Creating Personalization Profiles: Tools to Build Customer Identity

You’ve read up on customer identity; you’ve made the decision to create shopper profiles in order to personalize content and shopper experience for your customers. You want to target them as individuals, getting to know their wants and habits as well as any corner grocer. That’s good – almost all digital marketers agree with you.

One recent infographic shows that 94% of digital marketers consider personalization crucial to their online strategy. A recent survey found that 65% of online stores showed a conversion rate gain when using sophisticated personalization strategies. The takeaway? Your ads, emails, landing pages, offers, and your entire website should be personalized for your individual visitors.

So, what tools should you use to achieve this goal? Although there are scores of analytics providers, most of these software packages serve one of two functions. They either collect data or they help you execute on the data you have collected. Today, I’d like to discuss some of the big names in each category.

Data Collection Tools

In order to personalize, you must collect data on your site visitors and shoppers. Where did they come from? What do they do? What exactly do they look at? How and to what degree do they engage with particular elements of your site? Which elements worked and which didn’t work? This is how you create your customer identity. Sounds complicated, right? The good news is that there are data collection services out there that are inexpensive and simple to use. The most widely used data analytics service is Google Analytics.

Google Analytics (GA) is a freemium web analytics service that tracks and reports on website traffic. It monitors online campaigns and tracks user-specified goals such as conversions, sales, lead generation, particular page views, and downloads. GA’s e-commerce reporting tracks sales activity and performance, such as transactions, revenue, and a host of other important metrics. GA can also identify poorly performing pages, visitor origination, dwell time, and geolocation.

Another widely used service is Adobe Analytics Cloud, a subscription-based online marketing and analytics platform that enables marketers to measure and optimize marketing campaigns and digital experiences. Adobe collects and contextualizes your data, combining real-time data insights with predictive analytics to enhance your understanding of your shoppers. Besides collecting experiential data, Adobe uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to uncover hidden opportunities in your customer list.

Personalization Execution Tools

Now that you’ve collected the data you need for your customer identity, how do you actually use it to personalize user experience? There are any number of ways you can personalize your interactions. Once you determine a strategy, two highly rated services to help you execute it are Gigya and Hubspot.

Gigya’s Customer Identity Management platform turns unknown site visitors into known, engaged customers. It enables businesses to increase registrations and identify customers across devices and to consolidate data into detailed customer profiles. Gigya is a one-stop personalization shop for websites, providing features such as social log-in, commenting, sharing features, and gamification.

Gigya’s identification management tool enables shoppers to log-in to a site quickly using social media. It then analyzes the social profiles of those shoppers. Gigya’s social tools enable onsite user comments/recommendations and an activity feed that shares what friends are buying or viewing. Finally, Gigya offers gamification services. Gamification encourages customer activity on your site by making interaction seem like a game. This isn’t for all e-tailers, but on sites conducive to this kind of activity, its results are robust.

HubSpot develops inbound marketing and sales software tools. These tools enable social media marketing, content management, web analytics, and search engine optimization. Inbound marketing operates on the principle that prospective customers have learned to ignore and block intrusive marketing and sales tactics. Old school tactics like email blasts and popup ads simply aren’t effective anymore. Newer, less intrusive tactics are.

Imagine it as fishing, reeling customers in with custom content rather than bashing them with direct product advertising. The idea is to entice customers into visiting your site, turning that traffic into purchases with email and marketing automation. But creating custom content is expensive and time-consuming. Hubspot’s approach is to offer its customers pre-designed templates. These enable e-merchants to design web pages, landing pages, emails, and blog posts without web developers.

Data Collection and Personalization Execution: Cue Connect

If you are looking to streamline the personalization process, a good place to look is Cue Connect. Cue is a comprehensive platform, offering both data collection and personalization tools in a user-friendly package. Its tools collect data, identify users, and enable social media-based sharing and personalization.

Cue puts your customer identity, email address, name, shopping intent, product preferences, and more at the core of your marketing. It’s social media tools enable marketers to capture both demographic data and harder-to- obtain product interest data. Cue’s social sharing encouragement tools enable you to access your shopper’s networks – prospects who would otherwise be invisible to you.

They also capture the shopper behavioral information necessary to build robust individualized shopper profiles. The insight you gain on these shoppers will help you more effectively personalize, micro-target, and convert. On the execution side, Cue’s enables you to query, segment, and export customer data to create individualized experiences and relationships.

Finally, Cue is unique in that not only does it offer marketing support, but it also provides guidance and educational tools. Cue’s content offerings show you how best to collect data and how to utilize that data to create personal shopping experiences that are proven to drive higher conversions.

This article was originally published at cueconnect.com/blog/