The Future of Marketing: Hyper-Personalization to Improve Customer Relations
Have you noticed how Netflix has multiple thumbnails for each show? The thumbnails keep changing every time you open the app, whether you are on the same episode or another one. Each time you stream on Netflix, your individual user profile learns your streaming patterns, behavioral attributes, and what grabs your attention using predictive learning and AI techniques. For them, this form of hyper-personalization begins right from their homepage.
Digital marketing relies majorly on consumer behavior and purchasing habits, and on average, a person spends around six to sixteen hours on digital platforms. While personalized online advertising has been a market driver for a long time now, hyper-personalization has become the need of the hour. Customers are aware of how mass personalized marketing works, and it does not excite them anymore. Hyper personalization is when you leverage artificial intelligence and real-time data to study consumer behavior and offer them specially curated services to suit their needs. To put it simply, rather than sending an email that starts with “Hey Netflix users,” you send them a mail with their first name — “Hey John, we are glad to see you are enjoying the crime thrillers on Netflix.”
The Digital Shift
Consumer behavior is constantly changing depending up on a lot of factors. But in the last couple of years, we have seen customer migration online on a massive scale. Every purchase decision a customer makes is based on reviews, user-generated content, influencers, and how brands communicate. With the technology we have, it’s easier to analyze customer behavior and habits because it’s all available online. There are two factors at consideration here — what has and what hasn’t worked. As the digital sector is witnessing a huge surge, it’s important to find out its impact on online advertising and digital marketing, with all its pros and cons. Customer loyalty has taken a hit, and it’s no more about how many years they’ve been using a particular brand or how well the brand knows them. It’s all about that unique experience — an exclusivity they crave for. Could businesses adapt to this shift? What can we do to improve the customer experience?
Are You Cool or Creepy?
Hyper-personalized marketing utilizes every bit of customer data to offer them a unique online one-on-one experience across all marketing touchpoints. You have to be proactive in engaging, converting, and building relationships with your customer. So, where do you start?
The first step is to build a personalization strategy based on the customer needs and personal purchase journeys. You then start sourcing the necessary data, technology, and architecture. But the key factor here is to realize that there’s a thin line between hyper-personalization and data privacy. You don’t want to annoy them with irrelevant, creepy ads. That’s only going to cause more harm than good because you are approaching your customers in a way that annoys them, using the data they do not know you have access to. It’s unfair to the customers that they are bombarded with ads about an orange or apple sale just because they searched for peaches. It also might affect you as a business because you will not get many leads from these ads, even after spending thousands of dollars on them. You must have probably thought of all those sponsored social media ads you get every time you open an app. Let’s be honest, how many times have you clicked that “it’s irrelevant” button in the last few months?
The only way to not be on that blacklist of “digital marketing went wrong” is to use the data with value and relevance. Rather than accessing huge chunks of data and targeting everyone in that one single pool, hyper-personalization should be done with people you know are likely to be interested in the services and products you are offering. You would focus on people who search “peaches” rather than “fruits” because the former gives you better results.
Can Hyper-Personalization and Data Privacy Go Hand in Hand?
Online advertising is all about data. Tech and social media giants have convinced people that they can never choose between personalized experiences and data privacy. People abandon the brands they’ve been loyal to for a long time just because they are not offering personalized services. But at the same time, they are concerned about how their data is being used. That means they care about data privacy but are willing to let the brands use their data if it’s presented with relevance. This can be achieved when organizations realize, that like content, consent is important too. You can collect the data with transparency and ensure that it’s being kept and used safely.
Brands are all about people, and they should always be focused on the satisfaction of the end-user. The focus should be on breaking the traditional norms of digital marketing to ensure the purchase decisions are given back to the customers and not forced upon them with irrelevant ads.
