The push for omnichannel personalization and a seamless customer experience isn’t a fad. Marketers and their organizations have seen the value in delivering highly personalized experiences for their buyers, and there is no turning back. As more traditionally brick and mortar brands seek to optimize their ecommerce channels, there are a few key areas to focus on to drive real results.

According to a recent Econsultancy article on customer experience, tapping into customer emotions and leveraging personalization are both essential to delivering a positive experience. And they should be treated as intertwined efforts: “Naturally, one impacts the other,” reads the article, “with personalised marketing helping to evoke emotions and create a stronger and more memorable connection with consumers.” 

Return on Investment (ROI) of personalization

Improved customer experience and better personalization are obviously good for brands, but how should they be measured? Often times brands tend to focus on one or the other, and measure success by gut feel or customer satisfaction data, rather than revenue or pipeline data. Cunard and P&O Cruise, pioneers in luxury cruising, may have cracked the code on delivering both to their customers—and measuring effectiveness with data that matters.

P&O has seen 12x ROI after optimizing its mobile checkout page.  

How did they do it? P&O used Monetate Test & Segment on a specific area, the mobile checkout page that typically took customers as long as 30 minutes to complete. By pre-populating fields based on existing customer data insights, form fills for many sections were shortened, streamlining the checkout process. These changes increased ease of use and significantly improved customer experience, as evidenced by an uptick in overall revenue and 7.8% lift in mobile conversion rates.  

Omnichannel ROI

Implementing an omnichannel strategy can seem daunting to marketers, but it doesn’t have to be. Full omnichannel personalization across an organization is an aspiration, and takes a certain level of maturity of systems, data, and content. However, the key is to start where you can and then optimize results based on the data. Before you begin planning your growth into omnichannel, take a good look at your data, and assess how different channels perform in terms of engagement and conversions. Understanding how your business performs in each channel before you launch your omnichannel efforts will enable you to set strategic goals and calibrate your team’s expectations for each channel and segment of your database, so that you can spend your resources wisely and learn as you go.

Building an omnichannel personalization campaign helped Cunard generate 20,000 new prospects and covert more than 57% of visitors. First, Cunard launched a full-page takeover of the ‘Hello’ magazine website and social media presence, with the goal of directing traffic to the Cunard website to drive email newsletter sign-ups. Next, they created a targeted, mobile-friendly personalized experience (in which page formats were modified for each visitor) to optimize for mobile viewers.

The results proved that, for Cunard, a more personalized and omnichannel experience was an effective way to drive the dramatically higher engagement rates that they were seeking to achieve.

Building deeper personalization and omnichannel experiences is not a “quick fix” for most organizations. However, those that are committed to enhancing customer experience can create immediate impact by improving personalization, even on a small scale, and launching omnichannel campaigns strategically to test effectiveness. These initial endeavors offer further value by providing insights to inform the team’s process as they design next steps, as well as playing a key role in building the business case to invest in omnichannel personalization.

Read the full press release on Cunard and P&O to learn more about their success and how they built world-class personalization and omnichannel marketing.