I attended the LoyauT study results conference the other day…and I had a little moment of delight, I must admit, when I heard that personalization positively impacts a customer’s engagement with a loyalty program and the purchasing frequence. In fact, according to the study, “content personalization/relevance is one of the two basic conditions for driving members’ purchasing frequence.”
Music to my ears 😊, because personalization, I stumbled upon it a long time ago and it has never left me since. Yep, personalization impacts engagement with a brand.
Personalization is the key to relevance and, in 2021, you can’t ignore it anymore… It doesn’t have to be complex, some people have everything they need to deploy communications with 1 : 1 content. However, it’s also not a requirement to wait until you can achieve that level of personalization or even do it all the time in every communication. There are different levels of personalization and you can even play around with the degrees of personalization in the same communication…what a blast!
Of course, structure, access to data and tools to facilitate production are key. So you need a flexible and efficient platform that gives you access to everything you need, like the Dialog Insight platform.
Do you know content sequencing ?
It’s simple, it allows you to position the same content differently depending on the preferences, transactions, web behavior, provenance… of a contact or group of contacts.
This option allows you to be more relevant while not being in 1 : 1 content 😊 This can help you to:
- Respond to a specific internal request to feature certain content.
- Meet alignment with your strategic direction.
- Demonstrate to your customers your overall offering while pointing to content that is more relevant to them as input.
- Etc…
Content sequencing doesn’t have to be an alternative, but one more solution to deliver relevant content.
For this option, you can use preferences, transactional data, behavioral data, but it can be as simple as the gender of a person.
It’s easy to program sequencing criteria into an email template, whether it’s in HTML or via a drag&drop template, like our easy-to-use templates! Ask us and we’ll be happy to show you.
Personalization by persona and by segment
Again, you won’t necessarily be in 1 : 1, but the relevance to your reader will be there. It’s simple, develop content according to your persona. You don’t have a persona? It can be according to different segments or to customers’ clusters. The idea is to group contacts according to certain criteria, the propensity to have a similar interest in a group… as the good old saying goes: “who looks alike comes together”. This form of personalization can start from a person’s granular data if you have it, but the whole thing is pulled together to form segments/persona/groups, which makes the content personalized to that group. This can be done from :
- Qualitative or declarative preference that can be captured via forms such as those commonly used on our platform;
- Transactions made in store (POS), on your website, captured by your loyalty program;
- Browsing behavior on your website captured, for example, with our Journey tool;
- Level of loyalty;
- Etc…
Personalized content can be anything from reading content, offers, promotions or even a visual.
Did you know that at Dialog Insight, we have a tool to facilitate personalization via persona?
To guide you, our team has written an article about marketing personas and how to define them.
1 : 1 personalization
Here you get the whole package!
At this level, it necessarily takes data attached specifically to a person as transactional data and as a journey on your website. It must also be easily accessible.
The content offered in your communication will be pushed based on the past transactions/behaviors of the customer. The content is therefore based on facts. Therefore, it is important to equip yourself properly in order to ensure a sharpness in your work without complicating your life or your team’s life! Tools such as DImension, Assets and Scoring from Dialog Insight can help you provide a high level of personalization and track your results and performance in detail, all with ease.
Play with the different levels of personalization in your communications, you’ll see, it’s pure fun. You’ll see the impact on your customers’ engagement. In the same communication, depending on the space, you can vary the type of personalization or, if you prefer, from one communication to another…
Haven’t you started yet?
You need to build a road map:
- See what you can do now and where you want to go…one step at a time.
- Establish a plan to enrich your customer knowledge, from data capture to data exploitation.
If you don’t know where to start, at Dialog Insight, we can help. And you know what? We’d love to, because personalization is what we’re all about. We have the technology platform to do just that, with different features to meet the needs of the simplest to the most complex! And on top of that, we have a team of strategy experts to support you.
In conclusion
I agree with Hans Laroche (R3 – LoyauT study), personalization is no longer a luxury, it’s a must in 2021. Especially since there is a range of tools to help you achieve this, even with a small team.
Believe me, one of our clients, simply by getting better tools, managed to increase its level of customization from 8 versions (including 1 : 1 offers) to 180 versions. All this, without adding to his team and even reducing his production time! So more time for strategy.
So go ahead, have fun and be more relevant!