Customer engagement: The impact of purposeful personalisation

Customers in the Middle East and Africa (MEA) are similar to their global peers when it comes to receiving communication from their favourite brands. They are more responsive to messages that address them by their names or give them updates on products and stores in their location.

In other words, they love personalised and relevant engagement.

Communication is the key to unlocking long-lasting customer relationships but the best outcomes in any communication process come from sending out the right message at the right time and to the right person.

This not only makes the customer journeys more engaging but also yields better results for the brand.

Staying ahead of the game with personalisation

The customer communication space is crowded with emails, chatbots, social media platforms, push notifications, and transactional messages. To stay ahead in the race, brands have to send eye-catching and relevant content at the appropriate time.

Highly personalised messages not only engage better with existing customers but also help brands tap into potential ones and even bring back lapsed customers.

Bespoke push notifications hit home with shoppers.

Push notifications are instant product updates, promotions, or alerts that enhance the app’s visibility. What matters most in push notifications is the relevance of content as it identifies a customer’s needs and interests in real-time, which makes them highly impactful. For example, if a customer’s behaviour demonstrates that they are in the market for winter or gym wear, then the push notifications can promote those categories in the message.

Read: Insights – Customer engagement platforms are key to brand loyalty

These notifications can be time-based, with delivery scheduled around the customer’s browsing patterns. They can also be behaviour-based, based on the customer’s app browsing habits.

Some key pointers to increase customer engagement are employing personalised push features that include addressing them by their first names and delivering content based on customer behaviour like preferred product, time and location.

Brands can also enhance engagement by sending out messages when the customer is using the app or creating content with the optimised keyword.

A recent benchmark study of the shopping behaviour of MEA customers, carried out by a leading customer engagement platform, revealed that the click-through rate (CTR) of behaviour-based personalised push notifications across all industries increased by 6.9 per cent (2.4 times).

Additionally, with behaviour-based personalisation, brands could increase their conversion rate (CVR) by 14 per cent and improve their deliverability rate by 1.12 times.

An omnichannel approach with a mix of email, SMS, push notifications, and WhatsApp can lead to a better conversion rate and a higher CTR.

For instance, a survey of more than 1,000 Middle East customers found that 36 per cent of customers interact with two to three channels before making a purchasing decision. A leading Saudi-based travel and hospitality brand leveraged omnichannel customer journey orchestration to witness a 21.6 per cent conversion rate for cart abandonment flows.

Leveraging new opportunities

Brands can scout for several new opportunities to offer different types of push notifications and personalise their messaging beyond plain vanilla promotional messages. For instance, why do shoppers abandon their carts? Is it because they see better-priced alternatives or realise that the shipping costs are high? In this scenario, the cart recovery push notifications can be used to send the notification to that segment of customers who abandoned the website or app after beginning the checkout process. Then there is the FYI kind of push notifications that send messages based on weather reports or offer updates on store stocks.

Brands can also use triggered push notifications to push a series of automated messages based on real-time data on customer behaviour.

All this research and the resulting statistics prove that it’s time for brands to onboard a holistic platform that helps marketers forge meaningful relationships and increase engagement with customers.

Marketers have to get all the moving parts of their communication process aligned and leverage automation to send targeted messages to the right people, at the right time through the right channel.

Only a customer-centric martech stack can bolster this omnichannel strategy to ensure seamless, cross-platform experience leading to an increase in the brand’s revenue and bottom-line metrics.

The writer is the regional head of MoEngage, MEA.