How Hyper-Personalized Marketing Can Deliver Better Customer Experiences at Scale
Decades ago, local grocery store owners had to remember the names of their regular customers, the preferences and lifestyles of their most loyal customers, leveraging all that information to provide a more welcoming and memorable service.
Today, technology empowers businesses to seamlessly gather and capture customer data like names, birth dates, and purchase history which helps them to deliver personalized customer experiences at scale. In fact, it is now common for online retailers to send messages by addressing users by their first names and recommending products based on their historical buying behavior, gender, and precise geolocation data.
Personalization in mobile app marketing has been around for years now. Marketers like you have tasted the fruits of personalization and know the true potential that it holds for today’s mobile-first businesses. Users now expect personalization when receiving emails, push notifications or any sort of communication.
According to McKinsey, personalization can deliver 5X — 8X the ROI on total marketing spends and can boost sales by 10% or more.
But personalization is evolving. Unlike everything else in marketing, there are constant efforts put towards enhancing and optimizing personalization. Over the last couple of years, the next wave of personalization has emerged in the form of “hyper-personalization”.
This facet of your marketing strategy can help you elevate conversions and build sustainable long-term customer relationships.
What is Hyper-personalization?
Hyper-personalization is the process of engaging with individual users with the help of advanced insights from behavioral and real-time data. In simple terms, it takes personalization techniques and strategies a step further.
For instance, assume you visit an e-commerce website to browse through footwear of your choice. The platform soon begins recommending similar kinds of shoes or related products based on your browsing and search history.
Imagine you’re scouring an e-commerce app for a pair of running shoes and end up abandoning the search without purchasing. Soon after you exit the app you receive a push notification addressed to you with the details of the product and a suitable discount.
This is nothing but “Hyper-personalised Marketing”. Every business today is aware of the power of personalization and how your users tend to pay attention to your communication if you address them personally by their first name, birthday, or by gender. Well, that’s where personalization limits itself. To connect and engage with customers on deeper levels, you need to craft and deliver hyper-personalized marketing campaigns.
The goal of hyper-personalized marketing is to maximize the opportunities to customize the content and communication that rightly fits your customer needs.
How is Hyper-Personalization Different from Personalisation?
Hyper-personalisation is being more involved in customers’ behavior, more complex, and far more effective than personalization. There’s one significant difference between hyper-personalization and personalization. Personalization is restricted to simpler aspects such as addressing users with their first name in the title of the push notification or in the subject line of an email.
While hyper-personalization leverages user-specific data to go one step further to send highly contextualized communication to boost the chances of conversion. Based on your users’ interactions to such campaigns, you can identify subtle details about your customers that traditional personalization and customer profiling might fail to capture.
This, in turn, helps you deliver highly targeted and personalized products/services, discounts, offers, and contextual and relevant content. All of this is delivered to the right user at the right time with the right content on the right channel.
Why does Hyper-Personalized Marketing Matter?
One size never has and never will fit all!
Be it exclusive discounts and product recommendations via push notifications at the right time when needed, users expect apps to learn and act on their needs and preferences. Contrary to this, there are users who don’t want businesses to study their behavior and consider personalized communication a product of privacy invasion.
You might rely on goal-oriented data such as email subscriptions, sales conversions, past purchases, etc. to engage with your customers across channels. But, the data that you really need to focus on is behavioral data such as:
- The geographic location of your customers
- The time (What time of day is the customer visiting the app?)
- Previous search history (Which product or product pages were viewed or most purchased?)
- Response to previous messages (Ex: Which day has the highest push notification/email open rate?)
For instance, a customer on Wednesday visits your app during the lunch hour and browses through women’s apparel category, looking for Denim Jeans on sale. She spends about 15 minutes on the app and then exits your app without adding any product to the cart or wishlist or without making any purchase.
You, as a marketer, need to analyze the following data points to hyper-personalize your follow-up marketing campaigns:
- Product Category: She’s looking for Denim Jeans
- Time Spent on Product Browsing: She has shown high purchase intent since she spent about 15 minutes browsing this product category
- Product Search Behavior: She uses multiple filters for the brands and size that she is interested in
- Real-time Response to Product Price: She tried to buy them at a discounted price
- Historical Response to Marketing Communication: She has engaged with similar push notifications (i.e. “shoes on sale”) in the past
What’s next?
Based on this data and the analysis made, you can create a hyper-personalized push notification campaign that would send her a message during her lunch hour for “Denim Jeans on Sale this Friday”.
You can also add specific brand names to the message since she used filters for specific brands. Remember, you have less than 8 seconds to grab the attention of your customers. Focus on making your content crisp, super relevant, and highly contextual.
Hyper-Personalization: The Surest Path to Long-Term Customer Satisfaction
Customers are evolving with the changing technology and so are their preferences. From simple salutations to their birthdays, they expect brands to deliver personalized messages. It’s a no brainer that hyper-personalization is the need of the hour. This new wave is driven by both business needs and consumer demands. It helps you break through the noise, makes your customers feel more valued while enhancing the chances of cross-channel conversions.
The better you understand your customers and their diverse behaviors, the more you can hyper-personalize your marketing communication. And, the more hyper-personalized your marketing campaigns, the more consistently you can deliver differentiated customer experiences at scale.
And yeah this blog was originally published on Smartech Blog.
At Smartech, we are focused on helping digital businesses create hyper-personalized marketing strategies in order to help them retain their customers for life.