The current market is full of choices. It has become a playground for businesses where you will always find a boom of competition. Hence, grabbing the attention of new clients and retaining the existing ones have become challenging. Nowadays, providing a product or service is not enough for a business to survive. That’s why many companies are trying to build an emotional connection to their clients by customizing the customer experience. Customization helps the industry meet the unique requirements of each client. For this kind of customer journey, personalization is a mandatory feature, not a mere option.

In this blog, we will discuss some important facts of CRM-and-rule-based personalization:

1. What is personalization?
2. What are Statistics saying?
3. How does a rule-based personalization function?
4. How does a CRM-based personalization function?
5. What is the greatest challenge to personalized customer experience?
6. CRM system integration

1. What is Personalization?

Personalization is all about knowing the target audience, its preferences, demographics, and behaviour. Armed with this information, a business can easily prepare a plan for creating campaigns that can drive better outcomes.

For any business, prosperity hinges on the owner’s ability to provide new and existing customers with a personalized customer experience.

2. What are the Statistics Saying?

According to a survey performed by Evergage, 92% of marketers have admitted that their customers and potential prospects want a personalized customer experience. 

As per Accenture,

• 65% of customers prefer sticking to retailers who send personalized and relevant promotions.
• 56% of customers are likely to be loyal when the businesses identify them by their names.
• 58% of customers appreciate recommendations based on purchase history.

From these statistics, one can easily understand how important personalization has become for businesses.

3. How does a rule-based personalization function?

Rule-based personalization is originated from the concept of manual testing. It targets particular groups or segments of people. A business should adjust sets of simple rules to tailor a customer’s experience. Rule-based customization modifies If-Then statements as per the particular business rules. Let’s imagine a visitor browsed through four pages of shoes on an e-commerce website.

Next time when he/she will visit the website, the home page will display special discounts on shoes.

The rule-based-personalization process considers:

1. Geographic location of a visitor
2. Keywords customers are using to find your website
3. Customer devices and traffic channels
4. Behavioural patterns, including viewed pages, number of visits, spent time on the website, etc.)

Rule-based personalization helps you narrow down your discounts or special offers to a particular customer group. You need to use available data and creativity to implement this strategy.

4. How does a CRM-based personalization function?

Many businesses are using CRM systems to tailor the customer experience. A tailored customer experience empowers the firms with a centralized approach for dealing with customer database with ease. CRM enables you to store, process, and maintain customer data in a single storage. Using CRM, you can develop a profile for each customer based on:

1. Contact data (name, date of birth, gender, profession, address, etc.)
2. Account data of potential customers
3. Purchased history and competitor products
4. Favourite store categories
5. Insights into offline channels

CRM-based personalization enables the business to use the data that website analytics can’t provide. However, sometimes it may misguide you. For example, time spent on a website may not always signal a customer’s genuine interest in a particular product. Sometimes customers spent more time because they couldn’t understand the product description easily. 

CRM-based personalization proffers efficient tools to resolve this issue. You can gather the missing data through account-based marketing strategy and market research. All of this requires a vast CRM database of valuable customers with quite detailed profiles. If you think that summiting text notes into a CRM platform after a sales call will work, you are on the wrong track. You will need a well-organized structure so that a customized engine can help you use the data. For example, you may consider items in which potential customers take interest and facts that stop a customer from purchasing the product.  

CRM systems let you automate many manual tasks, including:

1. Triggering personalized email distributions
2. Automated follow-ups
3. Reviewing and analysis
4. Segmentation

Moreover, you can integrate any other marketing tools you want with your existing CRM system.

Sitecore, one of the popular CRM platforms, supports the Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics CRM systems. This way, advanced CRM systems help businesses make personalized experience easier.

5. What is the greatest challenge to personalized customer experience?

User identification is one of the most significant challenges to personalizing the customer experience. Most users want to remain anonymous, and they look for a valid reason to share their confidential data. Moreover, deriving data from multiple sources and gathering all pieces together is a time-consuming and complex task. 

You can address this issue by using Sitecore’s Email Experience Manager (EXM). It was designed to boost content creation and delivery. It can help you create high volume personalized email campaigns.

You can quickly identify a user by filling out a contact form, logging in to a personal account, registering on a website.

6. CRM system integration

Sitecore features extraordinary support for Salesforce and Dynamics. Still, integration of CRM may need some additional elements. 

To meet these requirements, you may think about an efficient add-in. Its functionality may include:

1. Driving additional personalization opportunities based on omnichannel information
2. Dealing with Sitecore contact subscriptions and personal automation plans
3. Adjusting the user’s behaviour 
4. Setting up bidirectional contact mapping

By implementing the add-in features, you can expect a remarkable increase in your conversion rate.

Bottom Line

It’s high time you should stop spending time on second thoughts about investing in your Sitecore platform’s customer personalization. It will provide you with customer loyalty and revenue. If you want to improve your customer satisfaction, you need to provide a personalized experience. By providing such an experience, you will cultivate a customer experience that will make the most segregated customers happy. 

For more such information, keep an eye on our upcoming blogs!