Building a Personalized Customer Journey: Stage 4- Re-engagement

When building out a personalized customer journey, a lot of focus and attention is paid to the first three steps – Landing, Engagement, and Purchase.

While attracting, engaging with, and leading visitors to make a purchase while onsite is the desired outcome of an effective customer journey, it’s important to consider what happens after the purchase stage.

In particular consider, the following questions: How can you encourage visitors to return to your site? What can you do to encourage visitors to make a purchase and turn them into repeat customers?

Retailers and merchandisers have data and information based on past visitor behavior. Even if visitors ultimately did not make a purchase on their first visit, there are actions retailers can take to re-engage with site visitors to encourage them to come back and potentially convert based on their behavior from previous site visits.

In this blog post, we’re going to focus on Stage #4 of the customer journey – Re-engagement and discuss the importance of retargeting past customers to encourage them to return to your site for additional purchases.

In Monetate’s “Delivering a Personalized Customer Journey: A Step-by-Step No Nonsense Guide,” we define and outline the four main stages of the customer journey – Landing, Engagement, Purchase, and Re-engagement.

If you’re looking for a refresher on stages one, two, and three, you can check out our earlier blog posts on Landing, Engagement, and Purchase.

The Importance of Retargeting for Re-engagement

Retargeting is one of the most important things to concentrate on when you want to boost your conversions. Despite your best personalization efforts, only a small percentage of initial site visitors will end up buying a product on their first visit.

The vast majority (around 98%) will have a look around your site, maybe adding one or two items to their cart, before moving on to something else without completing a purchase.

But all is not lost at this stage. Retargeting previous site visitors with ads based on their browsing behavior, for example, with ads for products left in their cart, will help you lure them back.

And if you have a well-developed personalization strategy that links up engagements across all your channels, you’re much better placed to deliver meaningful messages that will boost your chances of converting the ones that got away.

Being able to intelligently retarget customers and deliver meaningful site experiences to them will let you develop a stronger relationship with them, creating much greater lifetime value for each customer.

To see this concept in action, let’s look at how Monetate customer Waitrose leveraged AI and personalization to drive re-engagement with customers throughout the customer journey.

Waitrose Drives 66.8% Engagement Lift Using AI Experience

UK grocery retailer Waitrose has a mature personalization capability that allows them to drive visitors through the journey in a way that maximizes engagement and conversions. The automated personalization experience starts on the homepage, with machine learning deciding on how best to entice customers to click through to their recipe pages.

They combined their own CRM customer data with over 150 out-of-the-box behavioral targets from the Monetate Personalization platform to create a winning formula for customer engagement.

As a result, they saw their engagement levels increase by 67 percent. They also learned a lot more about their customers in the process.

For example, they found that young professionals in London were engaging more with quick, simple recipes during their busy working week, and so were better able to target this customer segment with more relevant messaging.

This process of learning about what motivated their customers meant that Waitrose has been better able to re-engage with them throughout the customer journey, tailoring experiences to the individual visitor, which has seen them returning to their site much more frequently than was previously the case.

Re-engage Through the Entire Customer Journey with Personalization

Curious to learn about how Monetate Personalization can help you re-engage and retarget customers throughout the customer journey on your eCommerce site?

Schedule a demo with a member of the Monetate team to see how the solution works and can fit into your plans for re-engagement to convert visitors into long-term customers.

Also, download “Delivering a Personalized Customer Journey: A Step-by-Step No Nonsense Guide,” for a more in-depth look at building out a personalized customer journey at each of the four stages – Landing, Engagement, Purchase, and Re-engagement.