We already know that digital customers place a premium on experience, so the provision of personalised, immersive and engaging experiences must be a high priority. Without this, how can businesses stay competitive?

At the heart of such experiences is customer value. Customers want to feel valued by businesses, and to know that their specific wants and needs are being catered for. It’s for this reason that localisation has proved so popular as a tool for retail targeting.

Currently, 56% of consumers claim that the ability to get information on products and services in their native language trumps pricing, while 72% expect companies to know their background and purchase history regardless of whether they are communicating via a website, on email, or over the phone.

When it comes to building effective experiences, familiarity is key. It creates a sense of belonging, and a feeling that a business has taken time to learn about the needs of the individual.

This goes beyond just the inconvenience of having to change currency or language preferences; it’s frustrating to think that the brand you spend time and money on doesn’t care about your culture, your background or your overall experience.

The rise of hyper-localisation

Localisation isn’t just another buzzword, it’s centred on targeting and messaging for the benefit of the customer to combat the feeling of “I’m just one of the crowd.”

While businesses have been using localisation since the early 2000s, more recently, retailers have started to take this trend to a whole new level, through ‘hyper-localisation’.

Rather than seeing consumers as part of one particular nation – and tailoring languages and content to that nation, hyper-localization examines individuals in a much more focused way, using geotargeting and mobile location data to offer unique experiences right down to the street, or even store, level.

This hyper-localised data is becoming both more accurate and more available over time, and with the majority of mobile searches (52%) now occurring while out and about, there is a possibility for brands to use such data to further improve the customer experience.

Already, we are seeing retailers using in-store push notifications, real-time discount codes and even location-specific layouts and content for their mobile apps and ecommerce stores.

But while hyper-localisation has proved revolutionary for many retail brands, the consumer demand for increasingly unique and stress-free shopping experiences continues to grow.

So, what will come next for localisation? How can businesses continue to target and hone their experiences, even beyond a customer’s exact location? The answer, is in targeting the individual.

How we get there

Rather than simply targeting customers based on who and where they are, today’s businesses must look to develop an understanding of how their consumers feel.

The logical endpoint of localisation is that it must become so focused that brands no longer target one particular nation, region or even device, but instead tailor their experiences to the customer’s individual moods.

In order to achieve this, however, retailers and brands must first develop a customer profile that goes beyond geographic and demographic information and focus instead on psychographics – the subtle clues that highlight a consumer’s specific moods, mindsets and emotions.

With these clues, it’s more likely that businesses can build an understanding of their customer base and preempt situations that are likely to cause dissatisfaction across the customer journey.

As fundamentally emotional beings with higher expectations than ever, customers will display a range of behaviours that need to be managed efficiently to avoid frustration and ensure a positive buying mindset.

Frequently consumers use retail therapy as a way to alleviate stress from their daily lives, so businesses and retailers should be offering shopping experiences that reduce, rather than add to, the stress levels of their customers.

However, with 32% of people admitting to losing their temper when shopping, it’s clear that brands have not always had access to the right tools to understand consumer mindset.

For brands to truly understand the experience every customer is having, it’s crucial that they start to look beyond traditional metrics and instead consider new forms of ‘experience analytics’.

Behavioural metrics such as clicks, hovers, app-taps and scrolls can help illuminate the mindset of customers as well as identify the subtle micro-stressors that are often not considered.

Only when these stressors have been eliminated from the buying process can every customer be served with the best possible customer experience.

This is the future of truly personal business: not just focusing on where potential customers are, but on who they are and how they feel in the run up and at the moment of purchase.

By Geoff Galat is CMO of Clicktale.