Fuel growth, value and customer loyalty with a personalized shopping experience

By: Angela Gearhart, Vice President Brand Experience, Sleep Number

Angela Gearhart, Vice President Brand Experience, Sleep Number

Consumers are searching for real benefits in products and an experience that is relevant, effortless and personal. Successful brands look for ways to leverage an integrated physical/digital experience to facilitate meaningful human interactions, allowing customers to experience their unique product benefits. They maximize the strengths of digital for speed and simplification combined with the power of their sales associates to build an 1-1 emotional connection with the customer.

A seamless digital/physical experience drives both brand engagement and brand demand.

Customers expect you to know them and deliver personal and relevant content wherever and whenever they want it. Personalization is expectation across each step of the customer journey powered by rich data. Collecting relevant data throughout the entire consumer lifecycle enables real-time personalization.

• 65% of consumers are more likely to buy from a retailer that recognizes them by name, recommends options based on past purchases, OR knows their purchase history.(Accenture, 2017) The Art of Knowing Me - Customer Genome & Personalization

• 88% of U.S. marketers reported seeing measurable improvements due to personalization, with more than half reporting a lift greater than 10%. (Evergage, 2019) trends-in-personalization-survey-report

This is the key to creating a value-added retail experience that builds customer loyalty and ultimately brand love. Your customer is both your best advocate and repeat purchaser, lowering marketing costs and accelerating engagement and consideration. Personalization can reduce acquisition costs by as much as 50%, lift revenues by 5–15%, and increase marketing spend efficiency by 10–30%. (Mckinsey Digital) marketings-holy-grail-digital-personalization-at-scale

We need to meet the customer where they want to shop, experience and gather information. Retail is everywhere the customer wants to interact with your brand. For us, it’s not only the tradition web and our 600 stores nationwide, but national partnerships, and almost 5000+ local and national event activations a year. 65% of brands say their event and experiential programs directly affect sales. (G2)40 Essential Experiential Marketing Statistics for 2019 and Beyond Intersect your brand with your audience’s passion points to connect outside the traditional retail environments. Events, pop ups and brand activations allow you to test with speed and validate before investing on a large scale.

The power of experience is now table stakes to retail survival. Human beings retain 20% of what they hear, 40% of what they observe and 90% of what they experience.(Edgar Dale, Cone of Experience, Audio-Visual Methods in Teaching, 1946) Cone of Experience We can affect consumer behavior by maximizing the strengths of high tech (digital) and high touch (physical) experiences to create meaningful and memorable experiences and a life-long connection with the brand.

Beyond “experience” as a buzzword - How are you rethinking your brick and mortar experience to exceed customer’s expectations?