How To Achieve The New Standard Of Personalization

Personalization is more than product recommendations or addressing someone by his first name. Messages that rely on one data point about the customer lack relevance, which consumers demand.

What is personalization? If I were to believe souvenir gift shops, then I may believe a keychain or refrigerator magnet with my name on it is personalized. But isn’t that trinket “personalized” to every other Jim out there, meaning it’s not really personalized to me specifically? It’s targeting a segment—a group of people with the same first name.

In the case of marketing, “personalizing” messages just to address someone by his first name is also not going to cut it. These types of messages that rely on one data point about the customer lack relevance, which consumers demand. In fact, 71% prefer when ads are tailored to their interests and shopping habits.

Marketers are realizing this and are starting to incorporate more data points into their strategies to add personalized elements, such as recommending another product based on a customer’s last purchase or retargeting someone with a discount on the item he put in his online shopping cart but ultimately did not buy.

These are steps in the right direction toward one-to-one personalization, but personalization is more than product recommendations. What if you haven’t seen that shopper in two months? Then what do you communicate? What if your company’s customer journey means a renewal touch point only once a year? How do you keep them engaged over 12 months in a relevant, individual way?

To fully achieve the new standard of personalization means that marketers need to deliver messages with contextual relevance that adds value for the customer. Treating consumers as individuals means that personalized communications are not only proactive but purposeful—using the immense amount of data in a way that engages and educates the customer, telling a more effective story to create an emotional connection.

Ditch The One-To-Segment Approach

In the age of the customer, marketers know that sending the same message to every consumer falls flat. To elevate this effort, focus on reaching individuals with information they need, where and when they need it.

For example, back-to-school promotions typically target the mom demographic, but don’t stop at this one-to-segment approach. What else do you know about that mom? Does she shop during the morning while running her errands and is more responsive to an in-store door buster? Or is she a working mom, making purchases on the mobile app during her lunch hour or on her laptop at night?

Leveraging everything you know about your customer allows for a more individual communication. Even if the personalization is subtle, the result is just a great customer experience.

Offer Value Beyond The Sale

Cross-sell, upsell, next sell. We often see personalization efforts focused on the transaction, rather than building the customer relationship. It’s easy to take a “next-best offer” approach to suggest a customer buy this complementary service or product after the first purchase. For instance, a sports fan purchases the NFL package with a new cable provider and after setup, the cable company could try to drive a second sale by next pushing a premium movie package. This overt sales tactic, though, often is a turnoff for consumers.

Instead, a “next-best action” approach provides more value to a customer and is focused on building and nurturing the customer relationship, not on a single conversion event. Providing value to the customer through education establishes brand loyalty rather than pushing a sale.

The cable company could share information about features of the package or how to download the mobile app to watch sports programs on the go and never miss a play. This is more helpful information for the customer and positions the brand as a resource. While it may not drive an immediate sale, the brand loyalty it creates increases the overall lifetime value of the customer.

Use Multiple Data Points

Personalizing the entire customer journey based on one single data point, such as the fact that an individual bought a particular coffee maker, is ineffective.

Assuming you know the customer just because you know one data point about her is wrong and can easily create a negative experience for a customer if you use that single data point about her coffee maker purchase to lump her into the same group as all the other people you know who have bought that same coffee maker.

This is segmentation—not true personalization—since you are using just one data point to guess what to “personalize” and offer next based on what the rest of the group has done prior. Instead, combine purchase data with multiple layers of data—such as online behavior, historical interactions, the channel and medium where she interacts, and the customer’s touch point in her journey with your brand—to create a more solid understanding of the individual and what she wants.

The bar keeps rising for marketers looking to meet consumers’ expectations. And as organizations get better at organizing and structuring their data, the opportunities to activate it and make it actionable are limitless.

Personalization is now table stakes for every interaction between a brand and a customer, but the challenge of doing it right, with a holistic purpose and value that drives the customer relationship at scale remains. However, the great experience it offers customers—and the resulting ROI and business value—make the endeavor well worth the effort.