According to McKinsey & Company, “Consumers don’t just want personalisation, they demand it.” The statistics tell the tale: 71% of consumers expect personalised interactions, and 76% get frustrated if brands don’t offer these interactions.

What exactly is personalisation? It’s the analysis of customer-provided and third-party data to pinpoint products or services that align with consumer interests, budgets, or emerging preferences. 

In practice, personalisation includes analysing historical purchasing patterns to offer shoppers a tailored selection of products through customised email or social media links.

Personalisation isn’t simply selling customised products that offer a more niche experience or changing emails to include customers’ first names. 

While these surface-level efforts may help brands appear more interested in customer preferences, they’re often perceived as the bare minimum effort required, leaving many customers looking for brands doing better work elsewhere. 

Consider the German market. Known as pragmatic shoppers, Germans are often more concerned with function than form and more focused on quality than brand connection. As noted by research from KPMG, however, “COVID-19 caused many German consumers to look inwards. People developed a preference for local products, and there was an increased reliance on services such as weekly markets.” 

As a result, personalisation is now the most important factor in cultivating loyalty among German customers.

Four major industries are putting personalisation at the forefront of their strategies.

 

1. Fashion

Brands like Stitch Fix are finding ways to create hyper-personalized clothing options for consumers, according to Common Thread.

Instead of simply browsing products on a website, Stitch Fix customers can complete a style quiz that creates taste, fit, and price profiles and matches users with a stylist. Customers then pay a small stylist fee, which is credited toward any eventual purchases. When curated items arrive, customers can try them on and purchase or send them back free of charge. As of 2020, Stitch Fix was worth $2.9 billion, according to Common Thread.

The takeaway: Discover exactly what customers want by asking for in-depth information upfront

 

2. Grocery

As noted by Retail Dive, grocery brands such as Misfit Markets are using customer data to create online shopping experiences that only show consumers products they may want to purchase. By analyzing historic purchase trends and preference data, the company’s mobile app helps consumers cut down on time otherwise spent looking at products they don’t want.

The takeaway: You can streamline the purchasing process and boost sales by using customers’ historical data.

 

3. Food and Beverage

There’s personal, and then there’s personal. 

According to EHL Insights, British brewery Meantime Brewing has opted for the second type with its DNA-based beer service. In partnership with genetic testing company 23andMe, the brand analyzes customer-provided saliva samples to determine their flavor preferences. Then, they create bespoke beers tailored to consumers.

The takeaway: Personalisation deep dives offer potential for niche brands to deliver unique experiences for enthusiasts. 

 

4. Personal Care

According to Prestige, personal care brands such as Skin Inc. are making the best use of machine learning algorithms to help customers find personalized skin care products. 

Customers can take the company’s Skin ID Quiz, which analyzes a database of more than 1 million profiles to find product matches and recommend the ideal products to address specific skin care concerns.

The takeaway: Machine learning offers a way to turn anonymized customer data into personalized recommendations.

How do brands and retailers make the move from product- to people-focused efforts, while aligning with ecommerce personalisation trends?

 

Recognise Inherent Challenges

One of the biggest potential issues is privacy: If customers don’t feel that brands are adequately protecting their data, they’ll leave and shop somewhere else, making personalisation efforts useless. 

Consider research from PCI Pal, highlighted by Business Wire, which found that 83% of Americans would stop spending with a business for several months after a data breach.

Twenty-one percent said they would never return. In the United Kingdom, 41% of consumers said they would never come back. While consumer data underpins personalisation, its protection is critical.

In practice, ensuring data privacy starts with brands being upfront with customers about why they’re collecting consumer data and how they’ll use it. Next, brands must apply basic security practices, such as robust encryption and multi-factor authentication (MFA). 

Finally, companies must consider any relevant regulations — such as General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) or the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) — depending on their operating location and customer base.

 

Take Small Steps

While it may be tempting to go all-in on personalisation as quickly as possible, brands need to remember the goal: creating long-term, reciprocal relationships with customers. It’s worth taking small, data-driven steps to reduce the risk of fostering friction rather than familiarity. 

Start by better understanding your current digital shelves. Ask yourself what’s working, what isn’t, and what needs to change. 

If companies opt to leverage historic and trend data to create customised consumer links to product pages, for example, they should focus exclusively on this effort and ensure that metric data backs up the efficacy of these efforts before expanding personalisation programs.