These days marketers no longer talk about personalization. Now “hyper-personalization” is the term of the times.
“When done effectively, hyper-personalized marketing can be a win-win for companies and consumers,” a Western Governors University blog post reported. “It allows brands to more meaningfully engage customers, build new relationships, strengthen existing ones and improve the customer experience.
Recent research shows:
- 86% of companies report seeing a measurable uptick in business results from hyper-personalization, according to Evergage, a Salesforce company.
- 90% of consumers say they find personalized marketing appealing, according to a Deloitte report.
- 78% said personalized content made them more likely to repurchase from a brand, according to a 2021 McKinsey report on personalization.
The following three strategies can help your organization take hyper-personalization to the next level:
1. Improve Hyper-Personalization by Making Full Use of First-Party Data
One great way brands can master hyper-personalization is to increase engagement levels with customers and prospects to fully leverage first-party data, said Ryan Turner, EcommerceIntelligence founder.
Table stakes here would be collecting the basics such as name, email address, phone number and other preferences around how someone wants to be communicated with, Turner said. However, this only opens up limited personalization opportunities.
“The leading brands in ecommerce and SaaS [software as a service] are using extremely advanced levels of personalization. This is made possible because of the granular data they’re collecting from customers and prospects at various stages of the buying cycle,” Turner explained. “For example, an ecommerce retailer selling jewelry could hyper-personalize their marketing and communications both pre-purchase and post-purchase by collecting valuable data from people such as gender, birthdate, jewelry color preferences (e.g., gold, silver, platinum) and style preferences (e.g., necklaces, earrings, anklets, etc.)”
Turner said all of this information could be used to deliver hyper-personalized communications across various digital channels, particularly email marketing and short message service (SMS) channels. The data could be used to segment a database of customers or prospects, he explained.
This would provide the basis for hyper-personalized marketing campaigns for each segment. If a brand chooses to run a sitewide promotion, it can send a version just showing its best offers on gold necklaces for women to all of the women in the database who matched those preferences, Turner said. The brand can do the same for people who showed other preferences.
Related Article: Can You Have Your Privacy-Personalization Cake and Eat It, Too?
2. Use Purchase Behavior Segmentation to Advance Hyper-Personalization
Beyond segmentation based on demographic factors and color or style preferences, a brand can advance its hyper-personalization efforts by segmenting them on purchase behavior, said Aleksandra Korczynska, GetResponse chief marketing officer.
She recommended the following purchase behavior-based segments:
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- Existing customers
- Customers who've not made an order yet
- Customers who spent above [X] amount of money
- Returning customers who bought from you more than [X] times
- Customers who haven't purchased from you in [X] amount of time
Brands can also make segmentation even more advanced with lead scoring and tagging based on user behavior such as opens, clicks and downloads, rewards programs for the most loyal customers and score-driven automation workflows, Korczynska said.
“Granular and real-time segmentation and personalization will equip marketers to individualize experiences in lockstep with what customers value in any given moment,” added Sunil Thomas, co-founder and executive chairman of CleverTap. “Platforms that combine real-time analytics, segmentation and engagement functionality enable marketers to adapt to minute changes in customer preferences at any given moment, as opposed to after the fact.”
Related Article: 6 Ways Marketers Need to Balance Privacy, Personalization
3. Seek to Understand the Customer Data for Better Hyper-Personalized Engagement
Understand the customer by creating a single source of truth that handles data privacy and consent. Then unify first-party data — including demographics, sales, support calls and behaviors — so you can better understand each customer and engage them with relevant content, advised Kelsey Jones, Emarsys global director of product marketing.
“Build deeper relationships with customers by delivering personalized, omnichannel engagements,” Jones said. “With AI-insights enriching customer profiles and identifying priority customer segments, you can quickly engage them with relevant content when it matters most. Engage where they want — customers expect consistency, and demand to be engaged with on their preferred channels.”
By empowering marketers to make smart, quick decisions with data-driven insights and analytics, they can keep up with the pace of consumers and drive business growth, Jones added. When hyper-personalized, omnichannel customer engagement is used, it builds trusted, loyal relationships.
An “intelligent data layer” will help with that customer understanding, according to Thomas. That data layer enables brands to see the activity and demographic data of customers in real time — what they’re buying, what they’re doing, where they are and what device they are using. This enables brands to not only respond in real time to an individual user, but also to build smart user personas and content moving forward.
The three strategies above can help drive those “game-changing” hyper-personalization efforts to the next level.
