Personalized experiences, recommendations, and rankings based on our preferences and past engagements are table stakes for any online interaction. Personalization drives our world! Every day, we wake up to a carefully curated news and social media feed, a smart speaker greets us with our daily schedule and local weather, we get breakfast suggestions on our favorite food app, and we select items ‘recommended to us’ while shopping online.
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While personalization has been around for a long time we’ve seen a significant transformation in the drivers of personalization and the technologies that enable it. The pandemic has made personalization more prominent. We are spending more time indoors and online. Typically, consumer behavior takes years to change, but the pandemic has changed it in a matter of months. Just in the last year, consumers have wholeheartedly embraced online channels for every aspect of their lives. Curated, individualized, and informed experiences have become more important than ever before. Think of the brands that stood out in the in the last year – Peloton, Grubhub, Disney+, and Amazon. Those that provided transformational experiences have seen more success and higher customer loyalty compared to their counterparts. According to a McKinsey study, organizations that have implemented personalized recommendations and triggered communications have realized a 5 to 10 percent increase in revenue and a 10 to 30 percent increase in the efficiency of their marketing spends. Good news is that there are 4 key rules leaders can follow to show their customer obsession through personalization.
Rule 1: Level up to the high standards of personalization
Whether it is selecting a garden hose, a cell phone plan, a vacation destination, or the next movie to watch, consumers expect brands to serve them their options on a curated platter. When it comes to online experiences, consumers don’t compare brands against others in the same category. Instead, brands are compared against the best, most personalized experience consumers have ever had. Regardless of what type of business you are in, you now compete with customer experience pioneers such as Amazon, Apple, and Nike. Whether you are in retail, travel, insurance or media and entertainment, you need to offer online experiences that meet high standards that your consumers are trained to expect.
Case in point: Intuit, a business and financial software company that develops and sells financial, accounting and tax preparation software, uses AWS machine learning to offer personalized recommendation engine for Intuit’s Mint budget tracker and planner app. Using customer profile and behavioral data, and the power of machine learning, the recommendation service helps deliver the right financial offer to the right customer at the right time, based on their spending habits, lifestyle, and goals.
Rule 2: Analyze omnichannel customer journeys
The lines between online and offline or in-person commerce are getting blurred. Consumers expect the same level of experience and guidance whether they are engaging with a brand in-store or online. On top of that, the scope of online engagement is getting broader day by day. Consumers can now interact with a brand from web, mobile, social media, and even through a smart speaker. ‘The store of the future’ as PwC calls it, will be omnichannel and experience-rich. Organizations need to create a seamless, personalized experience across multiple consumer channels and touch points and, think about customer engagements in terms of journeys instead of a single point in time. Personalized outreach before the visit, during the interaction, and after will only deepen the engagement and increase loyalty. With the right technology, you can personalize everything from re-marketing ads and messaging to how your website looks to repeat visitors.
Case in point: MECCA, an Australian beauty retailer, has successfully translated its trademark in-store beauty consulting services to its digital outlets to permeate its email marketing communications with individually tailored recommendations. This personalized approach has led to increase in email click-through rates by 65 percent, and increase in sales of recommended products.
Rule 3: Think of individuals, not segments
One size fits all doesn’t work when it comes to crafting customer experiences. The days of persona-based and segment-based ‘boilerplate’ online experiences are gone; what we need is truly individualistic, one-to-one experiences. The Media and Entertainment industry is one of the first ones to transition from one-to-many distribution to a direct, one-to-one relationship with their viewers. However, many organizations still confuse ‘personalized experiences’ with addressing customers by their first name. While that is an important first step, one-to-one experiences are far richer than that. Truly individual experiences are contextual, data-driven, and grounded in research.
Case in point: Domino's, one of the largest pizza companies in the world has a vision is to be the leader in deliveries in every neighborhood. Domino’s uses AWS machine learning to achieve personalization at scale across their entire customer base, apply context about individual customers and their circumstances, and deliver customized communications such as special deals and offers through digital channels.
Rule 4: Use data to your advantage
Data, when used effectively and appropriately, makes every decision more informed. Most organizations maintain a wealth of customer data that could be used to support a personalization solution. This includes CRM, promotional, email, and third-party data that can help to paint a 360-degree view of an individual customer. But unfortunately, most of this data is silo’d and disjoined. To offer transformational personalized experiences, organizations need to see all data points related to different customer journeys in a single pane, store data in open formats, break down data silos, and run analytics or machine learning to use the data to get actionable insights. To deliver the right experience to the right customer at the right time, organizations must go beyond basic customer information—capturing and incorporating behavioral data in real time and at scale.
Case in point: Zappos.com is measurably improving the e-commerce customer experience using AWS analytics and machine learning solutions to personalize sizing and search results for individual users while preserving a highly fluid and responsive user experience.
The new wave of personalization is already here. Advanced technologies such as geolocation marketing, AI and machine learning driven algorithms, and predictive insights are giving organizations more controls to offer curated experiences. Personalization is how you can go beyond advertising and connect to consumers on an individual level. If you haven’t already, it’s time to focus on hyper personalization and embrace it as a business imperative, and not an afterthought.
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