A whopping 59% of customers say that personalization influences their purchase decision. Personalization is the number one mechanism to grow and retain customers now that consumers expect personal, relevant experiences in real-time.

How can retailers leverage digital intelligence to improve  personalized customer engagement to compete effectively with the likes of Amazon and other leaders in the digital retail space?

The first step is to determine where on the personalization maturity scale your organization falls. Nearly every brand is doing personalization to some degree, but we have found that brands move through stages where they progressively mature their ability to personalize and engage with customers. The more they mature, the better they get at crafting truly personalized experiences.

An Intelligent Framework for Personalized Customer Engagement

We’ve also found that personalization must go beyond segmentation, and there’s a framework that you can use to help generate experiences that feel right to customers.

You may remember from school the concept of the “6 Ws” for writing academic reports: Why, Who, What, When, Where, and hoW. Marketers can apply these six guiding questions as a framework to map out campaigns that truly make for a personalized customer experience.

1. Why? You start by determining the reason for your campaign. What is the impetus for it? The answer to this sets up the rest of the “W”s.
2. Who? Here is your list segmentation. Think beyond generalized demographics and current definitions of what personalization means at your brand. Look at profile, session, and behavioral information.

Think through their behaviors with your app as what they are interested in, if they trend toward a specific activity or product, how can you help them fulfill the rest of their needs? Let’s say you’re a sports apparel store and in your app, a customer exclusively interacts with your running gear—why would you send them something about soccer?

1. What? Time to decide what specific product you are presenting and what type of promotional offer you’re going to make. You’ll need a different creative for each message that is tailored to the specific nuances of each segment you’re sending it out to.
2. When? Today there are 86,400 seconds of opportunities a day to market to someone. When is the right time to engage with each segment? Digital intelligence can help you hone in on timeframes that are most likely to get your target audience’s attention.
3. Where? Pick the wrong channel and all of your effort is wasted. Customers have preferred channels where they spend the most time and are most likely to see your message. Decide if it’s a web push, inbox, app, in-app message, email, or social channel and plan accordingly.
4. HoW often? Frequency matters. Too often and you annoy people. Not often enough and people don’t pay attention. Digital intelligence like Localytics can help you determine the right frequency for different segments.

The 6Ws framework is a great way to take the power of digital intelligence and put it to use in a way that is actionable and repeatable. Use this to get a better sense of who your customers are and to be more intentional about how you market to them. The better you get at this, the more your marketing feels “just right” to customers.

Learn how Localytics can deliver the digital intelligence to inform your personalization.