Personalization has come a long way from the days of just using a customer’s name in an email. 

Today, it’s about demonstrating that brands understand their customers’ individual preferences and using that information to make their lives easier, whether through specific product recommendations or promotions. 

Getting personalization right can help brands cut through the noise of an increasingly crowded marketing environment, but equally, getting it wrong can lead customers to click ‘unsubscribe’.  

On a recent episode of the podcast series, Retail Untangled, recorded at Shoptalk Fall in Chicago, Christine McEvoy, head of customer success at Brevo, spoke with Amie Larter, CEO of Inside Retail publisher Octomedia, about consumers’ evolving expectations of personalized communications and the opportunities for brands to step up their game in this space.

What consumers want from personalization

“Personalization is no longer a scary thing in our inbox. It is, ‘I know why you have my information because we’ve shared it,’” McEvoy said. What customers expect now is something in return for doing so. 

“Specifically in the millennial and Gen X market, we’re experiencing the expectation for needing a trade. If I’m going to share this information with you, I’d like to get something back.” 

Examples include offering customers a $10 voucher as a birthday gift or sending them product recommendations based on their actual browsing and buying behavior. 

“You know what I like. I don’t have to hunt through a hundred pages of different wide-leg trousers. You know exactly what I like and you’re sending it to me in my inbox or on my phone,” McAvoy said. 

She noted that consumer attitudes toward personalization have changed in recent years. 

“People don’t want to be a number anymore. Coming out of Covid where we were very separate and into this new world, we now have technology that’s connecting us,” she said. 

“Maybe back in the day, you’d get a card from a loved one with a $10 bill in it. What’s replaced that now is an email from my favorite brand with $10 off a $100 [purchase]. Thank you, Sephora. Things like that, we’ve come to really expect.” 

Short message, big impact

Just as the level of personalization has increased with new technology, so has the number of channels available to communicate with customers. 

While McAvoy said that email remains “the core” channel, there is a big opportunity for brands to leverage text messages, SMS and WhatsApp to reach customers on their phones.  

“I think it’s something like a three-minute turnaround time from when a text message arrives to when it’s opened,” she said. 

“And the cool thing about this is – as a brand – you’re saying, ‘Hey, Christine, I’m in your inbox, but I’m also here on your phone, so that thing you forgot to buy yesterday, I’ve made it so easy for you that I’m sending you a link to it.’ That’s the part where I think brands are really underutilizing how they can be in both places at once with a lot of ease and [create] that connected tissue that makes you really stand out to your consumer.”  

The risks and opportunities of personalization

The risks of getting personalization wrong are not to be underestimated, with 60 per cent of customers returning to brands for a personalized experience.

“If you’re rubbing 60 per cent of your consumers the wrong way, what does that do to the bottom line?” McAvoy pointed out. 

“I’ve gotten a text message where I’ve honestly thought, ‘Did someone sign me up as a joke?’ That’s the thing where you’re like, ‘This is so not for me that not only am I going to ignore it, but I’m going to unsubscribe. I’m going to kick it out.’” 

On the flip side, there are opportunities for brands that get personalization right to increase their customer loyalty, a critical metric, especially at times when discretionary spending is down. 

In fact, McAvoy said that she is seeing a growing number of brands with limited resources using Brevo as a loyalty platform. 

“If you’re a brand that’s huge and can do an app and can develop all of that, that’s really great. But most brands aren’t there,” she said.

“So one of the things that we’re seeing huge interest in at Brevo is the loyalty program because again, brands of all different sizes know this is a space they need to be in but they don’t want to develop an app – they don’t have the full bandwidth for that.” 

By offering customers points or discounts in exchange for sharing their personal information and being a return shopper, brands can personalize their relationships without needing to invest a lot of resources. 

What the future holds

When it comes to how personalization will continue to evolve in the future, McAvoy thinks it’s all about connecting data across ecosystems to get a more complete picture of the customers.

“If you’re using multiple channels, you’ve got your SMS, you have your email, you’re doing push [notifications], you’ve got a TikTok page, you have the social media, you need to start to connect that to get a better idea of who your consumer is…because you’re talking to them in all these different channels,” she said.

While some players, such as big-box stores, may struggle to connect the dots, given their legacy systems and large customer databases, McAvoy is excited to see a growing number of emerging brands bringing new ideas to the table and leading the charge in this space. 

“An email that’s going out to millions doesn’t make as much sense anymore as being really smart about your segments and saying, ‘I’m going to send a very specific email to this group who loves this content, who was engaged, who has bought, has clicked,’ and they’re getting better results because of that,” she said. 

• Listen to the podcast to hear McAvoy talk about consumers’ changing attitudes toward personalization, how brands can leverage personalization to encourage repeat purchases and foster long-term relationships with customers and what the future holds.