Why personalize when you can hyper-personalize? Part 2.

In Part 1 of this series, we covered why a mere personalization of using geographic and demographic data to segment customers and using first names on marketing communication is insufficient in today’s day and age and what is hyper-personalization.

In this article, we cover when enterprises need hyper-personalization and how to go about the same.

Well, as a principle and as a practice, it is the best method available right now to improve marketing relevancy at scale.

If your current or potential consumers resonate with your messages, and that drives engagement, then everything else that is good follows. Customer engagement, retention, and loyalty. And revenue growth.

Hyper-personalization targets audiences across channels and devices. Optimized for the time of day, week, or month. For events, festivals, holidays, back-to-school, back-to-college, etc.

Good campaigns flag non-responsive customers with follow-up communications. Continue engaging with those who did to go further in their path to purchase. The effort is scheduled and persistent.

Customers expect their brand experience to be pleasant and inclusive. Not intrusive. They want to be surprised by your prescience in anticipating needs. Much like Alfred does to Bruce Wayne. And pampering customers is feasible without freaking them out.

But is hyper-personalization relevant to all businesses and feasible for all, regardless of their current marketing / analytics maturity?

Well, we don’t make false promises. Let’s see how you determine there is an opportunity for hyper-personalization.

Nature of business

Do you have a large number of products or services that don’t fall under the impulsive purchase category? Sorry, CPG brands!

Are your products or services well known amongst your audience, i.e., are they not new to the market?

Do your customers frequently interact with you?

If your answer is affirmative to the above, hyper-personalization is something you should definitely consider.

Target segment

How modern are your customers? Or how much of your customer base consists of millennials and Gen Z? Because Gen X or boomer audiences generally freak out when you hyper-personalize, they worry that their personally identifiable data is compromised.

For millennials and Gen Z, the internet and mobile phones are like mother’s milk. Technology is second nature. They live on social media and have a wide network of peers, whose opinions they seek and trust. They thrive on personalized experiences.

Characteristics of your customer base

What are the empirical trends or behaviors of your entire customer base, perhaps seen as an index? If your customer base is mature, as is your product, structured, and tends to change gradually over time in largely predictable ways, hyper-personalize this audience.

But if the base is small, unstructured, and grows and de-grows in spurts, so that at any given point in time there are a sizable number of new customers, hyper-personalization will not yield attractive returns over the investment required.

Your current capabilities

If your marketing strategy is not geared for rapidly scaling up across multiple channels and devices, you are unlikely to get a 360° view of consumer behavior. You are unlikely to effectively hyper-personalize.

Enterprises find themselves on a thought-attitude continuum about analytics and its role in hyper-personalizing customer experiences.

The bottom three states recognize analytics and personalization as a significant business driver. If your marketing vision does not tend toward greater reliance on analytics and personalization, hyper-personalization will not work for you.

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What does it take to hyper-personalize?

Hyper-personalization is a journey, not a destination.

Achieving hyper-personalization requires you to analyze enormous amounts of data and programmatically unearth actionable relationships between distinct and diverse customer data points. Relationships that human agency will struggle to spot.

This kind of granularity in collating customer attributes is essential for any hyper-personalization strategy.

Particularly if you intend to offer real-time customized experiences on the fly, which is what you should desire.

There are three key capabilities that help you master hyper-personalization.

1. A robust real-time customer data platform with all data sources integrated, preferably in streaming mode or at least at a higher update frequency.
2. An omnichannel marketing automation platform tightly integrated with your real-time customer data platform and all your outbound and inbound channels with contact and response handshakes.
3. A team (yours or your partner’s) that is capable of conceptualizing, implementing, and optimizing micro-experiences at scale. The ability of the team to use Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to optimize experiences is an added advantage.

When you have these three at your disposal, be assured that your enterprise is poised for success with your hyper-personalization efforts.