How to increase sales using a personalized product experience

From experience gained in recent years, we have found that the most important part of the competition is no longer based only on price. You may be wondering now what matters more than that? Well, from our perspective, in order to win customers’ loyalty and increase sales, companies need to compete in providing quality services and offering a unique customer experience. One of the best ways to do this is through customization.

If we pay a little more attention, a lot of examples can be found in everyday life of personalization: the handwritten thank you note from a brand thanking you for a purchase, the call at the end of purchasing a product to see if we are satisfied, your favorite snack waiting for you when you check into a hotel, or a waiter remembering your name when you return to your favorite neighborhood restaurant. The concept makes us stop, appreciate the effort, and respect the company’s attention to detail.

So, in an ever-evolving digital world, consumers are used to and actually expect to have personalized experiences throughout their shopping journeys. For example, big tech companies like Amazon and Netflix have forged the path to personalizing the customer experience with personalized product recommendations based on the history of their purchases and their behavioral data.

Forbes recently stated, 80% of consumers are more likely to make a purchase from a brand that provides personalized experiences. So in this article, we help you by presenting some things that you should consider when you start building a sales strategy, such as audience acknowledgment, making the customer-product interaction as easy as possible, the first impression, adapting the product to the customer expectation, analyzing the customer journey, adapting the best strategies for keeping the customers updated and satisfied. 

To help you accomplish this, here are some personalization best practices that you can apply to your customer experience strategy. 

What is Personalization? Why personalize? Why now? 

Content personalization is the use of data and segmentation to create a whole unique customer experience based on their needs and wants. In the context of websites simply means customizing the look, features, and offers presented on a site to accommodate specific individuals or segments of individuals.

In order to personalize online interactions with site visitors, you must understand your target audience’s preferences, needs, patterns, and motivations. In this case, we should ask ourselves how much of the content of our websites is adjusted according to the needs of the clients who get there. For example, think of Netflix. Every time you log in to their website, your “Suggestions For You” carousel is yours – it’s totally reflective of your previous viewing habits and search behavior. 

Just imagine if you went to a store where you could only buy cakes. This would be great if your only desire is to buy cakes, but if there were only foods, fruits on your shopping list, then your experience in that store would be useless. The same logic applies to content personalization. We need to keep in mind that your audience needs more types of information, all at different points in their buying journeys and in different formats and through different channels.

Identify your target audience  

Based on our experience, it’s important that you have a clear idea about your exact audience type before you implement effective personalization tactics. To do this, you must answer these questions first:

Who is your audience? Are you looking for men, women, elders, teenagers, local audience, high-income people to address?

What do they want from you? Identify their current problems and their buying habits.

When do they want it? Find out when your target audience is available to interact with your services.

How do they want to get it? Identify the channels your target audience uses the most and answer yourself.

After identifying your audience, use this segmentation to track their history, previous purchases, demographics, and all sorts of metrics, and then use it to filter what notifications will reach what groups of users.

Make the login process simple and only ask for essential user information

The sign-up process is the first step in the onboarding experience, in which customers create an account to use a website or an app. For starters, you can create a sign-up form for new clients that require basic information like name, email, company, and job title. Generally, you should make it simple and easy. However, sprinkling some of this data throughout the initial user experience can help users feel like your product was designed specifically for them. This is where SaaS companies make the first impression on their customers.

In the sign-up process, it is essential to focus on people who have experienced the product during free trials or through direct contact. The good news is that customers are familiar with this process and are more ready to trust it, despite the initial difficulty. We are sure that this kind of individual will engage faster in buying the product than those who just did the research. But, don’t forget when a user is returning to a site rather than visiting it for the first time, they shouldn’t be sent to the same page. A company should recognize returning visitors as customers and present them with the most relevant experience for their needs. 

Our advice here: First impression matters when experiencing the product. If you’re not meeting the user’s needs during onboarding, they’ll be more likely to drop your product and not bother signing up again: Over 60% of users who fail to see the value of your product during onboarding will leave.

Pay more attention to the customer integration process! 

The integration of prospects is a little bit more different than the integration of other buyers. In order to improve the experience of any customer, we must use the information that is given to us for use in the creation of an account. So, when the customer implements all the necessary records to be entered in the data systems, the product can provide more customized value. 

The critical part of the integration of prospects is getting them to an “a-ha!” moment when they experience and realize the value of the product. When users find more value in your product and more reasons to use it, they engage more and are less likely to churn. So, dive deep into your user analytics and uncover what led your best customers to stay on your platform after signing up. Empirical studies have established that customer integration increases a company’s potential for innovation (Urban and von Hippel, 1988). Among its many advantages are: early customer integration leads to a stronger relationship with the products, a better understanding of market needs, fewer errors in the early development process, and better product quality. 

Understand customers journeys and the risks that lead to their loss 

It’s critical for companies to map in-product customer journeys because they can uncover important customer segments and needs based on the sequence of events and actions taken by customers to achieve a goal. At Algotech, the client’s journey is a bona fide experience that’s been tailored to the wants, needs, and expectations of the customer. 

Mapping customer journeys in SaaS is crucial to influence every interaction and make it a positive experience so that the customer remembers and is happy to come back. A customer journey is a story of someone who has a problem and is looking for a solution. In this situation, your team needs to understand what and where your customers are searching for when they try to find a solution to their problem: what keywords, phrases, questions, etc., and where they conduct their searches.  Traditional buyer’s journeys look like this:

Awareness — Potential buyers know and understand the problem they’re trying to solve or an area that offers potential growth.

Consideration — Buyers are pursuing possible solutions, researching options, and gathering clues.

Decision — Buyers have narrowed their options and are one step away from committing to a solution.

Also, it’s important to consider the customer’s interaction with certain product features because most product analytic solutions tell you how a specific user or segment interacts with a product or feature. Connecting these insights with customer sign-up data enables your teams to be more intelligent and helps them understand whether the product flows and its features make sense to customers. The SaaS customer journey takes the first three stages and connects them deeply and thoughtfully to the next puzzle pieces. 

Retention — The focus shifts to maintaining that spark once the customer seals the deal. Something made your customer choose your solution, and now your mission is to retain that initial support.

Evangelism — Satisfied customers are excellent brand advocates. Incentivizing and celebrating them further cements your relationship

TIP: Understand how fast customers travel through these journeys and the risks that can contribute to the rapid loss of customers before they reach their goals.

The main strategies for maintaining customers

As discussed above, in addition to the fact that it is essential to know how to attract customers, analyze their journeys/needs, and help them when they encounter problems, it’s necessary to understand how to gain their loyalty over a long time. So, improving customer loyalty should be a priority, or those customers you worked so hard to convert could vanish before you even know what happened. Today we’ll look at the most effective ways to personalize product experience in SaaS to increase your sales and keep customers loyal. ​​Let’s get started! 

Be transparent

Don’t be afraid to be frank with your customers, but know your boundaries! The value of transparency is clear: it improves your relationships with customers. At Algotech, we felt that in order to provide a great experience, we should be super transparent with everything so our clients always knew what was going on so that they could learn with us if they chose to. For example, they can see the comments and feedback on the clutch provided by our customers for each completed project. Also, through the articles published on our blog, we share the experience gained throughout the projects and various techniques that we use in our work. 

A study from consulting firm Label Insight found that 94% of consumers prefer brands that practice transparency. In another study from Spiceworks, 84% of IT purchasers said they need to trust a tech brand before making a purchase. 

Re-Analyze the onboarding process

Find the features that are compelling, appealing, and motivating to potential customers. These are the same traits that should keep the customer’s interest for the long haul. So, analyzing this process, we found that a good personalization strategy for new customers would be a “welcome” letter, and for those who return, it would be wonderful to create a welcome page to greet them with their names. All this can motivate them to make progress.

Communicate with users around the customer journey

Do not limit your customer interactions to customer requests. Instead, take the initiative and track down the user’s journey, using the data obtained from their actions. Then send personalized and timely messages to drive the user to the next stage. If your messages are helpful enough and solve users’ problems, you will watch your engagement increase.

Are you looking for good practices? We’ll tell you! Select a small group of highly loyal customers in different segments who truly love your product based on the obtained data. Let them become a part of your journey and make them feel part of a special elite with early access to features! The VIP treatment is an excellent way not just to flatter your customers with that feeling of being chosen for something special but to allow you to get feedback from your faithful segment.

Use automation

Automation comes in handy because it can help you save time and keep customers in the loop. For example, at Algotech, we have implemented a live chat that welcomes every user who visits our website. With his help, we are always connected with visitors, and we can answer any potential questions in a reasonable time. However, if you provide a way to engage with customers and help solve their issues quickly and efficiently, you can keep your customers happy, educated, and engaged.

Ask for feedback and listen to it

How do you know what customers like or dislike about your products? Every business should make an effort to collect feedback from customers and listen to it. In this way, you’ll get far more loyal customers and demonstrate that your product is constantly evolving. So, use multiple channels to gather user feedback. For example, you can do it directly with comments and reactions to measure interest and engagement. Another solution would be to conduct surveys to research the user’s experience with the product or schedule some interviews and ask questions on what users want from your product. 

Build a consistent relationship with users on social media

Don’t forget; content marketing needs to be part of your strategy. It communicates your product’s value by showing how it solves your audience’s problems and allows your company to connect personally with current and potential customers. In addition, this avenue is a direct driver for business, as 74% of customers rely on social media to guide their purchasing decisions. So what would be helpful here? Creating an open group on Facebook where customers will feel free to ask questions to your employees about your services or the industry.

Final thoughts on personalization

In order to summarize everything up, the future of the SaaS business model stays in personalization. So, to keep up, your team should be continuously looking ahead and thinking creatively about ways to make your customer’s journey as personalized as it can be and to delight your users with personalization from start to finish. In conclusion, using this strategy will increase your loyalty and income!