For years it’s been a recurring question for brands – what do Millennials respond to? What are their needs? And, what is the best way to attract and retain this generation of consumers’ interest in an era of short attention spans and an abundance of shopping choices?
Wanting to provide answers, the recently published MoEngage Winning Millenial Engagement 2022 report studied over 2 million consumers in 2021 included in 7500 email and push notification campaigns by the top brands in the Middle East.
The two central takeaways coming from this study are:
- Digital channels have quickly overtaken traditional shopping experiences
- Personalization is everything
Read on to learn more.
In 2022, Digital Consumers Make the Rules
MoEngage’s report affirms what businesses have been noticing for the past few years – the new consumer is tech-savvy, fast-moving, and quick to adapt. They are also hard to retain, as brand loyalty is rooted in a variety of factors such as customer service and experience, ethical business conduct, convenience, and levels of digital availability.
Reflecting these global changes, consumer behavior in the Middle East has transformed significantly over the course of just a few years. The internet penetration in the UAE is set to reach 96% by 2025, and 67% of consumers already report shifting to digital channels. In addition, a full 47% of UAE-based consumers have turned to smartphones as their primary online shopping device.
With over half of the Middle East’s population under 25 and, therefore, dominantly tech-savvy, brands must focus on optimizing their digital communication and marketing channels – not to fully replace, but to improve upon, the brick-and-mortar sales experience. And to do this, personalization is key.
Personalization Cuts Through the Noise
As the average consumer receives upwards of 100 emails a day, it’s almost impossible to capture their interest and stand out from the crowd with just run-of-the-mill touchpoints that are the same for each member of your customer base.
Segmenting your audience based on their interests and designing content that resonates with each group’s taste and needs is critical to direct their attention to your brand and your message.
To give you an idea of how segmentation and personalization work to a business’ advantage, let’s consider an example of an online fashion retailer aiming to increase its sales. First, they analyze and segment their audience based on the individual’s most-viewed items or pages on their website and/or mobile application.
Such segmentation reveals the potential customer’s current interests, from accessories to exercise clothes to shoes. Segmenting the audience according to different groups’ needs allows the retailer to craft specialized campaigns to provide content that speaks directly to the cohort’s interest. Segment-focused notifications about a special 20% off offer on all accessories, for example, grab that cohort’s attention and tend to inspire more direct and immediate action – ultimately quadrupling engagement.
Personalizing your outreach has also been proven to increase conversion rates, improve brand loyalty, and generate more revenue. And, as MoEngage’s report shows, the two most important channels for personalized B2C communication are email and push notifications.
Year after year, emails have shown to be the most reliable and easily-customized form of online communication and marketing. Email campaigns are also immensely rewarding, with the average ROI for each dollar spent shown to be $44.
However, everyone can agree that an inbox flooded with vague and confusing messages, advertising a product or a service the recipient has no interest in only drives them away from a brand, not towards it.
MoEngage’s study of over 7500 email campaigns confirms this, showing that the opening rate of broadcast (non-personalized) emails is under 8%. Personalized content outperforms broadcast emails significantly in this regard, with an opening rate of over 19%.
The discrepancy in unique click-through rates between non-personalized (1.44%) and personalized content (28.63%) is even higher – almost a twenty-fold increase!
Push notifications
Mobile push notifications are another very effective channel when it comes to consumer engagement.
MoEngage’s report shows that, again, when it comes to push notifications, personalized content brings significantly better results when compared to broadcast. For example, the conversion rate of broadcast push notifications is under 6%, while personalized messaging brings that number up to over 21%.
To perfect your push notification formula, you need to pay attention to two factors: frequency of messaging and the message itself.
Making your notifications work for you means achieving a delicate balancing act when it comes to timing – you need to reach out to your customers frequently enough to attract their attention, but not so much as to become a nuisance. The content of the notification, MoEngage outlines, should be clear, concise, and inviting in order to nudge your audience toward a specific action.
Wrapping Up
With the dominant younger population in the Middle East moving away from traditional shopping, digital experience has become a key growth driver.
Engaging with your audience via online channels is an entirely different challenge as opposed to the brick-and-mortar shopping experience. Still, it also represents a great opportunity for business growth and improvement of your overall customer experience.
However, if your team is not equipped with the information they need to understand their customer behavior, developing a quality approach to segmentation and launching personalization campaigns is challenging.
Personalization engines such as MoEngage’s Dynamic Product Messaging (DPM) ease the process. Providing you with a 360-degree view of the customer, DPM enables you to personalize at scale, auto-generate campaigns, and deliver crucial touchpoints in an instant.
To keep up with a generation that is always on the move, investing in new-gen Martech solutions is a critical step.
For more tips on how to best approach personalizing your email communications and push notifications, you can download the full MoEngage report here.
If you are interested in learning more about what Customer Engagement Platforms can do for your company and the impact of personalization on your ROI, contact us at e-CENS.
Our team of data experts can answer all your questions relating to data analysis and digital transformation.
