Understanding the Person Behind Personalization

Think back to the last time you bought a TV. As you stared at the wall lined with bright screens, big price tags, specs and features - what was your thought process that got you to finally swipe your card?

Source: QZ

Did you come into the moment researched and ready to compare a few models? Or was this one of those “classic” Target trips where you came for shampoo and left with a cart full of home goods?

Source: RedTri

If you’re like my co-founder Will and I, you may have had a fairly quick set of thoughts about how the TV looked, the quality of the picture and the price tag.

“Yeah, that looks about right”- purchase made.

But what about those of you who did your homework beforehand? How long did you look at different specs and models before finally coming into the store to see it in person? Would you be shocked to hear we talked to people who researched TVs for over two months?

With this in mind, how might you change the experience your brand is delivering?

Until now, most marketers have focused on understanding their customer base from a descriptive level (e.g. personas) and optimizing experiences based on past behavior (e.g. behavioral optimizations, A/B tests, opt-in nurture campaigns).

But are marketers really getting closer to understanding the people interacting with their brands every day?

Customers may look the same. They may even behave similarly, but every single one of those consumers is unique. We believe you should treat them like it.

We started Sorter AI 100 days ago with an audacious mission: to enable brand experiences that are crafted to how the individual wants to receive them.

By doing this, we can create brand experiences that truly resonate with people. Yes, there can be immediate upticks in conversion, but more importantly, we’ll help foster deeper relational ties to the brands who truly believe customers should be communicated with on their own terms.

How do you do that? It starts with personality-based segmentations.

Personality, as the dictionary defines it, is the combination of characteristics or qualities that form an individual's distinctive character. These characteristics are commonly measured across five characteristics often referred to as the Big Five or OCEAN. These traits: openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism can have big impacts on the effectiveness of marketing campaigns.

When researchers at Columbia University put personality driven marketing to the test, they were able to see some remarkable results. Tailoring advertisements to peoples’ extroversion and openness traits, they were able to drive a:

• 40% increase in click through rates
• 50% increase in purchase behavior

While we view these results as promising signs for what's to come, driving increased conversions isn't how we will measure the totality of our success with clients.

If we are truly treating people as individuals to improve the overall experience with the brand, we have to look at the entire life cycle of the customer. How can we:

• Reduce churn?
• Increase repeat purchases?
• Increase the number of people advocating for your brand because of their experience?

We have lofty goals to reach, and in order to get there we have to start by getting personalities segmented by communication preference patterns. In the first version of our product, Sorter AI takes a combination of first and third party data points to model your customers against well known personality indicators. These indicators can tell us how someone thinks through a decision.   

You’ve got a choice to make on a new software for your company. Where does your brain go first?

·        How is this going to get done?

·        How does this fit into the big picture?

·        Who else is affected by the choice?

·        What data supports this choice?

None of the responses are wrong, but they give indication to how you're wired. By focusing on the positive attributes of peoples’ neuropsychology, we can begin to truly be intelligent about our marketing. We are currently supporting four different segmentations for marketers to use:

Based on these segmentations, we can provide marketers with an easy to use creative brief that gives customized instructions on how to reach Movers, Motivators, Collaborators, and Thinkers on their terms. These suggestions are focused on our core actions of driving Movers, exciting Motivators, supporting Collaborators, and teaching Thinkers within the following areas :

• Copy
• Creative
• Calls to Action (CTAs)
• Cadence

Marketing is broad. To focus our launch, we're focused on email and Facebook ads.

Our initial focus is to make adjustments to email marketing and Facebook advertisements, but as we progress you will begin seeing much deeper platform integrations and expansions into all digital experiences.

We have set our “North Star” (the metric that guides our decisions) as the total number of experiences we can influence. The more experiences we can adjust, measure, and process the better our solutions and recommendations can become.

In order to drive that North Star metric, we understand that we have to:

1. Lead the charge to integrate the “long tail” of marketing technology.  

Source: Chiefmartec

Yes, you have your billion-dollar platforms, but if we want to truly get smart about interactions, we are going to have to be able to easily measure all experiences across all platforms. This requires us to be agnostic to all platforms understanding that not everyone is going to send and receive email from the same email service provider.

2. Make it stupid easy

Marketers don’t want X times the amount of work to do. They want a tool that is going to make it easy for them to act on these insights. This is embedded into our integration philosophy.

If we want to measure more interactions, we have to make it easier for marketers to use the technologies they're currently working with. There’s more to come on this as our model matures, but if we are focused on making marketers more effective and more efficient our road-map must reflect the tools needed to achieve this.

3. Prioritize Security and Transparency

We are building this system from the start to be more than privacy and security “compliant”. This means GDPR compliance is just a stepping stone as we look to push the boundaries of what can be accomplished while respecting our end users.

We promise to be radically transparent and always willing to let the consumer tailor how we use their data to personalize experiences. We view this as a requirement if we want a seat at the table in the 21st century, and we believe that with the right safeguards in place consumers will be open to a better experience.

Our goal is to help the internet experience to become more beautiful and more natural, and we see the end user and consumer as a natural collaborative ally as we work to create that.

What is going to take to get through the next 100 days?

We are currently entering into what we are calling our pilot-phase. My co-founder Will and I are hands on with our clients tailoring unique experiences (we’ll have more on this in a later blog) but our goal is to generate great case studies before the end of the year.

We are cultivating relationships with top agencies to help us scale. Digitally native agencies that understand the importance personalization can bring will be critical for us to achieve optimal effectiveness implementing our software into real world business cases.

We have much more to come, but we both look forward to keeping you up to date with the latest. We’re always interested in opening up conversations with exciting agencies and brands interested in piloting, so don’t be shy in reaching out.

Otherwise, be on the lookout as we start releasing our pilot results and check out our new website at sorter.com.