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By Jim Barnes

Today’s customers have more choices than ever and will choose to shop with retailers that make them feel valued time and time again. For those retailers that understand the customer’s happiness is the way to remain relevant, transforming digitally to deliver personalized, seamless customer experiences is a must.

Gone are the days of siloed advertisements and one-size fits all promotion. Fortunately, today’s opportunities to personalize online experiences beyond just a purchase are numerous.

So, what is digital retail personalization? Retail personalization is a strategy that seeks to build brand loyalty by presenting compelling experiences to customers based on their likes and wants. Personalization requires retailers to have a deep understanding of individual customers, which demands a strong data strategy. Retailers who get personalization right drive deeper customer loyalty while increasing sales.

In this article, we’ll look at seven tactics to enhance customer experience through digital retail personalization by establishing relationships using customer data, email campaigns, product recommendations and more.

Tactic 1: Favorites and wish lists provide digital convenience that permits customers to buy when they are ready to buy and makes reordering easy. They enable targeted remarketing, either through email or directly on the e-commerce page, complete with reminders and/or incentives to reengage with the customer to complete the sales process. Both are available in most e-commerce platforms or through additional third-party plug-ins.

Tactic 2: Customized microsites based on customer preferences
Customers will be drawn to today’s most popular products, and microsites enable retailers to easily spin up customized websites based on those types of customer preferences and order history to possibly upsell or complete a sale. These sites can be set to expire after a certain number of hours/days and can showcase items based on most clicked, reviewed, and/or purchased. Microsites have been shown to increase conversion by as much as 50 percent as compared to a typical website bounce-back link.

Tactic 3: Deliver dynamic, customized email campaigns to retarget
Leverage your CRM and marketing platform to deliver relevant, personalized messages and offers. Whether in the form of pop ups after a customer has placed an item in his/her cart without making a purchase, or targeted emails, most marketing platforms will allow a way to scale personalization based on customer data to offer the most relevant items, images, copy, and promotions to your customers.

Jim Barnes did not have a mentor at the start of his career. “No one taught me how to become a leader,” recalls Barnes, chief executive officer of enVista, an Indianapolis-based supply chain consultancy and software firm.

Instead, observation and experience helped Barnes develop his leadership principles. “I’m a stickler about communication, building a culture around trust and conflict resolution, and taking calculated risks,” he says. Failure is fine as long as you fail fast and then move on to succeed. “Progress is not a straight line,” he adds. “Progress is curvy.”

Here are some insights we gained when we spoke with Barnes about his work and his leadership values.

IL: What was your first experience in supply chain management?

While earning my MBA, I worked as a senior process engineer and management trainee at Johnson & Johnson’s Iolab division. We made cataract lenses and provided all the equipment and pharmaceuticals cataract patients needed. I was assigned to a task force charged with streamlining logistics, which were broken. It took us weeks to get a lens to a doctor. Our goal was to become so efficient and effective that a doctor could place an order before 3 pm and have it delivered by 10 am the next day.

After taking a close look at our distribution network and transportation with FedEx, we took weeks out of the supply chain. We could deliver not only our own product the next day, but also product from sister divisions, such as sutures and garments, in what was almost a drop-ship solution. This was a huge request from our CEO; it taught me to believe in creating stretch goals for yourself and your organization.

IL: You talk about failing fast and moving on. Did you ever learn a lesson from a failure?

In my early career, I formed a business partnership that didn’t work out. I failed in picking a partner because I didn’t seek out someone whose core values and moral compass aligned with mine. That failure taught me to focus on building lasting business relationships based on trust.

IL: Has a customer ever given you an unexpected assignment?

We once helped the e-commerce division of a major retailer analyze its inbound freight as a percentage of overall costs. We also helped them select a transportation management system (TMS). Then the senior vice president informed me that enVista would run this operation for his company. I told him we had never run a control tower before. But we had reached a level of trust. He said, “You’ll figure it out.” I agreed to do it for a year or two, under contract, and then turn it over to them. As it turned out, that partnership lasted for nine years.

IL: What issues keep your customers awake at night?

They worry about how to produce a unique experience for their own customers. Everything is about creating brand loyalists and brand ambassadors. Also, our customers struggle with how to manage the cost versus service model, because obviously there’s no such thing as free shipping. Nobody would pay for Amazon Prime if Amazon didn’t keep its promise to deliver in two days. The fee underwrites the cost of that fast delivery. That’s what supply chain professionals are trying to understand: What is the balance between time and cost, and then how do you manage it?