Personalization

It’s a well-known fact among marketers that every customer is an individual - a different person with different needs, desires and preferences. Whether it’s the reason they’re buying a product or the manner in which they prefer to be contacted – no two people are the same. As marketers, to better communicate with customers we need to speak to each person as an individual - make it relevant to their situation and who they are.

Everything boils down to delivering value to customers. The key to this is applying an outside-in view, thinking about and identifying what customers need and want in the various situations they find themselves in. In this era of technological innovations, the Internet, and new media, personalization is possible on a broader scale and can be done more quickly and effectively than ever before.

Traditionally, personalization had been associated with email marketing and CRM (customer relationship management), where marketers messaged to customers what they thought customer’s wanted. However, now strategies are changing as consumers tell us what they want — and how, where and when they want it. This applies to every form of marketing (search, social, content, email, display, digital) across the entire martech stack. Personalization goes beyond brand awareness, and organizations should think deeply about how they approach persona marketing. Segmentation is a good start, but it’s not enough. To drive personalization, you first need to build a strategy.

The growth of channels for customer communication, sources of user data, and need for near real-time updates makes achieving personalization a difficult technology challenge. To execute personalization effectively, brands must create a single view of the customer that spans channels, employ flexible and dynamic segmentation, and make consistent customer data accessible in all of their marketing tools.

Personalization will be driven by both explicit and implicit behaviour. Out of the box, you have the ability to build a unique customer journey through both rules and behaviour based personalization. Keep in mind that you will want to properly plan and document the personalization strategy, from a high-level strategic standpoint to a detailed tracking of content, as it relates to personalization. It is best to start simple. What may have already been a long process to get content created for a single page will grow exponentially as you build an ever-evolving set of unique, rule-driven, content-filled components.

Building rules-based personalization requires some sort of driver to build the rule. For this, you will want to pull from the high-level strategic elements mentioned earlier. A quick win for personalization is using a goal, combination of goals, or a campaign to define what content is delivered to the user in a component. With proper setup, these components, or sections of your web page, will be individual elements that can be individually personalized. This allows for deeper personalization control of each page.

Treating each customer as an individual is key. Based on the information we know about them and the understanding we have about their behaviour and characteristics, we need implement intelligent segmentation in order to be able to deliver personalised experiences throughout the customer experience. These segments need to be as refined as possible as we work towards creating individual experiences for individual customers.

This individual tailoring is what we call personalisation and it’s a major topic in retail and the wider marketing world. In essence, personalisation is a broad term for altering the customer experience to make it more personal and relevant to each individual.

Traditionally, personalization had been associated with email marketing and CRM (customer relationship management), where marketers messaged to customers what they thought customer’s wanted. However, now strategies are changing as consumers tell us what they want — and how, where and when they want it. This applies to every form of marketing (search, social, content, email, display, digital) across the entire mar-com. Personalization goes beyond brand awareness, and organizations should think deeply about how they approach persona marketing. Segmentation is a good start, but it’s not enough. To drive personalization, you first need to build a strategy.

The growth of channels for customer communication, sources of user data, and need for near real-time updates makes achieving personalization a difficult technology challenge. To execute personalization effectively, brands must create a single view of the customer that spans channels, employ flexible and dynamic segmentation, and make consistent customer data accessible in all of their marketing tools. 

Personalization will be driven by both explicit and implicit behaviour. Out of the box, you have the ability to build a unique customer journey through both rules and behaviour based personalization. Keep in mind that you will want to properly plan and document the personalization strategy, from a high-level strategic standpoint to a detailed tracking of content, as it relates to personalization. It is best to start simple. What may have already been a long process to get content created for a single page will grow exponentially as you build an ever-evolving set of unique, rule-driven, content-filled components.

Building rules-based personalization requires some sort of driver to build the rule. For this, you will want to pull from the high-level strategic elements mentioned earlier. A quick win for personalization is using a goal, combination of goals, or a campaign to define what content is delivered to the user in a component. With proper setup, these components, or sections of your web page, will be individual elements that can be individually personalized. This allows for deeper personalization control of each page.

Treating each customer as an individual is key. Based on the information we know about them and the understanding we have about their behavior and characteristics, we need implement intelligent segmentation in order to be able to deliver personalized experiences throughout the customer experience. These segments need to be as refined as possible as we work towards creating individual experiences for individual customers.

This individual tailoring is what we call personalisation and it’s a major topic in retail and the wider marketing world. In essence, personalisation is a broad term for altering the customer experience to make it more personal and relevant to each individual.

Mastering customer experience provides the competitive edge for today’s organizations. As more companies lead the way in personalization, this will continue to raise the bar for consumers’ expectations. And personalization goes beyond knowing who your customers are – they want to see the value in the experiences your company provides, based upon your knowledge of them.