Perspectives

Personalization:
How is Personalization
Changing the Face of
Marketing?

What is
Personalization?

Personalization consists of modifying a service or product to help selective individuals, sometimes tied to groups or segments of individuals. If done in the right way, personalization can increase the growth rate by 6-10%.

In today's age, consumer is at the center of almost everything. Customers are asked to share their information like name, city, area, and sometimes bank details to procure products in exchange for more personalized and convenient experiences.

Data privacy and to be able to interact with a company 24*7 are their main concerns. So, when companies try to adjust consumer expectations for a personalized experience, they face certain difficulties because of the numerous number of technologies and the added complexity.

Keeping all this in mind, businesses now need to take a holistic approach to evaluate, plan, implement, and optimize by digitally transforming their marketing functions to better anticipate customer needs.

Inside this:

Difference between Customization
and Personalization

Customization is done by the user. An application/service allows user to make changes to the experience to meet their certain goals by configuring functionality, layout, or content whereas personalization is done by the application being used. Application tries to deliver the content, experience, or functionality that matches the user’s needs.

How to Achieve and Leverage
Personalization Scale

You may think that doing right personalization is a burden but commitment and getting started are two things to put a strong personalization operating model in place.

Laying the Foundation

Technology has advanced to this level that marketers can use real-time data in a way which is meaningful to both customers and companies. Despite the promising solutions like CRM, MDM, and MRM, companies smack against the challenge of understanding what to prioritize.

Though, these solutions are enough to consolidate and streamline data, organize work flow, and enhance customer relationships but organizations do not take full advantage of the signals customers provide and end up relying on basic segmentation and campaigns to scale personalized interactions up.

Below are the four steps on how you can effectively activate your data:
  • Data Foundation: Building a good view of the customer
  • Decision Making: Mine the data to act on the signals
  • Design: Making the correct offers, messages, and experiences at speed
  • Distribution: Delivering experiences across platforms

Defining the Strategy

There is a big difference between what the customers want and what organizations think they want. Targeted communications can create lasting customer loyalty and drive revenue growth up to 10 to 30 percent. Organizations that deliver customers timely, relevant, and personal messages can help in building lasting bonds that drive growth.

Below are the five things that consumers said in a survey when it comes to personalized communications:
  • Give me better recommendations that I do not know
  • When I am in shopping mode, I need to talk to someone
  • Reminder for things I am unaware of
  • Connect digital messages with their offline experiences
  • Share the information that is meaningful to me

Gearing up Operations

Digital technology definitely allows marketers to engage in innovative ways to meet consumers’ needs particularly via personalized content, messages, and offers more effectively. But taking benefit of the new choices enabled by digital requires incumbents’ marketing organizations to become much quicker and have a bias for action. In other words, marketers have to become proactive in order to be more personalized.

Here is how companies can put together the teams and capabilities to make things happen on a larger scale:
  • Setting team expectations and aligning with leadership
  • Analyzing the data to identify the opportunities
  • Designing and prioritizing tests
  • Running various tests
  • Iterating the idea based on results
  • Scaling up across the organization

No Customer Left Behind

Driving significant and justifiable growth through personalization involves embedding into the marketing operating model. For this, companies must go beyond the primary excitement of “one-to-one marketing” and into the essential realm of organizational change.

Below are steps to develop your personalization operating model:
  • Process: Commit fully
  • Governance: Be clear about boundaries
  • Tools and Technology: Provide people with new ideas and innovations
  • Performance Evaluation: Focus on small and big outcomes
  • Talent: Foster long-term talent development
  • Leadership: Make personalization a long-term goal

Today, generic marketing is not sufficient to advertise sales and discounts. Personalization is one of the finest ways for retailers to be superior amongst the ones failing down. It is an easy practice proven by human psychology to implement without restructuring the whole business.

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