The metaverse represents the dawn of new and exciting online shopping experiences. According to research, by 2026, 25% of consumers will spend at least an hour in the metaverse daily. However, these users will be searching for unique and personalized shopping experiences from their favorite brands.
Even as the metaverse concept gains traction across industries, research shows that 71% of shoppers already demand highly individualized shopping experiences. Most express frustration if the experience falls short.
Your brand should take positive steps towards individualizing metaverse shopping experiences. Some steps include learning about the metaverse and its key concepts, providing different avatars for users, humanizing the experience, and experimenting with various ideas to improve user engagement.
Here’s why and how your business can offer personalized metaverse shopping experiences.
What Customer Engagement Looks Like in the Metaverse
Unlike conventional online shopping experiences, the metaverse allows customers to interact with a brand like in real life. Therefore, they are able to shop in a virtual store, peruse storefronts, consult with a store employee about a product, select products off a rack or shelf, add products to their cart, and try on different products such as clothes, shoes, and jewelry.
The engagement options are virtually limitless. Some brands may recreate their real-life stores in the metaverse, while others may opt for entirely unique metaverse shopping experiences.
For instance, instead of wholly replicating its in-store experience, Nike created Nikeland, a virtual world where customers can interact with the brand playfully and through other unique ways.
Hyundai also launched the Hyundai Motor Company’s Mobility Adventure, a shared virtual space for the company’s customers to participate in various theme parks and interact with the automaker’s products.
The Personalization Challenges Brands Face Today
Personalization in the current digital landscape comes mostly from access to user and third-party data. However, new privacy regulations and limits to third-party data are giving brands a considerable personalization challenge when trying to offer individualized shopping experiences to their customers.
Regulations such as GDPR and CCPA considerably limit how much data a brand can scrape or source from third parties about its clients. Therefore, brands have limited use of trackers and identifiers, which are critical to identifying individual customer needs and providing unique experiences.
Google and Apple have also taken decisive privacy changes, further making personalization a challenge for brands seeking to offer unique shopping experiences that, ironically, users are demanding.
Retention Marketing in the Metaverse
The metaverse, however, has a solution to current personalization challenges in the form of retention marketing. Retention marketing uses engineering serendipity to engage shoppers in the metaverse and offer unique experiences.
Engineering serendipity is a unique concept where a “macro” outcome results from thousands of “micro” interactions. Therefore, a brand selling in the metaverse has to notice micro opportunities to sell or pitch to its customers and act at the right moment with the right content.
These actions cumulatively create an incredible macro experience that delights users. The macro experience improves customer retention, engagement, brand perception, and profits.
Retention marketing makes users feel that a brand “gets” them. It also increases the likelihood of them saying “yes” to future sales and marketing pitches. Research shows that such positive customer experiences boost conversion rates by 10% to 15% and customer satisfaction rates by 20%.
Brands must encourage discovery and let customers take control of their metaverse experiences to boost engagement and provide individualized experiences.
How Your Brand Can Offer Individualized Shopping Experiences in the Metaverse
Your brand can take the following steps to personalize the shopping experience of its metaverse customers.
Learn About the Metaverse
You can only offer engaging metaverse experiences if you understand the ins and outs of this virtual world concept. Take the time to explore the technology and understand how it works.
For instance, the three core technologies you need to understand include the following:
- Augmented reality (AR) – This technology integrates digital elements with the physical space
- Virtual reality (VR) – This technology creates fully immersive virtual environments with unique sensory experiences
- Mixed reality – This technology blends physical and digital worlds using augmented reality and other technologies such as holographic technology.
You must also be familiar with concepts such as digital twins, cryptocurrency, and phygital.
Give Users Different Personas and Avatars
One of the metaverse’s most profound individualization features is the ability of users to create almost limitless avatars and personas for their metaverse experiences. Avatars represent a user’s character in the metaverse. It gives them a unique metaverse identity representative of their values and beliefs.
Giving users different avatars and personas promotes inclusivity within your business and allows you to uniquely structure your marketing, sales, and product teams to meet the unique experiences each buyer might want.
Use Virtual Stores and Other Ideas to Engage Your Metaverse Users
Brands must know how to create unique real-time content that engages their metaverse audience. The ideas you can explore are virtually limitless. However, one of the best-performing ones is setting up virtual stores.
Virtual stores give customers a unique metaverse shopping experience where they can virtually interact with products on display and engage with sales professionals. They can try out and purchase products they want from your business in the virtual store.
For instance, we partnered with Calvin Klein to create virtual stores where their customers can visit and interact uniquely with their products. Customers can try what fits them and consult on various products without leaving the comfort of their homes, resulting in a unique and individualized shopping experience.
The fashion accessory brand, Gucci, used branding through games. It partnered with Roblox, an online gaming platform, to sell digital versions of the Gucci Dionysus handbag to customers in the virtual world.
Make the Experience as Human as Possible
Humanized metaverse experiences are essential to delivering individualized shopping experiences. You should create a metaverse environment where users can have opinions, make purchases, and communicate with other users about your brand and its offerings.
Your brand should be able to address customer concerns directly on the metaverse, making their virtual, digital, and physical experiences appear as one. Responses from customer service need to feel human-like, with transparency and honesty driving engagement.
Choose the Right Partner to Transform Your Brand’s Metaverse Experience
Businesses in the metaverse need to invest in personalized experiences to transform how their users interact with them and drive more profits, sales, and brand loyalty. Partner with us, and let’s create a metaverse framework to empower your business in the virtual world.
