More than 90% of retailers say customers are demanding personalised experiences, yet just 59% cannot offer tailored content across devices. So finds a study by Monetate, who happen to be a leading personalisation platform for brands worldwide.
Recent data collected from over 100 UK retailers found that 81% of respondents claimed to be personalising content across more than one channel (predominantly desktop and mobile), but when asked if they were able to synchronise this content, for a consistent cross-channel experience more than half said ‘no’.
With today’s shopper now regularly beginning and completing their path-to-purchase across multiple different devices, delivering a seamless and integrated experience across channels has never been more important.
Mike Harris, VP EMEA at Monetate, explains: “It’s no longer the case that customers will use just one platform to shop. Now, people frequently research items using their mobile on the way to work, switch to a desktop when they reach the office, and complete their purchase via tablet that evening. For this reason, using personalisation to deliver one single view of the customer, across multiple devices, is essential. It allows retailers to target customers in real-time, based on their behaviour at that particular moment of interaction with the brand.”
When asked what they viewed as the biggest barriers to doing more with personalisation, 51% of retailers gave lack of human resource as the main obstacle, closely followed by an inflexible ecommerce platform (50%).
Harris continues: “Many retailers find they can run their personalisation strategy with teams of just one or two members, creating personalised experiences for customers alongside their other daily roles. For today’s retailers, customer experience is the only place left to both innovate and differentiate. Each customer has a discrete intention behind every engagement with a brand and it’s important for retailers to understand that and serve it.”
The survey posed a number of key questions to some of the UK’s biggest brands, ranging from what methods of personalisation they are currently implementing, to the level of return on investment (ROI) they are seeing.
When it came to performance, the survey also found that on average, three times more Monetate customers obtained Return-on-Investment (ROI) of 10x or higher from personalisation, than non-Monetate customers.