Summary

• Quality customer experience requires a holistic approach.
• Addressing customer personas at the segment-of-one level is key.
• Value creation and attribution can lead to a winning CX formula.

The secret Santa tradition can be a stressful one, especially if we don't know our recipients well enough.

But the opposite is also true. Watching our recipients unwrap their gifts—selected and packaged with care—after being kept in suspense as we prepare the gifts can be a heartening experience. Likewise, your customers are expecting to receive ideal customer experiences as a gift. If executed properly, brands will be able to foster greater brand affinity, boost customer advocacy, and increase retention.

In this blog, we will take a look at some ways you can become the much-adored secret Santa of your customers.

Address customer-focused demands

Nobody delights in a jury-rigged gift prepared without much thought. Therefore, knowing the kind of experiences customers want is the first step to better engagement.

However, this can present a challenge when brands try to analyze unknown audiences, which can feel like trying to find the right gifts for acquaintances about whom you know very little in a secret Santa exchange.

To solve this predicament, brands need an efficient customer data platform (CDP). A CDP turns first, second, and third-party customer data into actionable insights that inform brands in delivering relevant CX that accelerates conversion. It is able to: 

• create unique IDs for unknown individuals 
• determine their identities
• enrich those profiles over time, and 
• turn strangers into opportunities for growth

Create one-to-one customer engagement

Customers want to feel seen and valued, just as we all do. Personalized experiences will make them feel appreciated, motivating them to purchase from the brand and even become loyal clients over time.

To adapt to this personalized approach to gift giving, brands need to spend more time thinking about every individual customer. From a practical standpoint, however, it is challenging to execute for thousands—or even millions—of customers without a powerful data solution in place. 

A CDP unifies, standardizes, and derives insights into customer behavior and preferences, utilizing the intelligence to optimize how each customer is engaged and thus maximize marketing outcomes.

Know your customers’ personas

Personas (for instance, the high-earning professional), represent idealized archetypes of audiences sharing behavioral patterns, preferences, goals, and other traits, developed out of information collected through surveys and data analysis. 

To get the most utility, brands need to create a diverse set of personas with detailed, comprehensive traits. They can help narrow down the right audiences for campaigns, and with the help of a CDP, personas can serve as attributes that further refine target segments.

Cultivate lasting value with next-best offers

Being the secret Santa of customers is a long-term commitment. Racking up first-time purchases is significant cause for excitement, but never the end goal. It’s about subsequent purchases; it’s about keeping customers interacting with the brand.

CDPs like RESUL continuously analyze customer data to generate next-best recommendations of offers, content, and interactions most likely to facilitate repeated cross and up-selling.

Conclusion

You do not have to be your customers’ secret Santa only during the holiday period.

When you are committed to know what your customers want, pinpoint their personas, and deliver consistently tailored experiences at every step of the way, your brand will feel special to customers beyond the holiday season.

Tomorrow’s high-performing brands will approach each consumer as an individual, rather than as part of an indistinguishable mass. They will create value-rich, real-time experiences for each customer. This is the path to value creation—and, with the right technologies, attribution—at the segment-of-one level, leading to personalization that really wins over customers.