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Hello and welcome to the final article in the series, The building blocks of personalisation. Over the last few weeks, we’ve shared with you the best practices in personalisation covering the creation of the 360-degree customer view through data collection and the importance of data utilisation using machine learning. To complete our building blocks, here we will explore the role of content in personalisation and why keeping it consistent is essential to achieving your goals.
Now that you’ve developed your personalised messaging strategy, it’s time to focus on what time you should be communicating with your audience and via what channels. Understanding your customers’ channel preferences is essential to success and often time consumers don’t have just one channel they use regularly. Do your research and don’t make assumptions regarding your customers’ channel preferences.
For example, 68% of Gen Xers use coupons they receive in the mail and are more likely to receive paper bills and send birthday cards through USPS instead of email. Clearly direct mail is an active channel for this segment. However, it’s important to understand that that insight only informs how Gen Xers interact with one communication channel and not all of them. Gen Xers also actively make purchases through social channels and have a preference for Facebook shopping. In addition to having insights into channel preferences, marketers need to have a consistent content strategy prepared to ensure that they’re sending their customers the same, cohesive message, regardless of channel.
Relevant and consistent content is essential to effectively communicate to customers and achieve that 1:You connection with them. When establishing your content strategy, consider creating a library of content so you’re prepared to deliver unique content to each customer.
For example, if you’re in the travel industry, curate a number of images that reflect different travel interests and life-stages of your customer base. This proactive approach to content planning, with technology ready to active content in real-time, will allow you to reach your personalisation goals in a planned and timely manner.
Enabling technologies like machine learning allow us to achieve personalisation at scale. Loyalty marketing efforts have advanced with the integration of recommendation engines and the ability to identify the next best offer along with content profile matching.
eBay is starting down the path of an enhanced personalised customer experience by using machine learning to drive better results. Their holistic approach includes utilising larger data pools for decisioning for real-time interactions, product recommendations, and channel preferences on a continual, around-the-clock basis to learn what is working and what is not. This means that customers will never see two emails, product recommendations, or curated purchasing paths that are the same. Machine learning is even defining what colors and pictures are more successful; and it’s automating the process of improvement allowing humans (marketers, product managers, etc.) to better focus on strategy versus managing a campaign. Success is leading to the expansion of machine learning into search analytics, the creation of citizen data scientists, and voice-assisted interaction to ensure the experience along with the content is relevant regardless of the channel it’s delivered in.
And so concludes Block III of The building blocks of personalisation, we hoped you enjoyed the series. With these insights on customer view, the utilisation of data, and content we hope that you feel ready and able to create a truly personalised experience for your audience.
