Blog

Why 30 retailers are asking consumers to self-personalize the shopping experience this holiday

Personalization has long been touted as the Holy Grail for improved customer experience at retail.

November 17, 2016

Personalization has long been touted as the Holy Grail for improved customer experience at retail. The argument is that by examining past behavior data, like browsing and buying, marketers can make better decisions about personalized content to push to customer segments.

But the rub here is the marketer still is making a guess at what will resonate and drive a better customer experience to the targets of personalized campaigns.

That is why 30 top retailers are beginning to simply ask consumers at various touch points for consent to market to them in the future on criteria they set. These retailers include the leading home improvement, consumer electronics, and apparel retail brands.

The innovation these retailers are rolling out is called individualization. It is what Brendan Witcher, an analyst at Forrester, has been touting this year.

What is it? Quite simply, individualization means each individual consumer has the option to subscribe to alerts on future marketing content for only the products they are interested in, and only on criteria they select. That can mean opting in to alerts on price drops, new product launches and new availability (even by size and color in the apparel category).

While mediocre success and ROI for some personalization efforts may be driving this trend, most retailers also see new consumer-controlled ways to block their marketing and advertising efforts every week. Facebook just announced it is slowing the number of ads in its service, despite the fact it has the superior solution for targeting ads to members' interests. And new FCC privacy rules are going to mean consumers have much more control over their own data privacy.

Meanwhile, ad blocking usage is soaring, as are the unsubscribe rates for retailers' generic email blasts. Data from eMarketer shows more than 80 million Americans are using ad blocking this year, and it will increase to more than 100 million next year. Unroll.me reports half of the top 15 email spammers driving unsubscribe rates of more than 40 percent are retailers.

The bottom line is that all of this marketing is unrequested by consumers, and even if it is powered by big data analysis and personalization it still is a 'guess.' It still promotes the product and deals the retailer wants to promote rather than what each individual wants. And, the key message in all marketing touch points today is BUY NOW, versus "how can we save you time in making smarter decisions on the products you may buy in the future."

What's more, individualization platforms are among the simplest to integrate into most e-commerce platforms. They are enabled with one-line of javascript in the site, and then the white label technology vendor embeds a form on product pages and elsewhere on the site for subscribing to specific alerts. The individual only has to leave an email or SMS number one time and then can begin to build their own future product graph with notifications on selected changes. Retailers report many alerting campaigns are outperforming all other digital marketing channels and campaigns by 3x to 5x, and the average incremental revenue for every alert sent is $3.54. Compare this to the average revenue of 8 cents per email from the 26 percent more unrequested email retailers sent in 2015.

Kim Garretson is principal at Realizing Innovation.