Personalization is a term bandied about with increasing frequency. Everyone seems to be personalizing everything. There is personalized learning, personalized shoes, personalized phones, personalized fitness, personalized ads, and the list goes on. Just as a rainbow spans a continuous span of colors, personalization seems to span a continuous spectrum of options.
But for this discussion, let's focus on personalized marketing. First, a multiple choice test:
a) A bank sends out an email newsletter with the customer's first name in the salutation.
b) An apparel retailer's landing page shows only women's categories (blouses, denim, accessories, etc.) in the hero image area because the visitor is female.
c) An electronics retailer sends an email with the subject "$100 price drop on the Nikon D7000." (The email recipient recently spent time browsing Nikon D7000s on the retailer's site.)
d) A mass merchandiser's e-commerce site offers a widget with "Customers who Viewed This Also Viewed" product selection.
e) Your Facebook newsfeed has an update from a national department store chain you've Liked with the offer "50% off Nike running shoes." (Your Facebook profile shows that you like Runner magazine and that "running" is a preferred activity.)
Which of these choices is personalization?
Actually, they are all personalization! But some are very superficial-inserting a person's name (a), while some-providing a specific offer on a product that a customer has browsed (c), can deliver significant value to both the customer and the business.
How about if we go a step further? Into hyper-personalization.
Hyper-personalization allows companies to deliver messages to each individual customer according to what they've bought, what they've browsed, what they've clicked on in an email, what they've shared on Facebook, and so on. And these messages are delivered across the spectrum of channels that a customer uses-mobile, social, PC.
Hyper-personalization means sending Joe an email about the $100 price drop on the Nikon camera because he browsed that product online. It also means posting on Joe's Facebook timeline the same offer and, perhaps, combining it with a hotel discount for an upcoming trip to Belize that Joe shared. And when Joe visits the retailer's site, be it on his PC or on his smartphone, he also sees the same camera and offer, plus some lenses and carrying cases for the Nikon.
Hyper-personalization: it's about knowing your customer so well that it just doesn't make sense for him to buy from anyone else.
image: personalization/shutterstock