How to Achieve Omnichannel Personalization With Declared Data

TL;DR:

• In order to drive omnichannel personalization efforts, you need data — and that data needs to be high quality and have enough depth for you to precisely understand what customers want and need.
• Declared data, which consists of zero-party and first-party data, is the best kind of data for a personalized omnichannel experience.
• As we illustrate with a hypothetical beauty retailer, you can gather declared data and enable omnichannel personalization at multiple touchpoints along the customer journey — including mobile apps and in-store visits.
• Jebbit gives you the tools to create interactive digital experiences that allow you build customer engagement while gathering data — and it also integrates seamlessly with BlueConic, which is a customer data platform (CDP) that will enable you to power real-time omnichannel personalization.

Personalizing the customer experience across channels is a goal most brands have but can be challenging to achieve. With consumer standards higher than ever, it’s not enough to just have an online store, post on social media, or send a promotional email or SMS. Consumers expect seamless experiences that cater to their individual needs. This means brands need to focus on omnichannel personalization and create a consistent experience across both physical and digital touchpoints.

In this blog post, we’ll show you how you can achieve true data-driven personalization at scale so you can treat everyone in your customer base like the unique individual they are, across all in-person and digital channels.

What Is Omnichannel Personalization?

Omnichannel personalization is about using the data your customers willingly provide to make the shopping experience easier and more enjoyable. With data, you can provide personalized content and product recommendations across multiple channels. 

So instead of keeping all your marketing and customer channels — like your website, email marketing, search advertising, and social media — in silos, you can interconnect them with an omnichannel approach. 

Why Is Omnichannel Personalization So Important?

Here’s a fact from McKinsey: 71% of customers expect personalized shopping experiences, and 76% become frustrated with brands who don’t. 

In other words, omnichannel personalization isn’t a nice-to-have; it’s a must. When you can demonstrate that you understand what customers want, it helps them feel valued, which can improve customer retention.

Perhaps even more importantly, omnichannel personalization done well can make the shopping process easy and seamless. It shows customers exactly what they want, when they want it — as opposed to a lengthy browsing process scrolling through dozens of products that aren’t the right fit. That can help you increase average order values and overall customer lifetime value.

Omnichannel Personalization Starts With the Right Data

Delivering omnichannel personalization is impossible without data. To personalize across channels, you need to know when, where, why, and how customers are interacting with your brand. These data points help you create a unified customer profile that you can use to understand what customers want and need.

Sounds simple, right? On the surface, the concept is simple — but to leverage data effectively, you need both quality and depth.

Quality means data needs to be real time, relevant, and accurate. Depth means going beyond basic behavioral and transactional metrics to discover motivations and specific use cases for your products. 

For example, if a customer purchases a set of markers, are they buying them for a personal art project, for their child to make a poster for school, or to embellish their bullet journal? This is crucial information to know since personalization will look different depending on whether you need to target an artist, a parent buying school supplies, or a professional who enjoys a creative take on their day planner.

To get both depth and quality, you need declared data, which is another way of referring to zero-party and first-party data.

Both of these data types are referred to as declared data because they’re willingly and explicitly shared by individual consumers. If given the chance, consumers will freely tell you their motivations, intentions, interests, and preferences in exchange for relevant, personalized experiences. By activating this data across all channels, you can create meaningful, one-to-one, omnichannel marketing strategy that treats every consumer like a friend.

You can then use a marketing automation tool like a customer data platform (CDP) to sort that data into unified customer profiles. With these profiles, you can create a meaningful, one-to-one omnichannel marketing strategy that will serve up relevant personalized content on the fly to market products and help guide customers into purchase decisions.

Using Declared Data for Omnichannel Personalization: An Example

Collecting and using declared data for your omnichannel personalization efforts is a complex process. To make it easy to understand where and when to gather data — and how to use it for personalization — we’ve created a hypothetical example. 

In our example, the brand is a major beauty retailer. Here’s a top-down view of what the customer journey and omnichannel personalization might look like for this retailer:

1. A potential new customer visits the brand’s website and looks at skincare products. A pop-up prompts them to sign up for an account and enroll in the brand’s loyalty program for rewards. The user fills out the form, providing the brand with a few demographic details plus their email address. After that, they spend a little bit of time browsing skincare products. All of this information — demographics, email address, and browsing details — is automatically compiled in the beauty retailer’s CDP as part of the customer’s profile.
2. Now that the brand has the user’s email address, they automatically send out personalized email marketing featuring subject lines and promotional content about products related to the skincare the potential customer was browsing earlier. The email also prompts them to earn rewards by downloading the beauty retailer’s app.
3. The user downloads the app and takes a product finder quiz that’s featured on the app’s home screen. The quiz allows the beauty retailer to gather information about the user’s preferences and at the same time provides the user with personalized recommendations for skincare. The user isn’t quite ready to buy, but they add a couple of product recommendations to their cart to save for later.
4. The next day, the user decides they want the products in their cart but doesn’t want to wait for shipping, so they stop in at the beauty retailer’s nearby physical location. They purchase an exfoliator and a cleanser from a particular skincare brand, and to earn points, they give their loyalty program details at checkout so that the purchase is logged on their account.
5. Later, the user moves on to browsing social media. In the background, the beauty retailer’s CDP has been gathering and compiling data — browsing history, purchase history, and more. That data is uploaded to social media for advertising purposes, and because of that, the social media platform serves up a paid ad for the beauty retailer that invites the user to “complete their skincare routine.”
6. The user clicks on this ad, which leads to a personalized landing page. Here, the user discovers that the beauty retailer also sells a serum and a day cream from the same brand they purchased at the brick-and-mortar store.
7. All along, the beauty retailer continues to collect information based on this user’s interactions. At some point after the user’s experience with the landing page, the brand sends out an automated email — and this happens to be a shoppable email full of personalized recommendations. It directs the user to a page featuring relevant skincare products, where they select a couple of items and make an online purchase.

That’s how omnichannel personalization works. Every touchpoint where the customer interacts with the brand is an opportunity for the brand to gather declared data. Through automation, brands can compile that data into customer profiles that offer insights into what customers want and need. They can then use those insights to serve up personalized recommendations and content at various touchpoints — like marketing emails, dynamic content on webpages, or targeted advertising.

Improving Your Omnichannel Personalization Strategy With Jebbit and BlueConic

Now that you know how omnichannel personalization works, it’s time to look at some tools that can help you make it work even better. With Jebbit and BlueConic, you can create engaging customer experiences, offer personalized recommendations, gather both zero-party and first-party data — and then unify it all into accurate, detailed customer profiles that will enable real-time omnichannel personalization. 

Engage Customers, Offer Personalization, and Gather Data With Jebbit

Having Jebbit on your side is like adding a digital marketing superhero to your team — and that’s because with Jebbit, you can create digital experiences like quizzes, surveys, lookbooks, or even simple games to engage your customers. These experiences can be launched across multiple channels — your website, social media, your mobile app, and more. As customers interact with them, you’ll get to gather the declared data needed for multichannel personalization.

Samsonite is a great example of a brand who has successfully leveraged Jebbit to engage customers and collect data. They created a quiz that asks customers about their travel preferences. Users who engage with it enjoy answering a few short and fun questions, and at the end, they get personalized recommendations that suit their travel needs. 

In the background, Samsonite gets to learn more about those needs. For example, the second question asks users whether they normally travel for business or pleasure. In theory, Samsonite could add customers’ answers to this question to customer profiles — then serve up personalized content based on whether individuals expressed an interest in business or personal travel.

That’s on top of the other benefits Samsonite got from this experience: 

• 58% of visitors who clicked on the quiz engaged with it.
• 60% who started went on to finish it.
• 50% of those who completed the quiz went on to shop product recommendations. 

Aggregate Customer Data With BlueConic

Successful Jebbit experiences will provide you with a trove of invaluable data — but how do you activate that data? That’s where BlueConic comes in. BlueConic is a customer data operating system that seamlessly integrates with Jebbit. 

What this means for you is that you can collect data through Jebbit experiences, your website, social media, and elsewhere — then aggregate all of it within the BlueConic CDP. This enables you to automatically create comprehensive customer profiles and segments, which gives you the power to provide real-time omnichannel personalization based on each individual customers’ behaviors, needs, and preferences.

Get Started With Omnichannel Personalization

Ready to improve marketing campaigns with omnichannel personalization? To make the most of your efforts, you’re going to need data that is high quality, relevant, and detailed so that you can understand your customers wants and needs. You can gather data and enact personalization all throughout the customer journey — on your website, mobile app, social media, and even in stores.

With Jebbit, you can maximize data collection through engaging cross-channel digital experiences. You can then aggregate this data (plus information you’ve collected elsewhere) on the BlueConic CDP, which will allow you to enable real-time omnichannel personalization.

Ready to learn more? Get started by scheduling a strategy call with a Jebbit Experience Expert!