Increasing digital success through experimentation and personalization

Brands are operating in an increasingly digital world, particularly post-lockdown where e-commerce penetration is rising with new and existing consumers, while competition is continually growing. Customer expectations are rising and the nature of online makes it simple and seamless for them to move to the competition. Consumers therefore demand a high-quality, personalized experience that exactly matches their needs if they are to continue to remain loyal to your brand. 98% of consumers leave websites without converting, leading brands to miss out on large-scale digital revenues and profits, unless they have an experimentation and personalization strategy in place to capture this potential.

1 The benefits for brands of experimentation and personalization

Delivering the right digital experience is therefore essential to success. It means understanding what each and every customer requires, and using this information to provide a tailored experience that best meets their needs.

Companies can improve the experience through:

• Experimentation: A/B testing new products, services and digital enhancements to continually improve the experience for all visitors or defined segments.
• Personalization: Tailoring the experience, content and messages that visitors receive based on their behavior and other targeting criteria to provide them with an individual experience.

Successfully embracing experimentation and personalization benefits consumers and brands:

Benefiting consumers

Online, consumers now face an almost unlimited choice. Finding the right product or service at the right price can therefore be a long and complex process - they want brands to help them, saving their time by offering them an experience that exactly meets their needs.

Research from Accenture found that 91% of consumers would be more likely to buy from a brand if it identifies, recognizes and offers them personalized content and promotions. Backing this up, 66% of global consumers surveyed by Kameleoon said the current experience brands are delivering will impact their future purchasing behavior.

Benefiting digital brands

Research from international experimentation consultancy, GO Group Digital outlines the clear link between experimentation and financial success. It found that organizations that create a healthy experimentation culture grow at least eight times faster than global GDP with 89% of companies it interviewed saying that experimentation was vital to transforming how they operated.

Research by Boston Consulting Group highlights how effective personalization helps retailers. 40% of consumers spent more than they originally planned when visiting websites that were highly personalized. Brands that have a personalization strategy are seeing revenues increase by 6%-10% - two to three times faster growth than those that do not personalize.

2 Demonstrating ROI from personalization and experimentation

As with every investment, money spent on personalization and experimentation needs to deliver bottom-line results and support business objectives around digital growth. Projects need a solid business case in place - and while the details of this will vary between different brands and industries, these tangible benefits should help shape your calculations:

Experimentation:

• Provides the ability to identify and test new concepts, products and services before their wider introduction, reducing risk and potentially adding completely new sources of income.
• Enables brands to better understand consumer needs and continually introduce incremental improvements that deliver higher conversion rates, engagement and loyalty.
• Creates a data-driven, experimentation culture that is agile and responsive to changing consumer needs, driving longer-term relevance and success.

Personalization:

• Increase conversions by delivering exactly what visitors are looking for, at the right time, whether this is products, content or a tailored experience.
• Supports a customer-centric culture, focused on consumer needs.
• Achieve higher cross-sell opportunities through behavioral and contextual analysis and using this understanding to run targeted campaigns to groups and individuals.
• Drive greater engagement and loyalty through a relevant experience that differentiates brands from their rivals, increasing customer lifetime value (LTV).

Automation:

• Adopting experimentation and personalization solutions enables brands to automate digital marketing, lowering campaign set-up time and costs while seizing opportunities faster.
• Automation provides the foundation to scale personalization and experimentation across your organization to drive exponential growth.
• Research published inHarvard Business Review, demonstrated that personalization enables companies to reduce customer acquisition costs by 50% and improve the efficiency of marketing spend by 10%-30%.