A chance to differentiate at a human scale.
“Personalisation wasn’t supposed to be a cleverly veiled way to chase prospects around the web, showing them the same spammy ad for the same lame stuff as everyone else sees. No, it is a chance to differentiate at a human scale, to use behaviour as the most important clue about what people want and more important, what they need.”
This sage advice from Seth Godin reflects the growing recognition of businesses that their approach to understanding and targeting consumers needs to fundamentally change, and presents a huge opportunity to those that react first.
As access to large amounts of data and advanced technology have proliferated, bad habits have been formed, with consumers being inundated with poorly targeted, badly timed marketing messages, provoking their annoyance, distrust and scepticism.
With so many brands failing to deliver on personalisation, there is clear potential for those who crack this challenge to positively differentiate from their competition and increase consumer advocacy, revenue and profit. In fact, an Accenture survey noted that “83% of organisations believe that delivering a relevant and personal experience will differentiate their organisation”.
Consumers respond to personal interactions.
When Dale Carnegie stated that “a person’s name is to that person, the sweetest, most important sound in any language”, he captured a basic human truth, which marketers are beginning to adapt to.
When approached with warmth, politeness and a genuine interest in helping us solve our needs, people are hard wired to respond positively. When approached with rudeness and apathy, we automatically turn the other way. Even worse, for the majority, we do so without explicitly saying why, meaning brands who take this approach will rarely find out why they alienated the consumer and lost the sale.
The stats back this up. Accenture also found that “91% of consumers are more likely to shop with brands who recognise them by name, remember their preferences, and provide them with relevant offers and recommendations”. It sounds so simple, so why do so many brands fail to deliver on personalisation?
Rediscovering the value of customer need states.
Despite widespread recognition of the value personalisation offers businesses and their consumers, a BCG survey reported that “only about 15% of companies can be considered true personalisation leaders, and most of them are tech companies and digital natives”, furthermore they found that “only 13% say they deploy truly consumer-specific individual messages, and only 7% manage fully integrated tailored communications across all channels”.
Hyper personalisation can bring back the lost art of optimising to a customer need state. Understanding consumer needs, missions and moments is key to tackling this challenge and to reap the benefits it offers.
Need states, such as wellness or gratification, are by no means a modern innovation. The same can be said of missions, such as booking a holiday, yet understanding and catering for both, at an individual level are more important than ever.
Moments on the other hand have become far more prominent in recent years, as consumers increasingly use the internet to fulfil their needs. For example, a moment may be comparing holiday destinations or the actively entering the booking funnel.
Personalisation leaders are adept at stitching together and understanding consumer journeys using data and AI, combined with skilled and experienced data scientists and strategists to make sense of the journeys and interpret insights into forward looking decisions.
This final part is key. Armed with robust insight, hyper personalised, laser targeted interactions, such as marketing communications or service messages can be designed and orchestrated, increasing consumer satisfaction and likelihood of purchase or problem resolution.
Personalisation pays, and there is plenty of evidence demonstrating the benefits that have been derived from targeted solutions. For example, BCG reported that “A/B testing found that after personalisation was implemented, (leading FMCG brand) Nivea’s browsing conversion rate improved by 70% and transactions increased by 150%.”
Dynamic Yield, a recent $300m acquisition by McDonalds for their personalisation capability, reported that Lamoda (Russia’s leading fashion retailer) achieved a 35x return on investment, $15m in gross profit and uplift in revenue of 8% per session, from deploying personalised and optimised experiences for 20 million online consumers.
How we enable hyper personalised targeting.
At HyperFinity we recognise that understanding in-moment consumer need states enables truly personalised experiences and have so developed intelligent, next best action solutions to deliver recommendations in real-time, to drive consumer engagement.
Our solutions typically leverage large scale consumer data, apply machine learning algorithms and feed into front end tools to enable contextual, engaging and valuable interactions with consumers in real-time. Interactions that inspire consumers to act in ways brands desire, be that conversion to sale, resolving a service issue or obtaining referrals to friends and family.
Our technology agnostic approach means that we can utilise the best possible tools to meet your objectives and fit in with your existing stack, reducing implementation costs and keeping the focus firmly on driving positive business outcomes from your targeting activity.
Contact us to discuss how we can help your retail business create truly personalised experiences.
Visit HyperFinity Get In Touch
