't work as expected, one can always delve deep into data to identify gaps and the updating preferences of the customers along with personalization trends.

Create a Single View of Customers:

Personalization initiatives in the DTC world is more than just emails. Major factors of personalization in today’s time include customer information like mode of purchase, customer demographics, location of purchase, keywords searched and much more. Once you’ve gathered the data, creating a single view of customers helps brands in who their customers are, how they shop and when they’d love to get personalized offers.

If you think it is difficult to keep track of every interaction of each customer with your brands, you need to understand more about a single view of customers. With the right use of technology and the best set of tools like customer data platform (CDP), you can create individual customer profiles, understand their likes and preferences to offer real-time personalization on the go.

Fig: Single View of Customers

Check out our ebook on creating a single view of customers for B2C businesses to understand better.

 

Connect Across Channels, Connect with a Purpose:

CPG brands have majorly relied on the traditional way of marketing for building connections with the customers. However, in the digital space, omnichannel shopping is a big opportunity for businesses to earn from various platforms including social media. Depending on the preferences of the customers, personalization suggests more than what to buy from where. Customers can discover products, conduct research and get recommendations across platforms to buy something they never knew about but now they own.

Even though in-store purchases are still preferred by many CPG customers, digital touchpoints are creating exciting opportunities to develop direct contact with customers. Connecting with a purpose of creating customers for life needs complete understanding about the buyers. Connecting across various online as well as offline channels helps CPG brands in gaining significant revenue, cross-sell, and up-sell in the market.

Emulate other CPG brand strategies and offerings to the customers:

Names like Nike, IKEA and Amazon have set the standards of personalization high in the retail world with relevant content and on-point customer interaction. CPG business owners should not view this as a threat but as an opportunity to learn from these brands and implement something similar or better. Extensive market research is the key to understanding what your competitors are doing to gain consumer attention. It helps you understand what worked for them, what didn’t, what experiments you can go for, and what mistakes you should not make.

Adopt a lifecycle strategy that allows you to reach out to the customers on various channels from acquisition till retention phase. All the personalization and marketing strategy examples coming from brands like Amazon follow an omnichannel approach by reaching out to the customers on various platforms with the best use of technology. Always be open to experimenting and learning from your competitors’ mistakes.

Utilize consumer data and focus on sensitive prices with the power of technology:

Customer loyalty in the post-pandemic world is fickle and the purchase path is no longer linear. A good DTC personalization strategy would consider all the major factors like season, product demand and more for offering a consistent experience to customers.

When it comes to price sensitivity, consumers dealing with low confidence have changed their shopping habits in several ways. Thanks to CPG brands understanding this behavior where consumers wish to spend less on non-essentials, choose discounted products and switch to affordable brands. Using customer data to refine messaging and meeting price sensitivity is what businesses need to do when it comes to offering personalization.

Bonus tip- Personalized Products and Packaging:

Once you’ve studied enough about your customers, you have an opportunity to not only offer personalized experience but also personalized products and packaging. Consumers these days love products that feel special to them and several small businesses are making the most of this opportunity. So, if you wish that the consumers should be excited to buy again from you, surprise them with personalized packaging that they never expected.

Bottom Line:

A strategic focus is essential to deliver hyper-personalized experience for CPG brands. With neck-to-neck competition and sensitive prices, businesses have no other option than to come up with an effective personalization strategy. You need a blend of crucial data, in-depth analysis, the best technology, tools and innovation.

Wish to make your personalization game stronger? Our experts at Altudo can help you in offering 1:1 personalization and seamless customer experience. Write to us at marketing@altudo.co and we’ll answer all your queries.