Hyper-Personalization: The Next Wave of Customer Engagement
Introduction
In the present era of evolved customers, creating generic customer segmentation buckets and mass marketing campaigns isn’t going to work for you. With a surge in customer touchpoints and an overload of information and communication targeted towards them, the element of confusion is obvious. In this scenario, the best way you can attract and hold your customer’s attention is through personalized communication and customized experience.
A recent study by Accenture revealed that 75% of customers are more likely to purchase from an organization which offers personalized services based on their individual preferences. As a result, several industries are shifting to a more personalized approach in providing services to their customers. A great example can be found in the field of nutrition where a trend of customizing diet plans based on a patient’s DNA is slowly becoming the norm.
What is Hyper-Personalization
“We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It’s our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better”
- Jeff Bezos, CEO, Amazon
With the emergence of big data, creating a hyper-personalized customer experience has become easy. Organizations have been able to identify exact customer needs and requirements with the help of behavioral data and interpret individual characteristics with the help of emerging technologies. This has created a paradigm shift from the erstwhile product-centric marketing to a more personalized customer-focused marketing.
Hyper-personalization is basically the concept of gathering real-time behavioral data of customers to tailor products, services and experiences according to their wants and needs. To achieve this, brands will need to have a thorough understanding of their products and customers as well as combine data and technology to create a customized strategy. For example, an ecommerce brand can analyze a customer’s previous interactions with their brand and create a multichannel setup for a seamless online and offline shopping experience.
The benefits of hyper-personalization are many. Firstly, it reduces the effort required by customers to get what they are looking for by removing any obstacles in the sales funnel which leads to an uncluttered and simplified shopping experience. Secondly, it eliminates the problem of “choice-overload” wherein a customer feels overwhelmed with a wide range of options. Considering around 39% of customers leave a website and buy from a competitor after being drowned with options, hyper-personalization helps solve this by providing them with only those options that they actually need. Lastly, with the attention span of an average person having declined to 8 seconds, it has become even more difficult to attract a customer’s attention. More so with the pile of information that’s already targeted to them. This calls for hyper-personalized information instead of a generic one to address their pain points and save their time.
Personalization Vs. Hyper-Personalization
Traditional personalization focuses on the personal and transactional information such as name, organization, purchase history etc. The most common example of this will be including the first name of a customer in the subject line of an email. This approach merely uses profiling to make certain assumptions about the customer based on their characteristics.
Hyper-personalization, on the other hand, is a more complex and evolved technique which takes into consideration behavioral and real-time data such as browsing behavior, in-application behavior and engagement data to interpret their intent. This results in a more contextualized communication and, ultimately, greater conversion. For example, removing unengaging sections of the website or sending push notifications at the time when the customer is most active will fall under hyper-personalized communication.
The Importance of Context in Hyper-Personalization
What gives meaning to a hyper-personalized consumer experience is context. In fact, they are incomplete without each other. For example, a hyper-personalized consumer experience can analyze a contextual data such as the device used like a desktop or mobile. However, what’ll give this data more context are factors such as the location from which the device is accessed, the time of the day when the user is most active or the industry in which the user works etc. There can still be more real-time factors such as price points, previous interactions with the brand etc.
The Hyper-Personalization Framework For Driving Customer Engagement
The decision to shifting to a hyper-personalized approach may be easy but the implementation can seem complicated. In fact, as of 2017, only 6% organizations have achieved complete implementation till date. For most companies, technical hurdles seemed to be the greatest challenge in the implementation process.
In order to build an effective hyper-personalization framework, it’s important to ditch the conventional approach of basing strategy on just data and adopting an analytics-driven approach for measurement of the data.
Here are the steps to a hyper-personalized framework:
- Data Collection — The first and most crucial step towards a hyper-personalized framework is collecting data. Without data, it’ll be difficult to understand who your customers are. As per a report by IBM, around 80% customers feel that brands fail to understand them as individuals. If your business caters to a wide variety of users, then it can be difficult to identify the needs for each group of users. This is where collecting accurate and relevant data comes in. An automated customer engagement platform, armed with actionable analytics, can help you collect the required data for your business.
- Customer Segmentation — The data collected will help you to understand how customers are interacting with your brand. This will help you carve out hyper-personalized messages and experiences for them. But scaling the hyper-personalization process is incomplete without segmentation. You can segment your customers into various subsets based on factors such as average spend, location, demographic, satisfaction, brand interaction history etc. Only when you combine data and segmentation can you get engaged and loyal customers.
- Targeted Journeys — Once you’ve identified and segmented your customers, you can start with hyper-personalized communication. Choosing the right channel and the right time is the key to success. The more targeted and relevant your communication is, the more chances of conversion you’ll have.
- Measurement and Analysis — Just running a targeted campaign isn’t enough though. It’s important to measure the success of the campaign too. Looking at vanity metrics won’t help in the long run, but focusing on the metrics that’ll affect your bottom line will. Once you’ve figured out the specifics of which campaign is directly related to your revenue, you’ll be able to replicate it for sustained results.
How Brands Are Adopting The Hyper-Personalization Approach
In the hyper-personalization landscape, brands need to modify their marketing tactics to meet the customer’s needs. To collect, measure, analyze, and eventually action the data, you’d inevitably need a customer engagement platform. This is where SmartKarrot comes in. SmartKarrot offers Engagement Optimization Features to meet all your engagement and incentivization requirements. The best part is that the vast array of services it offers will help you hyper-personalize your marketing efforts, without writing a single piece of code! With a simple SDK/API integration, you can create, control, modify and monitor engagement journeys without having to develop them from the scratch.
Some of the features of the SmartKarrot platform are:
- SmartSegmentation — To create preferred audience buckets based on demographic and behavioral data.
- SmartNotifications — To send the right message through the right channel.
- SmartSurvey — To get customer feedback about your product or service.
- SmartGeofencing — To connect with an audience right where they are.
- SmartEngagementScore — To understand how engaging your app is.
- SmartReferral — To help grow your app via word-of-mouth marketing.
Get the SmartKarrot advantage for your application today!
