Hyper-personalisation: one step closer to your customer?
Maximizing revenue, enhancing your customer experience, reducing acquisition costs, that’s where hyper-personalisation comes in.
As a marketer, you may already use standard marketing personalisation tactics to attract, engage and convert your web traffic into customers, and why not advocates. However, have you ever considered upscaling your marketing strategy and offering a tailor-made experience to your customer?
In this article, I’m going to explain to you exactly the difference between personalisation and hyper-personalisation and the benefits of a tailored customer experience.
From personalisation to hyper-personalisation
In standard personalisation, it is as simple as using the customer’s first name in an emailing campaign, or welcoming them when they identify themselves using your product or service. For paid ads, using personalisation can be represented by displaying ads that target a particular audience segment based on similar profiles, demographics, interests or other characteristics.
However, with modern marketing tools and technology, you can level up your personalisation strategy and propose engaging, relevant and accurate services to your customers.
“22% of customers are happy to share some data in return for a more personalised service or product”
Hyper-personalisation makes use of these new tools: it is powered by artificial intelligence (AI), behavioural and real-time data from multiple touchpoints and channels to propose the most pertinent content, messaging, product, service information and promotional offers to each customer. It is simply taking traditional personalised marketing a step further.
That enables companies such as Spotify or Amazon to create highly personalised marketing strategies that truly resonate with their customer’s needs and desires. Therefore, each of the products, services, advertising content or offers will fit each customer and provide them content with the highest level of relevance.
However, reaching that level of personalisation can’t be done without using data, AI, machine learning, predictive analytics and marketing automation to understand each of your customer’s behaviours and make all of your interactions more relevant and engaging to them.
Customers are more interested in brands that connect with them and resonate with their values. They are no longer interested in companies that are only aiming to sell their products or services.
How can you benefit from hyper-personalised marketing ?
A hyper-personalised customer experience can help businesses overcome some of their challenges such as making data-driven decisions, improving customer experience, innovating and optimising resources, and most importantly, driving results.
With hyper-personalisation, companies can :
- Maximise revenue: Customers tend to purchase more often with brands that provide personalised experiences.
“80% of customers are more likely to purchase from a company that offers personalised experiences”
To enhance your customer experience, you can start by reviewing your customer journey and removing any hurdles by making it simple and easy. With more relevant offerings and content, your customers will spend less time looking for information and receiving offers for products that are not of interest to them. By hyper-personalising your customer experience, your customers will find your offer more convenient and valuable, and may even recommend your products or services to their peers. It will have a positive impact on both your customer satisfaction and retention rate.
- Accurate targeting: Hyper-personalisation allows companies to become more dynamic and reactive to their customer’s behavioural changes when they happen. With standard personalization, companies were relying on their marketing strategy to identify common customer personas or segments.
However, people change due to internal or external factors. With a hyper-personalised strategy, you can personalise your communication based on real-time data on your customers and make any adjustments at the right time.
- Cost reduction and enhanced customer experience: you can also expect cost reductions on customer acquisition and retention by having:
1- dynamic landing pages and websites
2- tailored content, marketing automation
3- a recommendation algorithm that predicts your customer’s next interest
4- a seamless customer journey
5- customer support available 24/7
You can save money on your acquisition by only targeting the right people, and improve their retention by improving their experience throughout the customer journey.
- Deeper customer connection:
Hyper-personalisation enables you to connect with your customers and have meaningful conversations thanks to the data you have collected. When a customer uses your chatbot, you’ll have all the relevant information you need to communicate with them and provide the best support possible.
For instance, you’ll have access to the customer’s purchase history, browsing activity, previous questions, preferences and more. With all those pieces of information, your customer support team can focus the conversation on the customer’s actual needs and offer personalised customer service.
Case study : How Spotify leveraged data to enhance their customer experience ?
The Swedish music platform uses hyper-personalisation to recommend the best music choices for their customers.
Spotify’s hyper-personalisation focuses on a recommendation engine and advertising based on location tracking. The platform’s music suggestions change in real-time depending on the user’s behaviour and actions whilst interacting with the streaming platform.
Spotify examines an individual’s music selection, and cross-analyses their choices with those of other users sharing similar preferences and then designs highly personalised and unique playlists for each user.
The company also has a feature to provide the users with information on live concerts/events the users favourite artists are performing in, sending them information and the possibility to purchase tickets.
Additionally, every December, Spotify publishes Spotify Wrapped. It’s a feature that displays a story of a user’s listening experience over the past year. It shows the songs and artists the listener has played the most, what music they have discovered, and how many minutes they spent listening to music/podcasts.
By choosing the social media ‘story’ as a way to communicate their relationship with each one of their users, it makes it easier for them to share it on social media and share their preferences with their friends. Through this, Spotify has enhanced its users’ experience, increased their engagement, and gained huge exposure through customer word-of-mouth — more than 90 million people engaged with their wrapped campaign in 2020.
The more personalised the experience, the greater your revenue
As we have seen, personalisation is already being used widely by marketeers in a range of industries, but the tools are out there to take it a step further. Hyper-personalisation is here and the opportunities it presents are real — Spotify, among others, are already reaping the rewards of hyper-personalised customer experience, garnering a 21% increase in app downloads following their wrapped campaign.
This helps to demonstrate the personalisation maturity curve: the more effort you place into hyper-personalising your customer experience, the more revenue opportunities you have, potentially exponentially.
To really harness the most of this new age of marketing, data is your friend. Real-time analysis of your users activity and preferences allows you to target individuals based on their personal interests and even behavioural traits, to allow you to pinpoint exactly the type of messaging they will be receptive to — helping guide more users down the funnel, faster.
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About this article
This article has been written by a student on the Grenoble Ecole de Management’s Advanced Masters in Digital Strategy Management. As part of a content creation assignment, students are given the task of writing articles based on their digital interests and disseminate the articles online. Articles are marked but we make minimal changes to the content. Thanks for reading! James Barisic, Programme Director, MS DSM.
