Taking Online Content Offline to Personalize the Customer Experience

Taking Online Content Offline to Personalize the Customer Experience

When interacting with your eCommerce brand for the first time, visitors will look online for visual clues that represent trust and authority in your brand. This content often takes the form of testimonials, ratings, and reviews which offer readers a preview of the customer experience before (or instead of) experiencing it for themselves.

Studies show that 85% of customers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. People trust online reviews as unbiased, unfiltered opinions on brands.

Their impact is so powerful that they can make or break whether or not someone makes a purchase. Reading about positive experiences will naturally create an affirmative brand impression on the reader, whereas reading about undesirable experiences will leave them feeling negative about a brand.

It is important for the latter point to make sure that customer issues are addressed promptly and professionally so as to mend the customer relationship and show prospective buyers your commitment to improving the customer experience.

Either way, leveraging the information collected on your online ratings and review platform is a powerful tool for personalizing the customer experience.

Here, we examine how to take the customer data collected from your online ratings and reviews platform and use it to personalize the customer experience in retail direct mail campaigns and other offline content.

User Generated Content (UGC)

Content provided by direct users of your products or services are an invaluable resource for giving prospective customers an unbiased look at your product in use. People will trust this type of content over stock images, as it is less scripted and more authentic.

The images users upload, the reviews they leave, and the ratings they give can be used to build your digital asset library to be applied dynamically to mail and other offline media.

For current customers, you can send personalized messages featuring cross-sell and up-sell recommendations including testimonials about products that best match their interests based on their previous purchases. For prospective customers, you can use data analytics on the prospects that look most like your customers and identify which products they are most likely to be interested in, and include ratings or testimonials of these products to establish trust and authority in your brand.

Heartbeat Feature

This feature from Revere gives increased visibility to what is popular, empowering customers to show what they like and dislike with the click of a button. API’s can be developed to identify these users and retarget them not only with digital ads on Google, Facebook, or Instagram, but also with offline ads mailed directly to their home encouraging them to make a purchase. These ads, sent within a few days of the initial interaction, serve as a timely reminder for the recipient to go online and purchase that product or a related product.

Marketing Swag

Customers that submit UGC the most often should be rewarded for their effort and contribution, as well as their brand loyalty. Consider sending them marketing swag and collateral that is personalized based on their activity on the ratings and review platform.

Marketing swag empowers frequent contributors to become brand ambassadors that again help you establish credibility and authority.

When sending marketing swag, consider that packaging is important as it is acts as another brand impression or customer touchpoint. This is a great opportunity to include personalized product information based on what products they already love and direct them to other products they may be interested in.

The Bottom Line

Online reviews are an effective way for prospective customers to get a preview of a product experience. Leveraging this content and leveraging it in your offline marketing strategy will help drive a better, more personalized customer experience.

About the Author

Allison Jensen is the Marketing Coordinator for Compu-Mail. Allison specializes in helping organizations seamlessly integrate their marketing efforts through high response direct mail & digital retargeting. She works with marketers to uncover the best way to deliver the right message to the right person at the right time. In prior roles, Allison has worked directly with agencies and non-profit organizations. She is a graduate of Niagara University.

About Compu-Mail, LLC.

Compu-Mail (www.compu-mail.com) provides end-to-end direct marketing and business printing services to companies across the U.S. and Canada. Headquartered in Grand Island, NY, Compu-Mail services include direct mail, email marketing, data driven marketing with database management, statement rendering, variable imaging, and digital retargeting through Google, Facebook, and Instagram. Compu-Mail’s subsidiary company, Dual Print & Mail, provides complete commercial print solutions. Compu-Mail can be reached at 800.255.0670 or [email protected].

2 Comments

  1. Adrian Jones 6 years ago

    When it comes to getting direct mail targeting, it’s important to take note that visitors usually look for visual cues that represent trust and authority in the brand that you’re representing, like testimonials, ratings, and reviews. Another thing to keep in mind is that customizing the user-generated content would provide more trust and credibility to the product since it’s believable and people would want to know more. If I had the chance to use direct mail marketing I would make sure that any and all reviews are personalized and relatable.

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