Competitive pressures and customer expectations are driving retailers to focus on customer lifetime value – requiring retailers to rethink their end-to-end customer experience.
The marketing funnel that brands built their businesses upon is no longer aligned with the new consumer path to purchase.
It has become increasingly important for retailers to map and understand customer interactions from awareness to checkout and post-purchase – making it challenging for retailers to improve both customer satisfaction and drive sales.
According to Adobe’s Digital Trends Report, this hurdle isn’t getting any smaller. On average consumers will interact with a brand seven times across channels before making a purchase. Eighty per cent of customer journeys are non-linear and 90 per cent of customers who shop in store have already researched online.
“How you harmonise the experience between your physical and your digital is absolutely critical to re-engage and retain your customers,” Carly Lynch, principal strategist for Adobe’s Asia Pacific digital strategy group, told Inside Retail.
“Seven in 10 customers expect personalisation and get frustrated with experiences that are not relevant, churning after one bad experience. Conversely, retailers who deliver on customer expectations will attract loyal customers and be rewarded with three times revenue and higher marketing ROI,” she added.
The challenge of creating a unified customer journey is further complicated by an increased demand for content and the need to scale content creation at levels not previously seen.
“This is where generative AI as a co-pilot is game-changing, helping retailers deliver against the demands and overcome the converging operational challenges with orchestrating experiences at scale,” shared Lynch.
“Personalisation at scale really just means delivering the right message to the right customer at the right time, wherever they are in their journey. It comes back to good customer service and delivering the best possible personalised customer experience,” she elaborated.
Exceeding great expectations
From Adobe’s perspective, customer expectations have increased in the digital age and advancements from big-box retailers like Amazon, Walmart, Sephora, McDonald’s and Starbucks have only raised the bar further.
Customers are no longer adjusting their expectations between independent and corporate retailers, they expect their local stores to deliver the same experience as the biggest global brands, which is why retailers’ ability to personalise at scale is so important.
But how can retailers drive in-store experiences to augment the digital experiences and deliver the best experience possible?
This is where Adobe comes in. It helps retailers with the creation of content at scale by helping define and segment the audience, engage that customer with the right content and orchestrate sequential experiences before measuring how well that experience performed.
“You need to be able to pick up on the data signals from your customers, consider how they’re interacting with your brand, and then compose a message to deliver the next best experience,” explained Lynch.
Adobe assists with the analysis, to ensure the experiences that retailers are delivering solve the customer problem while driving improvements in the retailer’s bottom line.
Leading by example
Adobe has invited two of its best customers and world-leading retailers, Walmart and Ulta Beauty, to showcase what personalisation at scale looks like in practice at next year’s National Retail Federation event in New York.
Walmart, the largest retailer in the world, is leveraging Adobe Firefly and Generative AI technology to streamline content production, enhance collaboration, and ensure high-quality customer experiences across all channels to meet evolving customer needs.
“They are really remarkable in their journey of bringing their brand vision to life and then creating excellence and unparalleled scale and efficiency – enabling truly personalised and on-brand content at scale,” said Lynch.
By partnering with Adobe and using Adobe Experience Platform, Ulta Beauty has revolutionised personalisation with a loyalty program that now contributes for 90 per cent of their sales. Leveraging their extraordinary customer loyalty and the data and insights that come with it allows Ulta Beauty to personalise experiences for their customers in extraordinary ways.
“They have really been building their personalisation at scale and bringing joy to their guest experiences through all their touch points – and the way they’ve been doing that is by utilising Adobe’s technology to collect data, drive insights to curate inspired experiences across their customers’ journey,” said Lynch.
The two Big Idea Sessions that Adobe is hosting with Walmart and Ulta Beauty are designed to help retailers identify the capabilities they need to evolve and meet changing customer expectations.
“January is the perfect time of year to take stock of your current performance for 2024 and how you are going to evolve that experience going into 2025,” encouraged Lynch.
Adobe will be at NRF 2025 in full force with its multi-storey booth – ready to help retailers generate personalisation and optimise their content supply chain to drive greater efficiency, scale and speed.
“It’s important for retailers to attend these events, hear how other leading retailers are addressing these challenges at the front and how they’re fundamentally changing their business opportunities to deliver the next generation of customer experience,” Lynch concluded.
Going to NRF and interested in meeting up with other Aussie retailers while you’re there? Let us know and let’s connect.
The post How to reimagine the end-to-end customer experience with personalisation appeared first on Inside Retail Australia.
