Tactics to Hyper-personalization

By now we have all heard the importance of personalization and how companies like Amazon use data science for personalization of “Customer who bought this…” to their customers.

The latest trend however is hyper-personalization in almost every industry from Retail to Travel to Hospitality and so on.

Hyper-personalization is use of browsing histories, past purchases, social media data and internal customer data to provide more personalized and targeted products, services, and content. It is about being relevant at the right place and right time to the right person.

Rapid growth of social and newer digital channels has created an opportunity to collect even more relevant customer data, thereby helping companies provide a personalized outreach.

How it is done?

Focus on 3 important ‘W” of hyper-personalization:

• Who you personalize
• What you personalize and
• Where you personalize.

Focus on defining your customers, their likes / dislikes, and most importantly their issues and challenges. By understanding these intricate details about your customers, you get an in-depth look at the pain points in their purchasing cycle, and also the factors that affect their buying decisions.

Once you have listened to them and grouped them into the right segments, you can begin to create personalized content, deliver it in a most relevant way, and help drive engagement.

Collecting data on an individual-level vs. collecting data by segment is an integral step in the hyper-personalization process. For example, if a customer searches for flights to a particular location, then travel agencies could use this info to target that customer with relevant travel packages.

Share personalized content in the context of a customer’s needs and location to deliver it across different devices so that it can translate into positive experiences for the customer. While doing this also ensure your brand is not placed among the relentless marketing which irritates customers.

Mobile has become another important medium which generates more than 60% traffic of internet and most importantly customer location.

Big Data & combined with Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence play a huge role in hyper-personalization. It becomes more effective when cloud is used for storage and processing for faster time to market.

With wearables on the rise and IoT is collecting personalized data for a consumer which is being used for special promotions on self care, health plans.

Netflix, Starbucks & Coca Cola are using hyper-personalization for increasing revenues.

Travel is the place where hyper-personalization gets the most exciting where remote check-ins and specialized door keys are used.

Today by looking at your digital footprint, companies can offer you additional insurance when you move into new house, or education loan for your child’s post-graduation, increase credit limit on your cards based on expenditure specially customized only for you.

Welcome to hyper-personalization!!

Do you need a Chief Digital Officer?

Today introducing basic digital capabilities and creating some pilots for customer interaction are days of the past. The challenges of the new digital age make the jumping on Digital Transformation inevitable and subsequently the need of executive like Chief Digital Officer is a no-brainer.

The recent times have seen the rise of the Chief Digital Officer, who sits next to CEO and is seen as instrumental to the future of the organization.

Traditionally, for the past several years digital was looked up as ownership of the marketing function, responsible for driving the organization’s online presence and connecting with customers, but now it is every department that has to contribute to digital enablement of customer journeys.

The spike in demand for Chief Digital Officers has been felt globally to drive digital across the organization.

Some of the CDO responsibilities are as below but not limited to:

• Define the digital strategy
• Map the digital capabilities to business strategy
• Leads digital transformation and customer centricity
• Providing detailed analysis of industry trends and developments in technology and customer behavior, both inside and outside the business sector
• Deliver analytics across customer touch points to enable better business decisions and enhance the customer experience  
• Use of all the digital transformation technologies like Social, Mobile, Analytics, Cloud, Internet of Things, API, UX etc.
• Responsible for the strategy for digital consumers, identify and implement relevant Omni-channel solutions 
• Embark on use of latest trends of Robotics, Drones, Artificial Intelligence, Beacons or NFC based payments, Blockchain etc

As digital is becoming a norm, every CXO will have to integrate their business and benefit from the CDO’s efforts.

Over the next decade, the Chief Digital Officer will be very exciting and strategic role for going near to customers.

Some of the well-known brand’s CDOs who have steered their companies on digital are:

•  Adam Brotman of Starbucks
• Ganesh Bell of GE
• Daniel Heaf of Burberry
• Atif Rafiq of McDonald's
• Lubomira Rochet of L’Oreal

The true measure of a CDO’s success is when the role becomes redundant, as a high-functioning digital company does not need a CDO.

What is Digital Marketing and how to succeed ?

Digital marketing is the promotion of products or brands via one or more forms of digital technologies to attract, engage and convert customers online.

For a business to succeed in today’s Digital world, it is really important to have a strong digital footprint on the internet. With today’s sophisticated digital lifestyle, consumers are probably on Facebook, checking out Twitter, browsing their email inboxes and searching for products and services on a search engine.

Digital marketing differs from traditional marketing as it leverages all the electronic devices like PCs, Tablets, Smartphones, digital signage or billboards, smart TVs to provide an experience in real time, that influences a desired audience to buy your product / read your articles / engage with your content.

Marketers shall use these Omni-channels, which can track the customer’s journey and give them the ability to engage with the consumer online.

Various components of Digital Marketing:

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – make your brand appear at the top of Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search engines
• Search Engine Marketing (SEM) – with pay per click & Google AdWords allow your website to emerge on paid listing of different search engines.
• Social Media Marketing (SMM) – advertising on Twitter, Facebook, Google +, LinkedIn and YouTube. Get maximum number of Likes and Tweets on twitter. 
• Mobile Optimization and Responsive Websites - When you take a look around a room, nearly everyone is on their Smartphone. The numbers of people browsing on mobile passed desktop users a long time ago.
• Video Marketing - best way to engage with millennials. Facebook live streaming, Periscope, Snapchat, and YouTube are on the rise now, more than ever.
• Web analytics – collection and analyze web usage data
• Content Marketing - eBooks, White Papers and Infographics
• Email Marketing – sending emails to customers directly

Here are some challenges for Digital Marketers:

• Explosion of digital channels - Consumers use variety digital channels and devices to interact with brands in different ways and for different purposes.
• Exploding data volumes - Consumers leave behind a huge digital footprint in these channels. It’s extremely difficult to get a handle on all that data, and find the right data that can help you make the right decisions.
• Increasing competition - Digital channels are relatively cheap, compared with traditional media, making them within reach of practically every business of every size. As a result, everyone is trying to capture consumers’ attention.

How do you succeed in Digital Marketing:

• Avoid overwhelming “in your face” marketing
• Respond to dynamic customer interactions.
• Extract value from big data to make better decisions faster
• Close loop the feedback into future digital campaigns for Cross/Up-Sell

People want brands they can trust, companies that know them as people, communications that are personalized and relevant, and offers tailored to their needs and preferences.

Digital is now the first touch point for the consumer and a channel where the consumer has greater control over what they see and when they see it.

How Marketers can benefit from Big data Analytics !

Internet explosion has enabled organizations to go closer to their customers & do a super personalized communication. 

People now spend more time on the internet than any other form of entertainment.  The demand for internet capable devices like smartphones, tablets have increased exponentially.  Most of the people are buying products online or compare products online.

Customers spend hours on the internet and leave behind millions of tweets, posts, likes, links, images, videos, chats, comments, surveys, blogs.

Businesses need to use this all big data forms to get a 360 view of the customer for marketing.

• Behavioral data that has orders, transactions, and other customer activity as recorded by the business
• Interaction data including email, chat transcripts, self-declared information, and records of calls between the business and customers and web click streams.
• Attitudinal data including opinions, preferences, needs, and desires. These are often discovered through survey responses or social media data.
• Financial data that is present in the company’s internal systems such as sales, revenues, profits.

This big data can make a substantial impact to:

• Increase Customer retention and loyalty - helps you discover what influences customer loyalty and why they keep coming back again and again.
• Improve Customer engagement - Helps you understand who your customers are, where they are, what they want, how they want to be contacted and when.
• Marketing optimization – helps you determine the optimal marketing spend across multiple channels

Let us see some examples of how Big data is making an impact on Marketing for cross-sell &up-sell.

You are familiar with both cross-selling and up-selling if you’ve ever visited a fast-food restaurant like McDonald. “Would you like fries with that?” is an example of cross-selling. “Would you like to super-size your order?” is up-selling.

Almax has created "smart mannequins" that have cameras for eyes and analyze shoppers' faces to detect age, gender, ethnicity, and a variety of other characteristics.

Sony mixed modern big data, social media analytics, and old-school marketing such as direct mail email marketing — and generated 300% more sales than control groups. They used their customer database & found out their strong social networks, influencers. A campaign was targeted to these influencers which is termed as viral marketing.

eBay is using “my Feed” so they can follow categories of items for newest listings.

Netflix is using real-time processing for digital marketing to its customers.

Walmart created WalmarLabs, created a search engine to understand what someone is searching for and goes through millions of tweets, Facebook’s likes, blog posts and more to detect purchase intent and boost sales.

Tripadvisor is using clickstream analysis to analyze what more than 56 million monthly visitors want and make them happy.

Visualize the scenario where you walk into your favorite apparel store like Gap or Target. Surveillance cameras mounted on the door immediately detect who you are and instantly beam identifying information to the in-store sales associates. An app on the sales associate's iPad then correlates all of your shopping characteristics such as loyalty, past purchases, cross-channel preferences, service incidents, and social media footprint and provides your consolidated view. With this information, a sales associate walks up to you as you are entering the store, greets you by name, and inquires about your most recent purchase. This level of personalized attention dramatically alters an individual's in-store shopping experience…and it's not that far-fetched…………