What is personalization and why is it necessary
Analogue personalization was once known as a barista knowing your name. In today’s digital world, it is known as receiving an email on your birthday, wishing you a good one, and recommending products to treat yourself with.
So what is digital personalization?
It is a trend that consists of specific goals that aim to help with customer satisfaction, preferences, and needs. This ultimately leads to growth in customer loyalty.
Digital personalization consists of using new, innovative and personalized ways of marketing and targeting the audience that is catered to making the audience feel seen, acknowledged and understood by the brand.
Personalization facts:
· „63% of consumers are highly annoyed with generic advertising blasts“ –Single Grain
· „80% say they are more likely to do business with a company if it offers personalized experiences“ -Single Grain
· „90% claim they find personalization appealing“- Single Grain
How to do it successfully?
The best way to start the personalization process is with a survey or a quiz. There, customers can give information about themselves and their preferences. Therefore, it will be easier to supply them with information and/ or products they might find useful.
It’s important for the company to collect the answers to the majority of these question in order to have a successful personalization for their customers:
1. Who is the customer? (age, gender, name)
2. What is their intent? (what are they looking for, are they browsing or shopping)
3. What has the customer done in the past? (shopping pattern)
4. Where is the customer from? (geographic location)
5. What are the products the customer is looking at? (can we help with the decision making process by using personalization)
Although knowing the answers to all these questions is the key to a good personalization in digital marketing, problems arise when personalization sometimes invades customer’s privacy. There is a line that shouldn’t be crossed and companies need to be cautious, otherwise, personalization is going to lead them to, unwillingly, intimidate their customers.
So, how do you do it right? Personalized marketing should help people navigate within the sea of products and information. The key role is to provide people with products they will actually find useful in their day- to- day life. We need to be able to offer them what they need in this exact moment, based on their shopping patterns and recommend products that would go along with what the customer is already planning on buying.
The goal should be helping customers with customized content and therefore improving the relationship between the brand and the customer. Creating loyal and trusting relationships is what’s going to end up bringing the biggest return on investment. To achieve that, personalization must shorten the time a customer would spend finding and purchasing something on a website.
Also, whatever the customer buys, it needs to be useful to them, so the next time something is recommended to them, they would trust to buy it again.
Impact of personalization:
Example 1: Starbucks
Starbucks app is made to help people buy their favourite drinks and foods while taking into consideration all the many benefits of personalization. The app has a reward system that is built into it. Any time a customer makes a purchase from the app he/she receives points and is closer to receiving free drinks or food. This app and its personalization helped Starbucks make 6 million sales per month, and although there is some criticism over the app, Starbucks’s revenue skyrocketed to $2.56 billion.
Example 2: Netflix
The secret to Netflix’s success is listening to people. They removed one obstacle the public had while watching films or tv shows and then used some personalization and a miracle happened. By not having to endure painful minutes of watching the commercials they already did the half the work. People went crazy for it, and then they added the personal touch of recommending new TV shows and films just as soon as you’d finish an entire season of one. Netflix wanted to find a solution for having too much content which made people confused and lost. Another thing Netflix focused on is predicting the success of an original TV show or movie…
E.g. 2.1: House of cards
Netflix focused on people who were fans of Kevin Spacey and those who liked watching content similar to House of cards, they made sure only those people would get a recommendation to watch this show. Afterward, word of mouth did its thing and the shows became a huge hit with 6 seasons.
Hundreds of millions of hours of Netflix’s content is being consumed every single day.
Personalization truly is the future and it’s the only way to build a loyal, trustworthy and longlasting relationship between the brand and its customers. People are demanding more and more each day and implementing personalization can help fulfill their needs and demands.
A happy customer means a happy and growing business.
