Robert Massa, General Manager EMEA, BounceX discusses how having greater granularity will help brands fulfil its customer demand for personalised experiences and help individualise their marketing approach across a range of channels and devices.
Who is browsing your ecommerce site right now? Perhaps you can identify a number of the cookies being used to access your website at a given time, but it’s unlikely you can recognise the actual people behind the screen. In fact, close to 95% of your web traffic is likely a mystery to you.
Is this such a big deal you may ask? After all, web retailers have relied on this level of information for long enough, so perhaps any further granularity is unnecessary. Well, if you share this opinion, it’s time to consider the benefits of recognising individuals and marketing to people rather than cookies.
Not only will greater granularity help you fulfil the customer demand for personalised experiences and help you individualise your marketing approach across a range of channels and devices, but it will also help you to accurately gauge consumer intent and finally reveal when individual customers are wavering on the edge of a purchase.
Key buying signals
It typically takes six to eight touchpoints with a brand before a customer finally decides to buy. Without accurate identity or device resolution, it’s impossible to recognise the tell-tale buying signals that high-intent customers give. These signals may be generated by an individual shopper across multiple sessions using a range of devices, so accurate identification is vital if retailers are to successfully piece this jigsaw together and nurture shoppers toward conversion.
For example, with the ability to recognise shoppers, retailers can more easily differentiate the informational queries that typify the early stages of the buying cycle from the high-intent transactional buying signals customers give off when they’re on the verge of buying.
Once retailers can accurately identify individuals and gauge their level of intent they can start using a number of tactics to get them over the line. Proactive messaging is a very good example. Retailers can identify high-intent customers and message them when the item they’re interested in is low in stock or when it is due to be back in stock after it was previously sold out.
New reasons to buy
Another highly effective, customer-centric tactic that leading solutions have only just begun is the ability to message high-intent customers when the item or items they’ve been browsing falls in price, giving them a great new reason to buy.
This is exactly the kind of personalisation – high in relevance to the individual shopper – that your customers crave, and it stands in stark contrast to the industry standard, ‘you liked that, so you’ll like this’ recommendations or batch-and-blast messaging based on demographic.
Five-step approach to conversion
Retailers should concentrate on the medium- to high-intent customers with a simple five-step approach: identify them, understand them, motivate them, encourage them and finally, convert them.
Without this level of online customer identification, you’re missing out on a digital goldmine of untapped revenue just waiting to be generated from medium-, high- and very-high-intent customers.
Identification also enables you to analyse out customer journeys and determine when, where and why they abandon your site, giving you valuable clues about unnecessary friction in the journey.
Understanding individual consumer intent and meeting shopper needs in real time in this way are the key to winning hearts, minds and sales, but without accurate identification, these goals are just out of reach.
By Robert Massa
General Manager EMEA
BounceX