Gone are the days of people finding personalization intrusive and creepy. Today’s consumers appreciate — and even expect — personalization. Of more than 2,000 consumers surveyed by Formation.ai, 79% agreed that the more personalization tactics a brand uses, the more loyal they are to that brand. Today’s technology allows marketers to take it even further with deep personalization, aka cross-channel marketing.
We all have our own individual preferences and patterns. Deep personalization allows for consumer experiences to acknowledge and benefit from that, ensuring they constantly improve over time as companies learn more about individuals. That happens through a combination of people’s complete history with a brand and any contextual clues from a specific moment.
For example, if I’m in the market for a new winter coat, a brand using deep personalization could predict this based on my website browsing behaviors. Real-time insights available can help brands drive deep personalization, informing marketing messages in the future. In addition to sending browse abandonment messages for winter coats — ideally the one I am predicted to purchase — that item can be featured in regular campaign emails, brought to the front of the mobile app and mobile messaging.
Adjusting to Deep Personalization
Consumers are increasingly aware of the data they provide to brands. While they don’t understand every process their data goes through, they do expect to exchange it for relevance. Keeping pace with consumer demands requires an investment in deep personalization.
Deep personalization represents a transformation. Brands need to break down silos between marketing, sales, customer service, merchandising, and other channels to create a single experience. It can happen in bits and pieces, but ultimately, it requires full dedication to data-driven, AI-driven marketing.
Deep personalization requires data and content, and the tools to operationalize both of them within and across channels. Brands need to invest in consolidated consumer profiles, make consumer data easy to access across marketing and sales channels, and upgrade to advanced personalization. This is already happening in many industries with the increase of in-house data warehouses, data lakes, data science teams, and more. Companies are also increasingly seeking solutions that connect to these owned data assets in near real-time so that partner technologies are as much a part of this internal ecosystem as possible.
Where Does Deep Personalization Work Best?
Think about your entire customer journey. Deep personalization is best-suited for all of it as it enhances any experience driven by data.
Acquisition touchpoints can be personalized using data from your retained customer base and pre-acquisition engagements with your brand. You can personalize first conversion engagements based on acquisition source, collaborative algorithms, and more. Retention and loyalty engagements can be personalized using the data you have collected from the lifetime of engagement with the individual consumer.
When deploying deep personalization, there are four big things to consider:
- Don’t let Big Data get in the way. There is so much relevant real-time data available. Brands can personalize based on device, location or channel, for example.
- Efficiency delights consumers. With deep personalization, a little bit goes a long way. These time-savers can be as simple as saving a password, populating a site with information from an email receipt or creating a cross-channel shopping cart.
- Evaluate kinks in the customer experience. Where can deep personalization help the most? It might not be the hero image on the homepage, but rather, personalized SMS messages around important actions.
- Test everything. A testing-centric culture is just as important as your data strategy. Hypothesis-driven thinking creates success.