In the past, marketing was a one-way conversation with messaging coming from the marketer, but no actual feedback from the customer. That doesn’t fly in the time where personalization is demanded by customers who expect to maintain a relationship with their favorite brands.
Getting personal
The key to personalization is simple: presenting the right content to the right person at the right time. But like the simple formula for success in the stock market, making it happen can be fairly complicated.
Successful personalization involves analyzing a huge amount of data from various sources and in different structures. On top of that you have different types of analytics pertaining to both the customer profile and the customer experience that have to be constantly updated in real time.
“The coming AI revolution in retail and consumer products,” put out by the National Retail Foundation in cooperation with IBM Institute for Business looked at how effective AI-enabled real time marketing can be. Among its examples is Avenue Stores LLC. The retail apparel chain implemented a solution that enabled it to deliver personalized customer experiences and incentives in real time while customers are in “shopping mode” when present in the store.
Momentous moments
It all comes down to being able to respond to the customer needs of the moment, or even micro moment, as described in Kantar Retail report. That’s the term it uses in describing the need for “contextual engagement through micro moments that blend with shoppers’ lives where they are as part of their niched ‘narrative stream.’”
This is important, the report explains, to indicate to your customers “that they are heard before they are spoken to.”
Context cues
Getting personalization right doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It also has to take into account contextual events that relate to the customer journey. These could be events within your business or those that apply to the customer experience in the real world.
For example, your customer may have eyed a particular piece a week ago but couldn’t purchase it because it was out of stock. Now it is back in stock or available for pre-order, or perhaps there’s a new item that is very similar to that one available. Any of these events in your inventory should trigger messaging to the customer to cue them in that there is something that should be of interest to them.
Context also extends to things happening outside your business that would affect the customer. One of the major triggers in retail, for example, is weather. When a heat wave is on the horizon, customers may be interested in air conditioners, fans, and pool accessories. When snow is coming, they may remember that they need a new snow shovel and ice melt.
The key is getting these messages out in time for the customer to act on them. If they get the “back in stock” message only after the item has sold out again, they will only be frustrated. Likewise, if you send a promotion for ice melt after the snow has melted on its own, your messaging is no longer relevant.
Pulling it off
While getting all the ducks in a row for real time marketing is a tall order, a CDP does make it possible. That’s because a CDP unifies the customer data and identification by correlating the customer behavior attributes across channels and devices that goes far beyond simple click metrics and recorded transactions. It extends to site visits, app usage, social media, promotions applied, and so on.
With that capability in place, you can reap the benefits of insight into the state of each customer in real time combined with predictive analytics that apply algorithms to optimize the customer’s journey. When all the data and analytics come together in real time, they also factor in the predicted uplift of all campaigns each customer is eligible to deliver the best one for that particular customer’s needs.
As Daniel Pink wrote in To Sell is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others (p. 72), “the ability to move people now depends on power’s inverse: understanding another person’s perspective, getting inside his head, and seeing the world through his eyes.” Or, as more often is the case, hers.