Your personalized guide to user-engagement

Why Hyper-Personalization Needs To Be Marketing’s COVID Response

Hyper-personalized communication is the key to reversing the decline in user engagement post the Coronavirus pandemic.

Given the global pandemic situation today, consumers are in the midst of a crisis, with several governments announcing a complete lockdown to restrict movement. Consumer brands are reeling from the impact of the pandemic that has caused a reduction in traffic, conversions, and a general souring of buying intent.

Such a turn of unprecedented events has caused consumer businesses to rethink their marketing and engagement strategy. Your regular marketing strategy is passe and tone-deaf. It is time to rewrite the guidebook to market a digital consumer brand.

As more and more users come online to transact, consumer brands are reacting to the stimulus by adopting measures that are a step ahead of traditional engagement.

And I am not talking about first-name personalization that we have all come to expect today. Brands are leveraging Hyper-Personalization in their marketing and communication strategy to create one-to-one experiences, even at a massive scale.

Today, as brands battle for survival in a scenario affected by COVID19, hyper-personalization has the potential to create the next breed of legendary brands built on customer loyalty and satisfaction.

Why? Because consumer behavior has experienced a tectonic shift. Today, brands can no longer expect to peddle discounts in a bid to grab market share. People are cognizant of the impact of the pandemic on their lives, and there is a general sentiment of apprehension in the market.

In such a time, consumer brands need to refocus their lens on one thing — empathetical engagement. Acknowledge the pandemic, and engage with users in a way that adds real value in these trying times.

While there are a plethora of brands still seeking ways to adopt the next steps of personalization, there are other early adopters that have now defined the new era of engagement to a whole new level.

For the case, consider your streaming experience on Netflix. Don’t you wonder how it recommends you the right shows and movies that perfectly fit your interest every time? I personally feel that it knows my mood and send suggestions at the most appropriate time for me to watch. Doesn’t it feel like our own entertainment assistant?

The predictive learning methodology backs the personalization wizardry of Netflix. It analyzes your behavioral attributes to send you clutter-breaking notifications. It consequently is successful in providing a unique experience to you and more than 169 million other users and making them stick to its platform.

It is the time when the need to have personalized recommendations and experiences has surpassed the dilemma of relinquishing personal information.

According to an Accenture survey, 47% of e-consumers strongly feel the need to have real-time personalized promotions delivered to their smartphones. They are willing to share their private data given the provision of more convenient services.

Robotic messaging is a concept long forgotten. Remember the last time you purchased something from Amazon. If Amazon kept flashing a sale on shoes when you were looking for a shirt, how likely would you have bought it?

Efficiency: Robotic Messaging < Personalization < Hyper-Personalization

Around 85% of email traffic was spam until 2014, as it involved dull and non-personalized advertisements. It was a prime example of robotic messaging.

Personalized engagement, on the other hand, involves the use of personal and transactional information of the consumer. You can say that you personalize your user interaction by merely adding their names in the subject lines of your mass email campaign. It can be a good practice, but only utilizing the names, title, purchase history, etc. cannot be the real trademark for immense marketing success.

Thus, for more interactions, more engagement, and more conversions, marketers are stepping ahead and adopting hyper-personalization. Hyper-personalization is more evolved and sophisticated, combining behavioral and real-time data collected from multiple channels and touch-points. You’ll be in a position to tailor services and advertising content for each user for a significant increase in relevance and conversions.

For example, consider you have an e-commerce retail platform. Last Sunday, a user added a blue shirt and a black pair of shoes to the cart. But he ended up purchasing just the shoes.

If you leverage a platform offering hyper-personalization in your campaigns, you will be able to utilize cart details, time spent on a product page, search query, day of activity, and other behavioral attributes. You can send an email or push-notification to the user, advertising an upcoming sale on blue shirts of different brands, the next Sunday.

Such a hyper-personalized campaign has the potential to be more relevant and converting with its usage of additional data points.

The strategy and data points to adopt hyper-personalization involve such critical factors

• The first step is to create a unique profile for each consumer based on the user attributes, like age, location, gender, name, device, os, membership status, etc.
• The real game of hyper-personalization starts with the collected data points of behavioral attributes. Information like search history, category filters, items reviewed/ rated, cart items, abandoned cart items, price filters, preferred messaging channels, etc. are vital attributes of behavioral data.
• Customer’s past purchase data involving the average amount spent, quantity purchased, purchase date & time, discount coupon selection, etc. paves the way for the most relevant buying journey of the user.
• The idea is to utilize the data points of behavioral attributes and past purchases for personally targeting each consumer with the right recommendations and offers at the right time.
• To provide a highly contextual messaging, it is equally essential to decide the time and the preferred channel of engagement. For executing, a unified view of the customer is a must.
• The predictive analysis used to foretell the right user behavior and future needs is a strong strategy to go for a high response rate.

4 points to prove how hyper-personalization is a definite game-changer for marketers:

• It enhances the conversion rate of any campaign. A study by Econsultancy states that Co-operative Travel saw a 95% increase in website visitors and a 217% increase in revenue generation after they opted for hyper-personalization for their website and push-campaigns.
• It drives customer loyalty and helps in retention. Per Bain & Company, a mere 5% increase in customer retention rate can increase the profit from 25% to 95%. Also, the average value of a lost customer globally is $243, as calculated by KISSmetrics.
• It enhances the utility of your brand messaging and campaigns. We are living in a world of evolved users overloaded with a variety of marketing and promotional content. Providing a hyper-personalized messaging with a predictive approach is the only option to make yourself heard among the noise.
• It eases and motivates better buying decisions for the consumer, thus increasing revenue per customer. Per a report of MyBuys, Companies that utilize personalized marketing are 5X more likely to see an increase in consumer spending. Also, a report by Marketo stated that 78% of consumers take advantage of an offer only if you personalize it to reflect their previous engagement with the brand.

Brands opting hyper-personalization are transforming ways of user engagement, and are undoubtedly standing strong in terms of customer retention.

Here is a list of my favorite hyper-personalized experiences at the time of this COVID-19 pandemic with the brands I’m attached to. I bet it’ll amaze you too.

Uber

Uber, the world’s largest on-demand ride-sharing company, has taken a tremendous step in transforming its messaging at this time of lockdown.

Since its business is almost at a halt in completely closed cities, Uber has found a way to provide an empathetic touch to the situation. Here is a push-notification I received recently.

They are using hyper-personalization on point to give a one-to-one touch to the user and to seek their kind contribution to help the drivers community. I made my contribution. I know you’d do too.

Swiggy

Swiggy, a food-ordering, and delivery platform created a new record of 7% Click-Through-Rate and 25% open rate in email marketing last year.

Today, in this phase of mandatory quarantining, It is leveraging its creative No-contact Delivery feature in its messaging delivered at my favorite channel.

I had ordered lunch at noon a day before and got this push-notification the next day. I kept on receiving it on all weekdays and honestly procrastinated cooking for the whole week.

OYO

OYO is India’s largest branded network of hotels offering standardized stay experiences at an unmatched price. It leverages multiple channels of engagement to reach its users.

Lately, I received this email from OYO.

My wizard membership was about to expire, and they provided a 2-month extension with such a positive and sympathetic note. The email was on-point in terms of sensitivity and hyper-personalization.

What next?

If you haven’t opted for hyper-personalization in your user engagement strategy yet, it is already high time. It is possible through a good marketing automation platform providing omnichannel engagement, and analytics keeping a unified customer view.

If you don’t know yet, check out WebEngage — A channel-agnostic marketing automation platform. You’ll get everything you need to begin.

Your Take-Away

Today, marketing is getting revolutionized with trends of hyper-personalized campaigns. Customers are getting hungry for higher levels of personalized recommendations and brand interactions. Especially during the pandemic, one-to-one and sympathetic messaging is the need of the hour to drive advocacy and present them a guardian’s face. Only brands adopting hyper-personalization shall thrive and have their customers successfully engaged amid the overflowing content on their screens.