How exciting to start to see books being written on the topic of Personalization. Mark Abraham and David Edelman recently released Personalized: Customer Strategy in the age of AI where they dive into how personalization will be the new norm in marketing and communication. Spotify, Netflix and Amazon has for sure set a new standard with personalized content delighting their customers, and consumers now expect more from all vendors. As technology is getting better and cheaper it is now available for the many to create personalized experiences, and vendors need to keep up. First movers out perform the laggars. Here are the 5 promises of personalization in the age of AI.
Empower Me
There is no point in personalizing just for the sake of being able to personalize. We want to personalize so we can empower the end user and put them in the drivers seat. In order to do that we need to understand our customer and how we best can meet their needs.
To accomplish this, brands must consider:
- Where can customer data be used to make the experience better, faster, and easier?
- What use cases should we personalize next to provide an ideal experience?
- How can we enable common pathways for more of our customers?
Know Me
In order to be able to personalize in a relevant way, we need to know the end user. Know where they are in the buyers journey, know their preferences and buying behaviour. And everything else that matters that they are willing to share. In order to get to know the customers we need to win customers’ trust and permission to use their data to improve their experience. Here is where many organisations need to start their personalization journey in order to get relevant data point in to their CRM.
To accomplish this, brands must consider:
- How effective is our approach to growing the volume of digital customer relationships over time?
- How do we provide value in return for users sharing their personal data?
- What do we directly ask customers about, as opposed to merely drawing inferences about?
- How well do our data governance processes ensure consistent and clear management of data?
Reach Me
Organisations need to know their customers prefered ways of communication, what channels they want to use for communicaiton, and when to reach them.
To accomplish this, brands must consider:
- What can we do to increase contact opportunities across our customer base by channel?
- What portion of our activation is triggered versus scheduled?
- Have we developed the key types of data science models to support these efforts
Show Me
We need to craft relevant content that we can showcase the customers to provide an excellent user experience depending on where the customer is in the customer journey. No need to lay out the text that here is where Solarplexus excells and tailor unique content to be relevant to each target group and personas automated and at scale, enabled by generative AI.
To accomplish this, brands must consider:
- What types of personalized content are most critical for delivering a great experience?
- How finely targeted is our content in our most important channels?
- How should we apply GenAI to increase volume of content generation?
Delight Me
When all of the above is aligned we have the possibility to make personalization feel magical. Easy, breazy, relevant and to the point.
To accomplish this, brands must consider:
- How well are we aggregating and using insights from customers’ responses to our personalized experiences over time?
- Are we building experimentation design into how we activate in order to support learnings from each customer interaction?
- How long does it take us to measure the impact of a campaign?
Get started
We are still in the early days of personalization where we need to design new ways of working and ensure continuous improvement, so a customer’s experience feels magical. There is no point in waiting for everything to be “perfect”. It is better to start where you are and build from there. Showcasing how much better personalized content converts and how it is improving customer satisfaction there will be plenty of arguments to move the whole organisation into the personalization mind set and deliver on the promises of personalization.
