Personalised Omnichannel – The Customer Journey

A customer journey is unpredictable, fluid, unique, and not a linear process. There are also a lot of touchpoints during a customer journey where potential and existing customers can interact with your brand – both online and in-store.

A personalized omnichannel focus is therefore essential for you to deliver consistent, relevant, and personalized communication across every customer touchpoint. No company can succeed by focusing on just one phase in the customer journey.

Every stage needs to be prioritised and requires different methods for you to target your customers the right way at the right time.

The key in the personalised omnichannel setup is the Customer Data Platform, which is a need to achieve a Single Customer View and deliver true personalised omnichannel.

Customer journey

Omnichannel is about creating consistent customer experiences across all channels. Raptor calls it Personalised Omnichannel.

This refers to creating personalised customer experiences based on real-time behavioral data and acting on the data across every touchpoint in the customer journey – both online and in-store.

Having said that, a customer journey is unpredictable, and never the same. Understanding where and when you should interact with potential customers, as well as how to act and communicate with them in the various touchpoints, is crucial to success.

It’s really all about turning strangers into actual customers and ensuring that they remain loyal ambassadors to your brand.

Personalised Omnichannel

Personalised omnichannel refers to collecting information and using it no matter where the customer interaction takes place – creating a consistent, relevant, and personalised experience throughout the whole customer journey. And most importantly connecting your online platform and physical store as a single entity.

But how, when, and where should you interact with your potential customers?

To illustrate this, Raptor has divided the customer journey into four phases – from first interest to final purchase: Awareness, Consideration, Purchase, and Loyalty. This is a simplified version of reality but easy to understand.

It is a useful tool for developing your ecommerce strategy and for understanding when and where you should interact with your customers to create consistent, relevant, and personalised shopping experiences.

Keep in mind that a customer journey is fluid and doesn’t fit into a linear process.

Personalization in the Awareness phase

Awareness illustrates your customer’s starting point in the overall journey.

The customer doesn’t know your brand or product. So, this phase is about making yourself and your product known. The customer is therefore a stranger in this phase.

To create awareness, you need to reach your potential customers in the channels where they are present.

In general, companies use a lot of money to generate traffic to their website, which means there are a lot of competitors out there fighting over the same potential customer attention.

To achieve a competitive advantage, you can bring personalisation into the digital channels you use for creating awareness. This involves all paid marketing channels e.g. paid search, retargeting, display- and social ads, etc.

Raptor’s role in this phase is to help you deliver highly relevant and personalized messages through these channels to optimise your conversion rates.

In this phase, the customer is unknown, and you have no previous data to use as a reference point in your recommendations.

To create awareness, you can use Raptor’s Personalisation in banners solution that enables you to display your best selling or trending products in your display ads.

When you have collected data on the customer, you can also use previous interactions such as viewed products, related products, or abandoned basket in your display ads.

By using Raptor’s Catalog Enhancement solution, you can also add new product attributes containing business critic logics such as margin, revenue per visit, or bestsellers to your existing product catalog, which will determine the products being shown in channels such as Facebook, Google Shopping, Amazon, etc.

Services that helps you

What products should be shown in your ads, can also be determined through our Raptor Merchandising Center, where you can take control of your recommendations and boost specific products while maintaining the power of relevance.

Raptor Customer Data Platform also allows you to use all the customer data you have from already known customers to build audiences that can be activated in channels such as Facebook.

Through this channel, you can convert your existing data into “lookalike” audiences and hereby reach new potential customers, that don’t know of your brand or products yet.

Offline transactional data from physical stores can also be used to support data from your online channels. Offline data gives you great insights into what is trending.

Did the weather for example just change? Potential customers will react quickly to a seasonal shift and buy e.g. rain jackets in physical stores.

A Raptor POS integration can spot this kind of trend, and make sure that the offline data is also taken into consideration in your paid media advertising. And hereby creating a coherent connection between your e-commerce site and physical store.

Relevant Raptor solutions in the Awareness phase
  • Personalization for banners
  • Catalog Enhancement
  • Customer Data Platform
  • Merchandising Center
  • Point of Sale / POS

Personalization in the Consideration phase

In this phase potential customers have become aware of your brand and show interest based on a recognised need.

They will then start researching content or visit products as well as compare alternatives. The customer is therefore a visitor in this phase.

Through your personalisation activities in the awareness phase, you have already gathered data about the potential customer. For example, now you know what product triggered the customer to click on your advertising.

This can now be used to personalize recommendations tailored to the individual customer browsing your website or in your physical store.

Based on the data you have gathered so far (clicks, views, and other previous interactions) you can now present the customer with personalised product recommendations on your website and on-site search results.

The more customer-clicks, the better recommendations you can present.

This means that you can now recommend similar or related products based on the customer’s previous interactions and not just focus on best-selling or trending products. Raptors Web- and Search advisors are therefore highly relevant in the consideration phase.

A good way to target your customers in the consideration phase is by using Raptor’s Behavioral Triggers. Triggers can be used to send automatic and highly relevant emails to subscribers based on their previous interactions on your site.

The Product Interest trigger is great to target subscribers that have shown high interest in a product but have not added the product to the basket yet.

Offline data such as transactions from your physical store can also be used to improve online recommendations.

If the customer shows interest in a certain product, you can use your offline data to determine what products should be featured as related products online, based on what has been purchased together with this specific product in your physical store.

Services you can use

The combination of online- and offline data can also be used to strategically furnish your physical store. If your online data shows that certain products are often bought together, you can take advantage of this insight and e.g. group certain products together in your physical store – as related products. Hereby using your collected customer data to create a coherent customer journey – both online and offline.

In your physical store, you can also place in-store information screens, that display bestselling products within a category or various other personalized recommendation modules as well as personalized on-site search. Just like on your website, but now in a physical setting in your store.

Relevant Raptor solutions in the Consideration phase
  • Personalization for Banners
  • Web Advisor
  • Search Advisor
  • Email Advisor
  • Behavioral Triggers
  • Customer Data platform
  • Merchandising Center
  • Point of Sale / POS

Personalisation in the Purchase phase

In the purchase phase, potential customers have now shown enough interest in a product for you to deliver the right message at the right time, which will increase the chance of a conversion.

The customer is therefore a prospect in this phase with a chance of finally becoming an actual customer.

You can now use all your collected customer data from the previous phases. For example, you might look at which specific products potential customers have shown a high interest in. Or if some customers have abandoned various products in their basket.

Product recommendations can push your customers towards conversion, but sometimes you need to use other personalisation solutions as well, to give the customer the last and crucial nudge.

The email trigger Abandoned Basket can be used to target subscribers that have placed a product in the basket but not yet completed the purchase.

You can also use your online channels to drive customers to your physical store.

If you have products, which normally can be difficult to sell online, you can encourage customers to visit your physical store for a closer look at the product. Features such as click and collect, reserve product and collect in-store, can also be used to get customers to visit your physical store.

Furthermore, your online recommendations can be used at the cash register in your physical store, where the salesperson e.g. can suggest related and similar products to the scanned product that the customer is about to buy.

Relevant Raptor solutions in the Purchase phase
  • Personalization for banners
  • Web Advisor
  • Email Advisor
  • Behavioral Triggers
  • Customer Data Platform
  • Merchandising Center
  • Point of Sale / POS

Personalisation in the Loyalty phase

After a successful purchase, the goal is now to keep your customer loyal and to get the customer to repeat the process of going through the personalized customer journey again.

The customer therefore has a chance of becoming an ambassador in this phase. And so, in this phase, you need to create awareness about other products and hereby create a new need that should lead to another purchase by utilizing the different personalization solutions, whenever they are relevant.

You now have a lot of data about the customer, which can be used even more actively to deliver targeted personalized recommendations, compared to the early awareness stage where the customer was unknown, and you had no behavioral data to rely on.

To keep track of the individual customer’s preferences and interactions across different channels, devices, and platforms, a Raptor Customer Data Platform is the key.

A Customer Data Platform allows you to consolidate behavioral data across all customer touchpoints, to create a Single Customer View and hereby use the data to deliver consistent messages through all your channels.

With a Single Customer View, you can also track whether the individual customer has purchased a product in your physical store, so you e.g. don’t spend your online marketing campaigns targeting a customer that has already purchased a specific product offline.

Relevant Raptor solutions in the Loyalty phase
  • Personalization for banners
  • Web Advisor
  • Email Advisor
  • Behavioral Triggers
  • Merchandising Center
  • Customer Data Platform
  • Merchandising Center
  • Point of Sale / POS