How To Use Data To Personalise The Customer Experience In Retail

Written by Matilda Howard, Marketing Specialist

Matilda Howard is a seasoned marketing professional with a passion for brand storytelling and consumer engagement. Focused on driving digital innovation and brand growth for clients she enjoys sharing her knowledge with the wider community online.

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Many retail veterans tend to place a lot of stock in the power of their experience and intuition. However, while data-driven strategy may seem to come more naturally to ecommerce and digital-first channels, using data to create a customized shopping experience in brick-and-mortar retail can still have a tremendous impact on your business’s overall success.

In this post, we’ll take a closer look at the role data can play in creating a personalized shopping experience for your customers, and some of the best ways that retailers can implement data analytics in their stores.

The importance of CX personalization data in retail

Customer experience (CX) personalization data in retail allows you to interpret the way your customers interact with your brand at various stages of the customer journey and build a more detailed picture of their experience when shopping at your stores. 

Key applications of CX personalization data include

Understanding customer behavior

CX personalization data can help you delve into how various segments interact with your brand at different touchpoints and the kinds of stimuli that can prompt them to take desired actions, such as finding out more about a certain product, visiting one of your branches, or signing up to a loyalty program.

Identifying and addressing customer journey obstacles

Data-based personalization in retail can also be a highly effective way to identify obstacles and pain points that your customers face during the customer journey. 

Common issues that can slow or halt the customer journey include issues with product features, difficulty finding or understanding product information, or poor-quality customer service. By understanding and fixing these issues, you can start to engineer a higher-quality buyer experience and improve your relationship with customers by actively implementing their feedback in a customized shopping experience.

Developing better products

By leveraging customer experience analytics, you can highlight the product features and benefits that are capturing your audiences’ attention, and which ones are providing the most value after a purchase. In the same vein, this process can also help you identify which product features aren’t being used and appreciated.

Through this kind of analysis, you can use your product development resources more efficiently to focus on developing items with the kinds of features your audience loves, and forming a better customer relationship from the beginning.

Identifying important trends

Keeping your finger on the pulse through customer data analytics will also help you identify patterns in both your own target market’s shopping behavior, and broader trends affecting the retail market. 

When you successfully identify these patterns and anticipate how they’re going to affect your business and market niche, you can adapt your strategies by developing new products, introducing different promotional offers, or launching new marketing campaigns that will align with customer preferences.

Developing a personalized shopping experience

Many modern consumers prioritize finding brands that provide a personalized shopping experience, and a good working relationship with your customer data can be a great way to achieve this.

Though data-based personalization has limited uses in a traditional brick-and-mortar setting, there are many steps you can take through digital channels to support your retail operation, such as personalizing emails, product recommendations, and highly targeted advertising. This will enhance the quality of the customer journey and develop brand loyalty through more unique relationships with your brand.

How to use data to personalize the customer experience in retail

Now that we’ve looked at the key benefits of leveraging customer experience in retail, you’re probably wondering about the practical steps you can take to seize these benefits and see them moving the needle for your brand.

Here’s three ways retailers can use data to personalize the customer experience for happier shoppers and healthier margins.

Measuring footfall with innovative technology

When people in the retail space talk about “measuring traffic”, the assumption is that this is part of the ecommerce sphere using the popular in-built or third-party analytics tools built specifically for online stores. However, recent innovations in retail tech have allowed stores to gain accurate figures on physical footfall, and drive better decisions based on these findings.

SaaS brands like Retail Report, for example, offer sensor-based footfall tracking data to not only track how many shoppers are entering your premises in a given period, but develop a better understanding of the customer journey with “built-in heatmaps to pinpoint the areas driving most traffic”.

Investing in this kind of technology will give you and your management team a granular view of customer behavior as effective as any ecommerce store’s analytics, and make it much easier to identify patterns that will help you develop your store based on customer behavior.

Foster a brand community

Building a community around your retail brand via physical and digital channels can also be a valuable way to leverage customer data for a positive customer experience.

Aside from supporting your brand loyalty initiatives by encouraging engagement with your brand and other customers, fostering a sense of community can provide an effective platform for gathering feedback and behavioral data, that can then be used to enhance your customer experience.

Ways to leverage a brand community for better CX insights include

Gathering customer reviews and testimonials

When customers feel a sense of community when interacting with a brand, they’re often more likely to leave reviews and testimonials, and to be more detailed about their experience when they do. Collating the patterns in this kind of feedback will help you ascertain what you’re doing well and what needs improving.

Tracking content preferences

Tracking the traffic and interaction with your branded online content (for example videos, blog posts, and social media content) will help you uncover patterns in the kinds of topics or products your community is most interested in. This, combined with trends you can uncover through soliciting feedback, testimonials, and polls, can keep you informed on what your customers are interested in, and guide your next customer experience initiatives.

Crowdsourcing and beta testing

When you’re launching new products, your community can also be a valuable asset in keeping your development process customer-centric and maximizing your chances of success. Crowdsourcing that invites customers to share ideas for new product features, or beta testing with your most loyal customers, can lead to some great pointers for developing a better customer experience.

Give customers value-added services

Providing customers with value-added services is another effective way to not only improve the customer experience from the beginning but also uncover high-value insights for developing your CX over time.

Setting up loyalty programs, for example, will immediately incentivize your customers to return to your store, and with the right analytics tools, can help you build a more detailed picture of how often customers shop, their product preferences, and which kind of loyalty promotions are generating the most value for your brand.

Loyalty program platforms such as Talon.One, for example, comes with features that allow you to “track every customer interaction from one centralized system”, providing a more granular view of how your promotions are being received and their impact on the wider customer experience.

Other value-added services like subscriptions, exclusive in-store events, and personalized customer support can all provide great platforms for gathering CX data and making adjustments to help tailor your shopping experience to your customer base.

Harnessing the customized shopping experience

By gathering the right data points, creating detailed segments, and meeting your customers’ needs with the right initiatives, you’ll be able to create a more personalized shopping experience with limitless value for your brand. 

We hope this guide has given you a good starting point as you learn more about CX data analysis, and find ways to apply it for your retail brand.

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Read more from Matilda Howard

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Matilda Howard, Marketing Specialist

Matilda Howard is a recognized leader in marketing, a seasoned professional who is passionate about driving digital innovation and growth for global brands. Matilda leads initiatives across a range of digital marketing disciplines, content creation, and brand management. She's passionate about blending creativity with data-driven insights to achieve impactful results for clients.