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Tech-savvy and accustomed to engaging with brands through multiple channels, modern-day consumers are no longer impressed by basic personalization. Nearly every promotional email now arrives customized with the customer’s name, and retargeted advertisements for items individuals have shown interest in are everywhere. The techniques are tried and true, but as consumer relationships with brands become more complex, often spanning multiple channels across both digital and physical realms, the definition of a personalized experience—and what it takes to deliver it—is evolving. 

A truly personalized customer journey is just that, a journey, and one siloed interaction is not enough to constitute effective personalization, Harley Manning, research director in the customer experience practice at Forrester, says. Rather, personalization should permeate the customer experience at every touch point, incorporating behavioral patterns and preferences to facilitate a seamless journey that rewards customers for their loyalty. Though the road map varies depending on the business, when it comes to building a personalized customer experience, there are fundamental steps every brand must take to ensure that the resulting journey is one that customers want to take again and again. 

Personalize Your Brand Promise, and Keep It

Personalized customer journeys start with a deep understanding of the entire customer base and a strategy that aligns with it; this is the brand promise. “Before you can even start thinking about how to delight a specific customer, you have to think about what all of your customers expect from the brand,” Manning says. And there’s no such thing as a universal brand promise. 

Though companies such as Costco and Apple both compete in the consumer electronics space, for example, the two could not be more different. Yet both consistently receive high scores for customer experience because they deliver experiences that, despite being virtually the opposite of each other, are in line with their brand and their customers’ expectations. 

When consumers walk into an Apple store, they expect one-on-one buying support, and want to talk to a salesperson about differences between products or how they can be customized. At Costco, self-service is the name of the game, and the selection is significantly smaller than at other stores that carry electronics, including Apple. But the comparatively small inventory and limited number of on-the-floor employees is what keeps prices low, and it’s why Costco customers love shopping there, Manning says. “If you’re a cost leader like Costco, you’re not going to try to have a customer experience strategy built around delivering a deluxe level of service. But if you’re a luxury brand, focusing on a cost-cutting strategy would be off-strategy as well. You have to personalize the overall experience to reflect what you promise to deliver,” he says.

Know Your Customer at Every Part of the Journey

With a well-established and executable brand promise in place, companies can start zeroing in on individual customers to determine how to best personalize their journeys. Analytics plays a critical role here, but must perform different tasks depending on where the customer is in the journey. When a shopper is anonymous—meaning he hasn’t shared his email address, signed up to receive information, or made a purchase—personalizing the journey is tougher, but necessary nonetheless. 

“A consumer might visit a brand’s Web site several times before making any purchases, and everything that happens during those visits is trackable and very telling. Long before…customer[s] actually become…customers, they’re searching for things; they’re clicking on certain key words, they’re viewing different products. These are all behaviors that can help brands personalize the journey,” Ray Wang, founder and principal analyst at Constellation Research, says.

One vendor with advanced audience targeting capabilities is Adobe. Recognized as a leader in Forrester’s inaugural Wave report on enterprise marketing software suites, the vendor offers solutions that enable brands to analyze consumer activity prior to conversion and identification by factoring in elements including geolocation, device type, and path to site, which determines whether the shopper arrived on the Web site through organic search, an advertisement, or another way. Adobe Target and Adobe Analytics, two solutions within the Adobe Digital Marketing Cloud, deploy testing and behavioral targeting solutions to track customers as they begin to identify themselves through activity on the site and serve up highly personalized product and content recommendations in real time.  

Once a customer is converted, expectations rise and the level of personalization that she seeks skyrockets, so analytics must become far more in-depth, Mathieu Hannouz, an evangelist on the cross-channel campaign management evangelism and SME team at Adobe, says. This is also where a campaign management solution, such as Adobe Campaign, should kick in to complement the analytics solution and orchestrate customer journeys through email, push notifications, direct mail, and any other channels that marketers deem appropriate.

For Adobe client Sephora, working with Adobe Campaign has paid off. The brand is consistently lauded for its personalized customer journeys and is a model for a top-notch customer experience, analysts agree. Sephora’s personalization efforts are linked directly to the company’s loyalty program, Beauty Insider rewards. After making a purchase, customers are invited to sign up for the program and redeem the points they earn through purchases for samples and freebies, which vary depending on their points value. As customers continue to earn points as Beauty Insiders, they can eventually attain VIB (very important beauty insider) status and enjoy perks that are associated with the achievement, including free shipping or special holiday discounts. Based on their purchase history, customers are rewarded with discounts on specific items, such as fragrances, and receive a free gift on their birthday. 

In addition to rewarding customers, this loyalty program enriches the Web site and mobile app experiences. When a customer logs in, she can access a list of favorite items called “loves,” as well as personalized product recommendations based on previous purchases, skin tone, and other factors. But the most compelling feature, according to Hannouz, is the “purchases” section, which reveals a list of every item the customer has ever purchased either online, through the app, or in a physical store, all in one place. Though most other businesses also keep track of order history, few facilitate access that doesn’t require clicking back and forth between separate orders, and even fewer incorporate brick-and-mortar purchases. 

“What a customer craves in a personalized journey is being able to get the most out of every interaction because every interaction is designed for that specific customer. Not a segment of people that behave like him, but a segment of one,” says Kevin Lindsay, director of conversion product marketing for Adobe’s Digital Marketing Suite. 

“Customers go to Sephora’s site for different things. Sometimes they want to browse, but sometimes it’s to just get in, order their usual makeup, and get out. Sephora understands [its] customers, and offers personalization on every level, regardless of whether a customer is in a store and needs to pull up past purchases to remember the right color to buy or is shopping online and just wants to explore some recommendations,” Hannouz adds. 

Not enough vendors currently offer capabilities that bridge offline and online experiences, Wang says, but Adobe is making strides, especially in retail. Traditionally, when a customer browsed for items online but didn’t purchase them, a retargeting email would be triggered and sent to her inbox. With Adobe Campaign, however, there are more personalized options. For instance, if a customer chooses a pair of shoes but abandons the cart, Adobe Campaign uses geolocation and inventory tracking technology to send a push notification alerting the customer that a pair in the same size is available at a local store. “Very few vendors are doing this, but unifying offline and online experiences is a big piece of personalization,” Hannouz says.  

Serve Up the Right Content

Interactions between brands and their customers don’t take place in a vacuum—they’re all interconnected, and one engagement often dictates the next. Prior interactions add context to customer relationships and should therefore be used to inform the kind of content and product that a specific customer is interested in. This strategy goes hand in hand with knowing who the customer is at every stage of the journey, and involves anticipating what the customer may need before he or she needs it, Manning explains.  

To that end, vendors are ushering in an era of marketing orchestration—a personalized approach to marketing automation that leaves traditional campaigns behind in favor of highly contextualized customer interactions. Forrester defines marketing orchestration as “an approach to marketing that focuses not on delivering stand-alone campaigns but instead on optimizing a set of related cross-channel interactions, that, when added together, make up an individualized customer experience,” but the term means different things for different brands. 

Oracle customer JetBlue, for one, uses the marketing orchestration capabilities at the core of Oracle’s Responsys solution to create more personalized email engagements that incorporate relevant customer context, such as the customer’s home airport.

Instead of sending promotional emails with generic messaging, JetBlue uses Responsys to generate emails with content that takes customers’ previous behaviors or purchases into account. “We use geotargeting to send customers specific offers based on where they live. And if our data has shown that a customer is consistently flying out of the same airport over and over again, we can assume that that’s their home airport, and share information about discounted flights from that airport specifically,” Maryssa Miller, head of digital commerce at JetBlue, says. 

Additionally, JetBlue tries to upsell customers with invitations to purchase the airline’s Even More Space seats by sending out an email as the flight approaches. “Customers might not want to buy those seats when they’re booking, but as the flight gets closer, they might reconsider. We know when they’re flying and we know the seat availability on their specific flight, so bringing this information together saves them the hassle of figuring out if and how they can upgrade,” Miller adds. 

Building on cross-channel interactions to drive personalization is an important component of marketing orchestration, and Oracle Responsys draws from a number of channels, such as JetBlue’s Web site and loyalty program, to further customize email content. Members of the TrueBlue rewards program regularly receive emails that congratulate them on reaching various point milestones, inform them about opportunities to earn more points, and illustrate where they are on their journey to becoming Mosaic Members—TrueBlue customers that have attained VIP status. The Web site feeds into the marketing orchestration chain as well; recent searches are saved and may trigger a reminder email, urging the customer to continue searching or finish a transaction. 

Committed to maximizing personalization, JetBlue plans to add even more customer-specific elements to emails and is currently focused on making messages containing flight itineraries more customized. “Right now, even basic customizations, like if a customer requested a special meal or is traveling with a comfort animal, aren’t noted on itineraries. We’re working to make sure that all of that information is on there, and that the itinerary is very personalized,” Miller says. The company is also rolling out auto check-in, which automatically checks in travelers and sends them a boarding pass to save time and eliminate stress on travel day.

From a customer’s perspective, it’s small touches like these that differentiate JetBlue from other airlines, Manning says. “You can tell that the company cares about all of its customers. Just look at their planes,” he says, alluding to the airline’s comparatively spacious cabins, entertainment-equipped seats, and wide array of free snacks and full-size beverages.  

Though JetBlue entered the industry as a low-cost airline, it didn’t offset affordability with underwhelming service or hefty fees for travel essentials, such as luggage. Instead, JetBlue began offering high-end features at a reasonable price, something no other airline was doing at the time, according to Manning. Today, JetBlue continues to “anticipate the needs of its customer base as a whole, and nail the individual experience as well,” he says. 

Balance Privacy with Efficiency

Analysts have named 2014 The Year of the Data Breach, so in 2015, customers are going to be particularly wary about sharing their personal information. To get customers to share their data, there has to be a balanced exchange of value, Wang says. “Customers are giving up privacy in exchange for convenience, so the experience has to be worth it,” he explains. 

At the same time, however, too many privacy measures or other barriers can cause friction and hurt the overall experience. “There are a lot of things that make the experience too complex. Having to log in several times, dealing with several layers of verification, being required to re-enter payment information…these are all things that add friction, and if you can minimize it, you can move personalization to a whole new level,” Wang says. 

The Girl Scouts of the USA was confronted with this problem in its volunteer recruitment and onboarding efforts, and turned to Salesforce.com’s Salesforce1 Mobile App and Sales Cloud—both now part of the Salesforce Customer Success Platform—to streamline the sign-up process.  

In the past, becoming a volunteer required filling out forms on different Web sites and submitting paper forms separately. The process took weeks, and volunteers often gave up before completing it. But since the Girl Scouts’ Minnesota Wisconsin River Valleys Council began using the Salesforce 1 Mobile App to sign volunteers up on the spot and the Sales Cloud to consolidate disjointed forms into one coherent structure, the entire application, verification, and assignment process has been reduced to just a few hours. 

“Before, we just made it too darn hard to become a volunteer,” Maggie Miller, chief information officer at the Girl Scouts of the USA, said during a preshow interview at the Salesforce1 Tour in New York City. Since implementing Salesforce’s solution, the organization has been able to start shrinking its list of roughly 30,000 to 40,000 girls waiting to be paired up with volunteer troop leaders. At the Minnesota Wisconsin River Valleys Council, there was a 28 percent increase in the number of new girls served within a few weeks of adoption, Miller said.

Though not every company has a sign-up process that requires a background check or other complex registration processes, there’s a lesson to be learned here: If the experience is too complicated, customers will abandon it, and brands are responsible for simplifying it and speeding it up. When it comes to something as basic as check-out, remembering a customer’s preferred address or credit card is an easy way to streamline the process, and can mean a world of difference to customers who dread filling out order forms.

“Customers are constantly on the go, they’re multitasking, they’re busy. The last thing they want to do is waste time by filling out endless forms over and over. Realizing that and remembering key information so that it can be prefilled or skipped lets customers know that their time is valuable, and that all the information they’ve already shared is adding value to their experience,” Wang says. 

Be Flexible and Forward-Thinking

One of the biggest misconceptions about customer journeys is that they are linear, but customers actually discover and interact with brands in a multitude of ways. While one person may start his journey in a brick-and-mortar store, another may start her journey online. Still, the interactions are highly connected and contextualized regardless of the order in which they occur.

“Customer experience is more of a ‘choose-your-own-adventure book’ than it is a journey,” Wang says. “It’s just one of those things where you have to apply some design thinking. Businesses have to plan for different types of journeys, but the more they go digital, the easier it will become for them to capture context,” he adds.

The next three to five years will be crucial for brands, as Wang expects a growing number of vendors to roll out new solutions aimed at customizing the entire customer journey or improve existing solutions with more personalization functionality. As tools become increasingly sophisticated, however, companies will have to avoid a major potential pitfall—relying on technology to do what only people can do. 

“Personalization is all about understanding the customer and anticipating needs. Technology can give you data and insight and can help execute a vision, but it can’t know your customer for you,” Manning says, “and it’ll always be up to the businesses themselves to understand their customers and design the next great experience for them.”

Associate Editor Maria Minsker can be reached at mminsker@infotoday.com.