4 Things Your Marketing Needs to Achieve True Personalization

Blueshift

| April 2, 2020

4 Things Your Marketing Needs to Achieve True Personalization

There are no ifs, ands, or buts about it — customers want 1:1 personalization from their favorite brands. Marketers want to provide these experiences as well because they bolster brand efforts, foster loyalty, and increase revenue all in one fell swoop. But, for overloaded marketers true personalization is more easily said than done, especially given that this ability to personalize at scale is relatively new and there’s no tried and true guide to making it a reality. To complicate matters further, most marketing teams don’t have endless engineering resources at their disposal.

95% of marketers don’t personalize at the 1:1 level across all channels, which isn’t surprising considering the barriers to entry can be almost insurmountable. That is unless marketers take the right steps and bring in the proper technology to get the job done. If there were endless hours in the day marketers would probably get this all bootstrapped by hand in order to provide personalization. Alas, we all only get 24 hours (and marketers being cornered into data science functions isn’t ideal), but there is a solution out there to help marketers execute true personalization sans huge engineering teams and limitless budgets. Let us walk you through what your business needs to achieve true, 1:1 personalization.

1. DISMANTLE DATA SILOS

If you’re a marketer in the year 2020, it’s very likely you’ve been marketed, pitched, or sold a Customer Data Platform (CDP). For the past year or so, it’s been the darling of the martech world and SaaS platforms have scrambled to either tack on a CDP to their current functionality or rebrand themselves into one. This hysteria is founded in solid logic because it addresses the most prevalent issue with most martech stacks. Siloed data.

When data is disparate (in other words, living inside separate ecosystems like CRMs, data lakes, etc.) it’s of little use to marketers. It’s impossible to really know your customers because you only get fragmented views of who they are, what behaviors they’ve exhibited, and what preferences they have. As such, it’s the first step to providing true personalization. Where CDPs fail is in that they only do a fraction of what’s needed to use your data effectively. Your data is in one unified ecosystem and understood holistically — great! But, what’s happening in between these single customer views and executing 1:1 personalization? Glad you asked, it’s a little something called data activation.

2. BRING IN THE POWER OF DATA ACTIVATION

Once data has been collected and unified it’s now ready to have intelligent, AI-power computing decide where it will be used and how. Data activation is the method by which 1:1 customer experiences are shaped by the entirety of your data. All digital interactions a customer can have with your brand are driven by a holistic, real-time understanding of customers — which includes transactional records, behavioral data, demographic data, and some unexpected sources such as customer service data (like Zendesk) and channel feedback data.

Blueshift’s Customer Data Activation Platform (CDAP) uses patented AI to design both self-driving customer journeys and meaningful individual comms using the power of first-party customer data. Essentially data activation is the “secret sauce” that takes the guesswork out of building out campaigns and autonomously pushes out the most effective marketing possible.

3. BUILDING INTELLIGENT, DYNAMIC SEGMENTS

Autonomous, highly effective campaigns are what dreams are made of, but everyone needs control occasionally. Within the CDAP it’s incredibly easy to build highly complex segments designed to perform optimally — and this is because of the solid data foundation that’s laid and the use of marketer accessible AI.

Use single customer view profiles to define segments based on any combination of user attributes, site activity, affinities, transaction history, and other custom data attributes and then utilize predictive scores to build these segments based on customers’ purchase likelihood, engagement rate, or perform the desired action to pinpoint the most valuable customers. And from here on out it’s hands-off, the segments will continually update to reflect new actions taken and user information.

Although grouping and goals are defined by segment, marketing delivered within these segments is still completely personalized — which is key. Those who personalize at the segment level, but not the individual level are 42% more likely to say their organization is falling behind their competitors in delivering individualized experiences. So, it’s key to think of segmentation as a tool for finding and target which customers are most valuable, but not as lists that receive identical messaging on the same channels.

4. UTILIZE REAL-TIME INSIGHTS FOR 1:1 PERSONALIZATION

Speaking of personalization within segments… you’re now ready to execute! With a foundation of solid technology and data in place, the path to 1:1 messaging is a smooth one. After defining goals and audiences within the segmentation engine, attaching graphic assets, and defining overall campaign themes and of course adding in dynamic recommendation blocks, the journeys are ready for production.

And although we’ve taken quite a bit of time to describe the path to personalization that actual process happens pretty quickly. Once data sources are integrated with the CDAP, the unification, predictive analysis, and decisioning happens nearly instantaneously. What’s more, new information is constantly being ingested from either side of the customer data funnel which improves functionality as it informs the single view of the customer. Your end result is a beautiful mechanism of data activation that produces marketing more meaningful and personal than ever before.