Personalisation Pays Off For 4 APAC Brands
Nuanced, timely messages; relevant, curated offers; and unified customer experience across touch points—these are just some of the sophisticated outcomes diverse organisations in APAC are exploring with the use of personalisation.
This article is part of our September 2018 series about the state of advertising. Click here for more.
When the Australian Red Cross Blood Service says it needs new donors, it needs almost 100,000 of them each year to ensure it collects enough life-saving supplies. The not-for-profit organisation is hoping to acquire new donors more efficiently by using personalisation across its digital channels to ensure relevancy amongst potential donors and to avoid a regular, steep drop-off in commitment.
“A lot of people think that the idea of donating is fantastic … but only around 3% of people actually go on to do it,” said Jude Leon, head of integrated marketing communications at the Australian Red Cross Blood Service. “One of the big things we’re doing is using personalisation to try and drive urgency, so [we’re] trying to create personalised ads—at the moment just using simple geotargeting so we can traffic specific ads to specific places.”
Clever personalisation can motivate audiences to take a next step, and it’s a method that’s gaining traction. As part of the Adobe and Econsultancy “2018 Digital Trends” briefing—based on a global survey of 12,795 digital marketers across EMEA, North America, and Asia Pacific—36% of respondents nominated personalisation as the marketing technology they are most excited about over the next three years.
This excitement is matched by spending, as investment in personalisation engines is on the rise, according to global research house Gartner, which notes a 35% worldwide increase in revenue from 2017 to 2018.
To be sure, personalisation is not just for B2C companies either. According to “The State of B2B Ecommerce in ANZ, Southeast Asia and India” report from Econsultancy and Magento, an Adobe company, a third of respondents (33%) strongly agreed that they can “personalise the digital experience based on previous interactions with the business.”
Getting Real (Time)
Getting the right message out at the right time is imperative for any organization, but for auction site and marketplace eBay Australia and New Zealand, that needs to happen in real time and at scale.
“Prioritising personalisation is transforming the way we’re able to engage with our customers,” explained Jess Chan, the company’s audience automation manager. “That means focusing on attribution modeling, data visualisation, and connecting our marketing channels through one persistent user ID.”
Part of Chan’s role is to personalise the experience for buyers and sellers across all touch points, unifying disparate marketing channels. “At eBay, we are currently experimenting with customer data platform technology and how we can understand a customer’s ID … whether that’s a CRM ID, an email ID, a device ID … we are experimenting with communicating to one persistent ID,” she told CMO.com.
It comes down to understanding the different digital touch points in one unified manner, Chan added—no small feat for an organization that produces over 8 billion rows of data a day.
Analytics For Student Experience
Universities are also great candidates for large-scale personalisation efforts. Australia’s RMIT University, itself a large, distributed enterprise, is applying high-end, real-time analytics to the task of ensuring the best possible student experience. With 92,000 students across its Melbourne and Southeast Asia campuses, that’s a significant task.
The university has invested in live insights to connect the university’s different technology platforms, explained Jack Hylands, General Manager of Strategy and New Product at RMIT Online.
“We see the future of experience being an incredibly personalised one,” he told CMO.com. “Every student has unique needs, bringing different prior experiences, knowledge, and aspirations of where they want to go. We’re working to use data analytics and insights to make sure that we meet the needs of every student as an individual.”
That means thinking about how to delight students from the moment they first engage with RMIT, “whether that’s through a digital advertisement or whether that’s as an alumni coming back to RMIT to see what further learning we can support them with,” Hylands said.
Curating Conversions
For Korean lifestyle products rental service MYOMEE, the expansive range of services and purchase options available through its website has created a perplexing user experience for some customers, something the company says has slowed down conversions in the past.
“For such customers, we now provide a curation service to facilitate customer-managed relationships,” said Sang-Hwan Huh, leader of platform strategy team at MYOMEE’s parent company, LOTTE Rental. “The curation service provides more personalised product recommendations determined based on their gender, age, preferred product categories, and purchase histories.”
For MYOMEE, personalisation has been a winning strategy in bringing the company’s conversion rate in line with other e-commerce sites, not only through in-site navigation but in their remarketing efforts as well. Since implementing, MYOMEE has “increased the rate of conversion fivefold,” Huh told CMO.com.
“Remarketing shopping cart abandoners and those with incomplete order forms have been proven to be effective at many e-commerce sites, but the tactic worked particularly well for us in combination with benefit-driven messages and clear guidance to landing pages,” Huh explained. “If a personalised service is provided in a manner suited to the occasion where the customer would find the conveniences and benefits worthwhile, he or she will freely choose to take our desired action or make our desired conversion.”
