The importance of visitor intent for personalised retail experiences
Personalisation is the art of tailoring products, services and delivery to each visitor elevating your digital sales platforms to a new state of direct engagement. With 40% of consumers found to leave websites after being overwhelmed by options, the ‘paradox of choice’ is clearly causing friction with the shopper. While reducing choices has been found to increase conversions, simply removing products may not help you to reach your commercial goals.
True customer intimacy is the way forward, with 70% of consumers stating “connected processes – such as contextualised engagement based on earlier interactions – are very important” in securing their booking. Personalisation allows businesses to significantly enhance the customer’s shopping experience, directly appealing to their intent and search requirements, based on their distinct profile.
Visitor intent – the why behind the what
Often considered the great unknown, marketers have spent their time understanding shopper intent. However first party data collection gathers engagement signals to create clear and distinct profiles of your users, and through AI begin learning what these signals reveal about your products and your visitors’ expectations.
AI algorithms are especially powerful at crunching data in real-time, providing a live view of your booking performance, revenue generation and attribution to commercial goals, enabling you to become agile and more responsive to market conditions.
Defining intent categories
Let’s take the travel retail sector as an experience, we split shoppers into four distinct intent categories to enable personalisation algorithms to respond to each stage of the booking cycle. This allows travel companies to prepare their product portfolio, offers, promotions, and customer communications to be deployed at the right time to the most relevant visitor.
Looker – the visitor is looking to be inspired and explores various travel options; they are visiting for informational purposes. AI should convert them to Planners by presenting a variety of messages and products that further build and enrich predictive visitor profiles.
Planner – the visitor is now defining the exact product. Your intent signals should tell you the type of holiday they are looking for, the size of the party, their approximate budget and intended destination, to promote the most suitable products.
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Booker – their intent signals show the product they are most likely to book. AI has identified their interest and provides the specific product information to encourage visitors to convert.
Customer – their real-time user profile signals know they made a booking, so rather than displaying a similar product, you present content, add-on products or services based on their booking and personal profile.
Measuring personalisation performance
Responding to visitors by providing relevant offers in real-time enables you to manage key commercial and performance metrics, while you improve the visibility of content. Three core key performance indicators measure the impact of personalisation solutions:
Engagement – the level of interaction with your visitors. AI keeps them engaged, matching content to their profile driving them through the booking funnel.
Attribution – recording visitors reaching the booking page or checking availability, as well as the revenue contributed by the use of distinct personalisation use cases.
Commercial impact – intent signals tell us approximate budgets of your visitors so your AI will present the most appropriately priced products while optimising revenue.
Responding to intent
AI adds a huge amount of power to your personalisation strategies that you cannot harness by just using a CRM operating on historic data. In today’s digital sales environment it’s important to match your product portfolio to your visitors so you are always relevant. This allows your digital, marketing and commerce teams to delve deeper into optimising Call to Actions (CTAs) and how you present them to different visitors.
The same product will be considered differently by different visitors: you need to present product information most relevant to each visitor and their stage in the booking funnel. Once your algorithms have learnt how visitors engage with your products, services and website, you will have the power to personalise your digital sales platforms to further your commercial goals, especially in challenging markets.
By Andy Owen-Jones, CEO and co-Founder of bd4travel
About the author
Andy is bd4travel’s CEO and visionary co-Founder. He oversees business development and the overall growth strategy. Before founding bd4travel, Andy was the CEO at leading German leisure specialist TravelTainment, which he joined after 10 years at Amadeus. Prior to that, Andy held positions at several international businesses such as British Airways, Deloitte Consulting, and Virgin Atlantic.
