Experience Personalisation Series, Part 3 : Personalisation
This article is the third in a three-part series, you can read part 1 here: Experience Personalisation: Getting the Data Right & part 2 here: Experience Personalisation: Data and Content
Data and content are both crucial for effective marketing. The more relevant data you have on your audience, and the more effectively you’re able to use that data to automate the display of content, the more of your marketing spend will lead to conversions.
That’s why, here at Adobe, we use the formula “Data + Content = Personalisation” to summarise the necessity of useful data and automated content targeting in an effective personalised marketing campaign.
Data was our focus in the first article of this series. We explored the ways in which data points from multiple interactions with the same user—across every system used by your organisation—can be synthesised into progressive profiles that grow and adapt in response to real-world behaviour changes. In the second article, we examined some powerful ways of automating the delivery of content, through automated targeting and personalised recommendations.
Now, in this third and final article of the series, we’ll see how data and content come together to create a whole spectrum of personalised experiences.
The broad brush
When we talk about personalisation, we’re actually talking about a wide variety of tools and tactics for audience outreach.
At the low end of this Personalisation Spectrum are broad-brush techniques, using rules-based targeting to address large audience segments.
For example, you might have a rule that says, “all customers who have a gold card, and only those customers, should receive an offer to upgrade to platinum.” You don’t need to know anything at all about these customers’ personal preferences in order to make this offer—all you need is a single binary fact: does this customer have a gold card, or not?
The simplicity of rules-based targeting makes this tactic an ideal place to start with personalisation, but the rules-based approach alone won’t win over most customers. To raise your conversion rate, it’s necessary to combine these broad-brush techniques with more targeted messaging.
Richer profiles
Toward the more granular end of the Personalisation Spectrum, we build our marketing not around broad audience segments, but around progressive profiles, which grow richer and more detailed with every interaction, across every touch point.
As our profiles become more complete, we can begin to use two-stage modelling—not only to determine what a given customer wants right now, but also what he or she is likely to want in the near future.
These richer profiles also enable us to make more relevant recommendations to the customer. Instead of just saying, for example, “People who viewed this DVD also viewed these DVDs,” we can say, “Here’s a list of DVDs that are appropriate for you, based on your personal browsing behaviour, likes, previous purchases, and so on.”
At this individual level, we can move beyond web-based targeting, and begin to offer relevant messaging in apps, email, and even connected devices. Personalisation becomes automated across all channels, including apps, multipage sites, and even devices on the Internet of Things (IoT).
That’s where granular targeting shows its true power.
