What real-time personalization really means for your brand’s bottom line

Over the years, the concept of customer experience (cx) has become really popular. Customer experience is basically how a customer feels about how they interact with your brand throughout the entire relationship.

Most experts often point to three areas that matter for excellent customer experience: value, enjoyment, and usability. These factors permeate every part of a customer’s interaction with your brand, from how easy it is to navigate your website and buy something to customer service. 

Here’s an easy graphic to help you get the idea:

One way brands are honing in on improving customer experience is through personalized email marketing. Take it a step further with real-time personalization, and you can see a significant impact on your bottom line. 

Here’s why.

More touchpoints

The cool thing about real-time personalization is you can use it to reach out to your customers at every stage of the sales funnel. Really, you can do it with every single email you send. 

When you have a pile of customer data that shows you not only their past purchases but also their behavior, you have a serious tool that can help you go deep on personalization. Now, add to that the ability to create specific, customized emails for every one of your potential customers and readers. 

You can add this type of experience to all sorts of emails based on data. For example, add real-time personalization to shipping confirmation emails, and your customers can track their packages right from their inbox.

That’s powerful stuff; you can create a custom journey for every buyer. And with more consumers wanting to have personalized content, you’re giving these people what they want precisely when they want it.

Keeping all those touchpoints personalized through every step of your relationship with consumers is a great way to get them to buy from you more often.

Better engagement

Another area where real-time personalization can make a huge difference is through engagement. Today with so many people constantly bombarded by emails and ads online, it can be challenging even to get the attention of your customer, nevermind have them actively engage with your content.

Real-time personalization can help fix that. Here’s one example. 

Let’s say you’ve got a killer offer that is on a fixed schedule—a Black Friday sale, perhaps. Now, where you can tap into real-time personalization is using something like a count down timer to let your readers know when their chance to grab this exclusive deal runs out. 

Emails like this help consumers see when deals expire, which is good, but it also helps trigger a sense of urgency too. It’s a psychological response that can make consumers more interested in buying; they don’t want to miss out.

The more you can get your customers to actively engage with your emails the better off you’re going to be in the long run.

Timing and relevancy

Let’s stick with the example email above and take things even further by looking at timing. 

You can use geo-location to customize email countdown timers to time zones too, that means no one misses out because an East Coast email got sent to a West Coast shopper.

Even seemingly small things like getting the timing right can translate into a lift in sales. Your customers don’t need to think about when something runs out; you are showing them right from their inbox.

The same concept can be used when thinking about relevancy too. Real-time personalization means you can pull data from your customer’s behavior and highlight more products and services that are directly relevant to their needs and interests. 

You can use relevancy in your abandoned cart emails, for example. Highlight not only the product left in the cart but other relevant products your customer would like too. 

Bringing it all together

Hopefully, you can see how your customer’s overall experience can benefit from real-time personalization. If you’re serious about improving cx, you want to pull out all the stops and find ways that keep your customers happy and buying. 

Using real-time personalized emails is one way to get there. These emails can speak directly to your customer’s wants and needs, helping your brand stand out from the crowd and positively impacting the bottom line.