Valentine’s Day is an occasion to show your significant other that you love them. But businesses shouldn’t need a holiday to show their customers some love. They can show customers how much they care every day by giving their customers what they want – a personalized experience.

According to Forbes, “77% of customers consider a company’s customer experience just as important as the quality of its products and services.” So how can you show your customers love to drive more loyalty? Here are 4 places to start.

1 – Go Deeper

Just like in any good relationship, your interactions with your customers should go deeper than surface-level. Today’s customers, especially Gen Z’ers and Millennials, are increasingly interested in connecting with brands through more meaningful interactions.

They care about a brand’s sustainability, point of view, and values, and showing that off takes a nuanced, multi-channel approach. For instance, it’s common to create social media and web content that doesn’t even feature the brand’s product.

So, while having, accurate, in-depth product information is important, it’s no longer enough. Getting past the superficiality of “this is our product, and this is what it does,” will help you reach modern consumers with the experiences they’re looking for.

2 – Build a Customer Profile

So how do you actually deliver those deeper, personalized experiences customers crave? You need to start with building a profile around what makes them truly unique. Personalization and customer data go hand in hand – after all, you can’t personalize your interaction with your customer if you don’t understand them. Making an impression with today’s consumers takes more than simply knowing their name, gender, and location. That bulk segmentation (separating customers into groups by their characteristics) is just assumed at this point.

Personalization in 2021 is more about individualization than segmentation. You want to deliver targeted messages and offers to each customer based on multiple layers of attributes, including demographics, career, values, affiliations, social behavior, location, and more. However, this individualization isn’t as simple as breaking each customer out into a few large buckets. You need to know their behaviors, preferences, past purchases, future interests, and more.

And the more data you collect on your customers, the more important an established data management strategy will be. To synthesize, organize, and syndicate all of this data to connect with customers through multiple channels, you need to manage your data with a powerful platform.

3 – Select the Right Platform

To give customers better experiences through personalization, there’s no getting around it – you’ll need to manage customer information through a Master Customer Domain. Your Customer data domain will provide a central repository of customer data and give you an accurate, 360-degree view of your customers.  How you go about that is up to you.

Some companies may be targeting an MDM (Master Data Management) platform with a strong focus on customer data. Others may need to start with PIM (Product Information Management) to make sure their product data is in order, then they’ll look to incorporate customer data. With a multi-domain MDM platform, you can do exactly that.

Multi-domain MDM is designed to flexibly scale with a company’s growing data demands. So when you’re ready to focus more attention on individualized customer experiences, the platform can adapt with you.

4 – The Platform is Not a Magic Bullet

Regardless of the platform you choose, know that technology alone isn’t enough to deliver an impactful level of personalization to your customers. Neither is having clean, high-quality data. You must establish data management as a priority for your organization – which includes processes to ensure you collect, match/merge, and leverage your customer data (and all data categories) to create the most value.

Collecting customer data can create privacy issues, but as long as you’re open and honest about it (and customers see a benefit) they’re usually on board. In fact, 83% say they’re willing to share their data to enable a personalized experience.

To prevent those same willing data participants from getting annoyed, it’s essential to clean your data. A Customer domain can help you match/merge and create a golden record of accurate, unique customer profiles. That way, customers don’t see irrelevant or duplicated offers.

Finally, you’ll want to leverage the data for maximum effectiveness. Using analytics, machine learning, and technology like augmented reality, you can utilize data to create truly unique experiences (think virtual dressing rooms for apparel) that build a relationship and foster loyalty.

Falling in Love Takes Time

Your customer relationship will take time to build, but that’s how all the best relationships work, right? If you’re committed to creating unique, delightful experiences for your customers, they’ll reward you with a loyal heart and an open wallet. Whether you need support to implement a Customer Domain or just need a better strategy to connect with your customers, contact us to get started.