There is a lot of interest amongst marketers in personalisation in digital marketing. And yes, we all like to be recognised for what we are. But we suspect that people are becoming wary of trivial personalisation or ‘personalisation lite’.
For example, recognising what I last looked at on a website is reminding me of the blindingly obvious.
However, telling me about a local retail event in the near future that is connected to what I was looking at on a website is much more likely to catch my attention.
And, for a full version of personalisation, understanding that I am a longstanding and loyal customer, rewarding me for my loyalty, and telling me about something that is actually of interest to acquire, really does hit the spot.
So, what is required to make this deeper level of personalisation actually work in practice for digital marketers?
Well, the first item needed is an effective personalisation engine. A tool that decides what kind of personal experience I should receive based on the information it knows about me. These engines work by the marketer setting rules or conditions which if satisfied mean that the customer will be sent a specific version of an email, or see a particular image, or offer on a website.
But next you will need to have joined together the online and offline data worlds. That allows the personalisation engine to know both that you are a loyal customer and that you are interested in a particular kind of merchandise or customer experience.
Most personalisation engines deliver ‘personalisation light’ because they ignore the history of your relationship with the company and just focus on what you have been browsing in the last 24 hours or so.
We have teamed up with Fresh Relevance (see www.freshrelevance.com) as our personalisation engine partner to allow you to give your customers full personalisation.
We manage this by sending Fresh Relevance a nightly feed of customers’ characteristics – factors like loyalty, spend, and long-term merchandise category purchases, so that these can be used in combination with their immediate online activities and behavioural triggers.
UniFida and Fresh Relevance can deliver in combination personalisation that really makes a difference.
To find out more, please email us suggesting a time that would be good for you to have a chat.
UniFida is the trading name of Marketing Planning Services Ltd, a London based technology and data science company set up in 2014. Our overall aim is to help organisations build more customer value at less marketing cost.
Our technology focus has been to develop UniFida. Our data science business comes both from existing users of UniFida, and from clients looking to us to solve their more complex data related marketing questions.
Marketing is changing at an explosive speed, and our ambition is to help our clients stay empowered and ahead in this challenging environment.