The concept of personalization in marketing has undergone a paradigm shift in recent years. From merely addressing customers by their names and wishing them on their birthdays to powering ML/AI-driven conversations and recommendations today - personalization is every brand’s ground reality, need of the hour, and fundamental challenge.

“How Important is Personalization to My Customers?”

Your customers continue to grow smarter, more informed, and demanding. And, basic levels of personalization just don’t cut it anymore.

In fact, according to an Infosys report, 31% of surveyed customers wished that their online shopping experience was more personalized than it currently is.

Your digital customers require greater context. Greater relevance. And, not just with regards to your marketing communication. While advanced segmentation-driven marketing campaigns are pivotal to customer engagement and retention, you need to work that much harder to unlock their wallets.

Your customers now expect an end-to-end personalized customer experience, right from the first time that they land on your website or launch your mobile app. This is evidenced by a Deloitte study where 36%
of surveyed customers expressed an interest in purchasing personalized products or services.

“How Can I Power Personalization?”

You need to integrate your personalization strategy into your multi-channel marketing automation machinery to deliver truly hyper-personalized customer experiences at scale - tailor-making experiences at an individual customer-level across various digital touchpoints such as websites, mobile apps, email, and social media.

And, all this needs to be driven in real-time by harnessing your customers’ demographic, geographic, and past behavioral data along with their intent to search, click, or purchase!

Delivering the right message to the right customer through the right channel, at just the right time is can no longer be a scatter-gun approach.

“How Can This Elevate My Marketing Strategy?”

Whether you are an e-commerce, food delivery, travel, or BFSI website or mobile app; a powerful personalization platform can help you boost
conversions by 8-13%. Along the way, it gives you the chance to drive
greater customer engagement, repeat purchase behaviour, loyalty, and retention.

By adopting a truly individualized, customer-centric approach, you can achieve the following:

1. Personalize the website navigational journey or app user onboarding flow:

One size doesn’t fit all. Never has and never will. So, why show the same website to all your first-time visitors and repeat customers?

Leverage your customer’s browsing behavior and purchase history to customize how you want them to move across your website. The more individualized your navigational journey, greater the probability
of your customers getting to exactly what they want, faster!

You can also experiment with dynamic website elements such as graphics, banner images, and CTAs to optimize the persona-based viewing and navigation experience.

Use Cases:

- E-Commerce:
Create persona-based website home page viewing and navigation experiences based on gender, geolocation, or type of customer (first-time visitor or repeat customer)

- Travel: Showcase flight deals or travel packages based on the current weather or most commonly booked travel destinations

2. Personalize the product search experience:

Once you’ve grabbed the attention of your customers through personalization on the home page or specific landing pages across your website, you could also look at significantly improving their search or browsing experience.

Now instantly complete the search entry in progress or provide relevant product recommendations when your customers are completing a search query. This would be driven by past search terms recorded and intent to purchase.

Use Cases:

- E-Commerce: Instantly populate recommended products when your customer is searching for a particular product category or specific item, along with similar search results

- Banking: Provide live recommendations or redirections towards the FAQ section when customers’ make product or process-related queries

3. Offer predictive personalized recommendations:

Allow the power of AI to do all the heavy-lifting by analyzing large sets of historical data to generate highly personalized and contextual product or content recommendations.

Now accurately predict the probability of each customer browsing, adding to cart, or purchasing a particular item or related products. You can actually break down the propensity to search for, click on, add to wishlist or shopping cart, or purchase from various product categories and specific products.

This can actually help you generate 20% better purchase and behavioral
predictions.

Based on these insights, your personalized recommendations can be displayed dynamically on your website or mobile app or be served as timely, triggered communication across channels such as web messages or email.

Use Cases:

- Media OTT or Music Streaming: Display video or audio content recommendations based on your customers’ historical and real-time viewing/listening, watch list, favorite genres/artists, etc.

- Food Delivery: Open up repeat conversion opportunities by recommending relevant restaurants or trending offers within a customers’ geographic vicinity based on his/her preferred cuisines, frequency of app launch, most common time to place orders, etc.

4. Intelligently micro-target personalized recommendations:

You can also now identify exactly when and where to display your product or content recommendations across different UI elements of your website, mobile site, or mobile app. These are built specifically for your platform and can be optimized for peak performance.

Choose from a variety of widgets, SEO-friendly pages, web
messages, and emails to trigger contextual recommendations at the right time to the right customer.

Go one step further - use AI-generated and optimised ads across Google, Facebook, and Instagram to further boost conversions that can deliver 50% better ROI than regular ads.

Use Cases:

- Travel: Trigger contextual AI-optimized ads on Facebook at customers who have viewed a particular travel package but dropped-off before completing the transaction. Use their historical interactions with these ads to further optimize when and where these are generated and displayed

- News & Entertainment: Get your repeat visitors to consume similar articles as “suggested reading” through triggered web messages when they are most likely to drop-off. Leverage unique data-points such as most engaged time, average time spent per session, reading history, etc.

5. Shorten paths to eventual conversion:

Direct repeat website visitors towards conversion by highlighting the exact product that he/she has viewed in his/her last recorded session - on a pre-defined section of your website, mobile site, or mobile app page.

This will help you increase top-of-mind recall and the chances of purchase during the current session!

Use Cases:

- E-Commerce: Highlight targeted offers on products based on past products viewed or items abandoned in carts at a specific space on your website home page

- EduTech: Remind repeat mobile app users to complete their pending courses by showing them a progress bar right where they are most likely to see it on app launch during their next session

“Is Personalization Here to Stay?”

Yes, definitely.

According to the Gartner Hype Cycle for Digital Marketing and Advertising, 2019; “innovation profiles like personalization engines are maturing rapidly as marketing leaders prioritize investments in this area”.

Just remember - today, your marketing ROI is directly proportional to the degree of non-pervasive hyper-personalization, across digital touchpoints.

Delivering a truly omnichannel customer experience is no longer a pipedream and scaling customer delight consistently is a function of your data-driven vision, creativity, and optimization efforts!