Top Brands Share Their Personalization Bests
With manual processes and limited resources, you might think it’s impossible to create deeply personal, one-to-one interactions for thousands or even millions of customers. Yet top brands are proving what’s possible with personalization. They count on AI and machine learning, analytics around customer preferences and behaviors, and the ability to reach customers across every channel and device. Read on to learn best practices that companies like Silversea Cruises, Swisscom AG, and London Heathrow Airport are using to break through personalization barriers in truly remarkable ways. With the right mindset — and the right tools — you can join them.
Three best practices — unlimited personalized experiences
1. Meet customers where they are.
Customers are constantly moving from device to device and from channel to channel. And they have very different needs along their journeys. With so many moving parts, the only way to deliver highly relevant interactions is to bring together everything you know about them: how they like to communicate, where they like to shop, and what interests they have. Meet them where they are and they’ll have no reason to go anywhere else.
2. Shorten the path to value.
The quickest path to business value starts with knowing what your customers want to accomplish, and then helping them get there. After all, if you help customers reach their own goals — like downloading a piece of content, adding an item to their cart, or making a purchase — they’re much more likely to take actions that help you reach your own.
3. Let AI sweat the small stuff.
Artificial intelligence and machine learning won’t take over your job, but they will take on manual tasks so you can focus on your most strategic work. That means making the most of your limited resources to reach every customer on a deeply personal level, no matter how large your audience.
What is Adobe Sensei?
Adobe Sensei uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to help you deliver personalized experiences at scale. It powers the following features in Adobe Target, our personalization platform:
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Automated Personalization:** Helps you deliver highly personalized content by combining and matching offers and messages based on customer profiles.
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Auto Allocate:** Increases conversions by automatically relocating traffic to the best-performing offers, and continues to learn as it runs.
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Auto Target:** Helps you quickly deliver personalized customer experience variations across channels by determining the most appropriate experiences for each customer and continuously improving with customer actions.
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Personalized Recommendations:** Creates cross-sell and upsell opportunities by displaying recommended products or content based on previous views or purchases.
1. Meet customers where they are.
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Monaco-Ville, Monaco
Unique customer journeys for one-of-a-kind travelers.
Silversea Cruises is an ultra-luxury cruise line that prides itself on providing personalized boutique experiences to its passengers. To create a consistent customer journey, the company needed to extend the same delight to its digital interactions. First, they used analytics to get a complete picture of customer behavior — from how they research their trips online to which activities and destinations they like best.
Next, they fed those insights into personalization engine Adobe Target to test their digital experiences and find out which resonated most with customers. By delivering more relevant creative, layouts, and content they increased engagement, clicks, and purchases. They also use AI and machine learning, powered by Adobe Sensei, to automatically provide highly personalized creative and offers based on the unique profiles of their customers.
“Everything that we do now revolves around data and personalization — starting with the first impression to the point where a customer steps off of the ship to go home and when they decide to book again.”
Xavier Bussonnais
Director of Digital Marketing, Silversea Cruises
Reduced cost per acquisition by 15%, increased site conversion by 20%.
London, UK
Delivering just-right experiences with testing strategies.
Philips is one of the most respected technology and manufacturing brands in the world. They communicate with customers in 79 markets and 38 languages across multiple channels and devices — including mobile, which accounts for almost 50 percent of their site visitors. To help them better test, manage, and deploy relevant experiences across their global sites, Philips turned to Adobe Target.
By pulling in analytics from across the customer journey, they’re able to continuously improve online experiences based on how customers interact with content. For example, testing and implementing just the right “Buy” buttons on one of their sites helped them increase clicks by more than 20 percent. A slide-in call to action increased newsletter signups by 635 percent. And replacing a carrousel with navigation cards on mobile increased product views by almost 25 percent, and purchases by almost 28 percent.
This is some text! “It’s wonderful that we can put out all of this new content quickly, but what makes it really special is that we can see exactly how customers respond and refine experiences accordingly.”
Joost van Dun
.Com Manager, Corporate Experience, Philips
100% of pages are tested and validated by analytics before going live on any of Philips’s online properties.
2. Shorten the path to value.
Long Beach, California
Smarter analysis for sharper decisions — and higher returns.
From printers and projectors to wearables and robots, Epson’s product lines are as varied as their customer base. In order to deliver the most relevant experiences to their diverse customers, Epson needed to understand better how customers were interacting with content on web, mobile, paid search, display, and email. Through a combination of analytics and artificial intelligence, they were able to automatically uncover issues like drops in traffic, increases in error codes, or customers bouncing from their website.
For example, by taking a closer look at analytics around the customer checkout journey, they found that site visitors bounced on pages that asked them to identify themselves as guests or returning customers. Using Adobe Target, they built and tested new versions of the checkout page, and found that the new versions performed better. After replacing the original layout, they continued to test and refine, improving the buying experience with each iteration.
“With Adobe Analytics and Adobe Target working together, we can take a closer look at the data coming out of our tests and make smart decisions that will help us optimize online experiences for our customers.”
Scott Sturcke
Director, Online Marketing Management, Epson America
Conversion boost from just one test along the checkout journey covered the cost of the Adobe solution for the first year.
Fornebu, Norway
Relevance meets results.
Telenor is one of the world’s largest telecommunications companies, serving customers in eight countries across Europe and Asia. Although they communicate with customers through a variety of channels, they wanted to increase engagement through digital sales channels like their website and mobile apps. They also aimed to increase revenue through cross-selling deals, upselling to additional services, and reducing churn.
Using the artificial intelligence capabilities of Adobe Target, they were able to sharpen their onsite targeting and automatically deliver personalized offers to their site visitors. For example, if a visitor already has television services, they’re served up cross-sell opportunities like faster internet, or upsell products like premium sports or movie channels.
“Working with smart capabilities enabled by Adobe Sensei, we can optimize marketing efforts in any channel to improve sales and retention.”
Ahmet Demirel
Head of Marketing, Telenor
With the ability to automatically display offers based on visitor attributes, Telenor can now more precisely target audiences across regions.
3. Let AI sweat the small stuff.
Ittigen, Sweden
Keeping it personal with AI.
Swisscom AG, one of Switzerland’s leading telecommunications companies, sought to differentiate themselves from the competition by delivering the most relevant, personal experiences. After seeing successes with simple A/B testing, they decided to take personalization to the next level using the AI and machine learning features in Adobe Target.
Starting out with personalized recommendations for products and content, they then moved on to automated A/B testing, which helped drive more traffic to their best-performing offers. They also used advanced machine learning to serve up the best experiences based on individual customer profiles. By using AI to optimize and personalize in this way, Swisscom was able to deliver more relevant experiences and increase sales.
“With Adobe Sensei, we can add personalization during the testing phase and get better results by identifying customer behavior patterns without any prior analysis.”
Nicolas Mériel
Senior Digital Strategist, Swisscom
40% uplift in banner click-throughs with the help of machine learning.
London, UK
Lower effort for higher customer spend.
As one of the busiest travel hubs in the world, Heathrow was looking for a way to encourage spend and increase revenues through retail stores and other businesses housed in the airport. And they wanted to do it by making personal connections with travelers before, during, and after their visit. But with a small team and eight sites to manage, this was no small task. So they enlisted the help of Adobe Target and machine learning.
Now Heathrow can better reach customers by automatically personalizing content and offers, including the subcategories on their home page. While most personalization methods use rules developed by analysts, Adobe Target uses machine learning to create rules. It then serves up the most relevant offers for each visitor, resulting in more conversions and higher revenues.
“We use the power of Adobe Sensei to intelligently automate our processes and achieve better results than our team can accomplish alone.”
Stuart Irvine
Analytics and Optimization Lead, London Heathrow Airport
60% higher average retail spend per customer as a result of targeted offers.
Experience the power of personalization
These top brands prove that with the right mindset — and the right tools — you can deliver personalized experiences that wow every customer. With the right balance of customer insights, the ability to connect with customers across channels, and the help of AI and machine learning, you can make every interaction personal and meaningful, no matter what the scale. All you have to do is set your goal and take the first step.
Learn more here. See personalization in action here.