There is no denying that personalization helps companies interact with a huge customer base in a relevant and timely manner whilst delivering a tangible benefit to the bottom line.
Yet the size of the prize is strongly correlated to how well you approach this task.
It’s one thing holding lots of valuable data about your customers, but it’s entirely another thing to use this data in a coherent way.
Avoid the rabbit hole – have a clear strategy
Gladly’s 2020 Customer Expectation Report found that 84 percent of consumers will spend more with a brand that offers personalized customer service.
That appears to make sense. But what exactly does personalized mean? And how do you do it well?
Let’s take the example where your company is about to launch 3 new products next month.
It would be ideal to know exactly which of your customers would buy which of the 3 new products, at which price point and through which channel. Knowing this would allow you to create a targeted marketing campaign. But, hold on a moment….
Outside of your new product launch, perhaps there is something even more fruitful to talk, instead, to a subset of your customers. Like an existing service or product.
Well, maybe. What if some of your customers are currently awaiting a response regarding a complaint they made – might it be the wrong time to sell them anything at all?
So, it’s not just relevant product placement that matters – timing is equally as important when it comes to personalization.
Although the above is a very high-level example, hopefully, you can already see how easy it is to end up in a rabbit hole.
Perhaps you’ve convinced yourself that you need to know everything about your customers in order to deliver the best personalized marketing and communication. But that’s not true either because it never ends up being cost-effective to use all of the information you own, at all times.
Instead, you might be better off understanding: What is going to deliver me the best return for the level of investment I am prepared to make?
Thus, creating an overall strategy and approach around how to maximize your return on investment is key.
You don’t need to know everything, nor should you try to
At Strata, we believe that successful personalization starts with understanding what is most important to your customers – well before you even start thinking about what to sell them next.
It means being able to see your own company through the eyes of your customers – both the good and the bad. Doing this will allow you to connect with your customers in a more human way, and ultimately get to a stage of offering hyper-personalized recommendations to drive sustained growth.
As mentioned, this doesn’t necessarily mean needing to know everything about your customers. It means needing to know what is most important to them.
Buyers are making purchasing decisions based on the context of their overall lives and you will not have full visibility of this. Even if you did, customers are becoming increasingly wary about the level of information you hold about them. So it’s not always the best objective to set out on a path to know as much about your customers as possible.
However, using a common-sense approach, there are some obvious data points you may want to collect, some of which may even help you avoid upsetting your customers.
For example, would one ever succeed in promoting a deal on a gourmet chicken to a die-hard vegan?
We have used this example on purpose to drive home the fact that common sense can really take you a long way in your thinking!
Once you’ve exhausted all the low-hanging fruit and you begin to approach hazier territory, Strata can help you establish a robust analytical approach to identifying which data points are providing a stronger, positive correlation to your KPIs.
Remember: The world never stands still!
We hope you’re on the same page as us that having a rounded approach to personalized marketing and communication is key.
Finally, don’t forget that the marketplace is ever-changing, so think of the path to personalized marketing and communication as an evolving journey rather than a one-off exercise. Approaching it with this mindset will allow you to set up a campaign and communications infrastructure in ways that allow for you to make easy tweaks to your approach on an ongoing basis, without having to rip everything up and start again!
About Strata Personalize Service
Strata Personalize Service (SPS) is a Data Science as a Service (DSaaS) Reinforcement learning algorithm that makes it easy for companies to add hyper-personalized recommendations to end customers who use their products. It reflects the vast experience that Strata Analytics and Amazon have in building personalization systems.
SPS combines Strata vast experience developing Advanced Machine Learning Models, the AWS Personalize Service and the Strata Real-Time Decision Solution to guarantee an integrated and complete solution. SPS is a Customer Centric Solution but it also incorporates a re-ranking of offers in order to guarantee Company´s economic priorities.
We hope you’ve enjoyed reading this short article by the team at Strata. We are passionate about Hyper-personalization and welcome your thoughts and comments below. To find out more about us and how we can help you, please visit Strata Personalize Service page or write us to personalize@strata-analytics.us
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