Is it Worth Offering Personalized Products to Customers?

It’s already hard enough for business owners to attract customers to their stores. It’s even more difficult to actually get them to purchase something. If you’re feeling frustrated and at the end of your rope when it comes to trying to increase your sales, here’s something that you can try: personalized products.

The Power of Personalization

When you allow shoppers to add a personalized touch to their purchases, it becomes more engaging compared to regular and generic products.

This allows customers to have a deeper and more personal connection to both the business and the product, which results in higher purchases and more frequent return visits.

In the past, personalized items were usually associated with either the gift or the souvenir niche – think monogrammed bath towels or wedding souvenirs.

However, more and more stores are turning to personalization, allowing their customers to choose various features to make their purchases more meaningful.

What Kind of Personalization Services Can I Offer?

There are generally three ways that you can offer personalization services for your customers: temporary, palette, and permanent personalization.

Temporary Personalization

Getting products personalized can be expensive. You might need to purchase special equipment, hire new employees, and even get training to know how to operate these personalization tools. If you’re a small business or just starting out, you might not have the budget for such an expense.

What’s more, there are times when your customers don’t want a customized look to be permanent. They might want to be able to change it at a later date or even remove it altogether.

If this is the case, you might want to consider temporary personalization services such as stickers or decals. They are easy to place, cheap to produce, and easy to remove when the time comes.

What’s more, since most stickers and decals are rendered in software, it can be quick and easy to knock out a design as requested by a customer. Temporary personalization works best for products with a flat, hard, and smooth surface.

The only significant expense that you might need to consider is ordering the adhesive paper in bulk, and you can easily find stores that sell these items wholesale.  

Palette Personalization

For something a little bit more permanent than stickers, but still affordable, you can consider offering palette customization.

When you offer the ability to change colors and patterns on a certain product, it increases the chance for customers to want to purchase the product because they can envision it in their home.

It might seem like a daunting task; what if your customers request a color or pattern that you’re unable to offer? Here are some simple steps that you can take to have better control over your palette customization process:

• Limit the colors and patterns that you offer – when you’re just starting out with this kind of personalization, you don’t want to offer too much too early.
  
  You can offer a basic set of colors and patterns that your customers can choose from, and expand once there is a higher demand for more choices.

• Give yourself a wider lead time – palette customization can take a bit more time compared to temporary personalization, so make sure to take that extra time into account.

Permanent Personalization

If you have a huge customer base or you are already making products that are perfect for permanent customization (clothing, bags, towels, etc.), it might be a good move to offer this type of personalization option in your business.

There are various methods for permanent personalization, such as embossing, embroidery, engraving, rubber printing, or even branding.

You need to choose the right type of permanent customization for the products that you are offering.

If you’re just starting out with permanent customization options, it’s best to start small and scale up once the word spreads that you are offering this service.

This allows customers to build up a demand for your personalized products, as well as allows you to be able to perfect your customization process.

Even Your Packaging Can be Personalized!

Aside from the products themselves, you can even add a touch of personalization to your company packaging.

There’s something really nice about receiving a personalized product wrapped in a personalized envelope, rather than just a plain brown envelope.

This is especially true if the product is meant to be given as a gift or souvenir.

You can add this feature to your store: your customers can add the option of ordering personalized business envelopes online. They can also choose other packaging options, such as accordion folders or even boxes. 

from Feedster https://www.feedster.com/business/is-it-worth-offering-personalized-products-to-customers/