One-to-one personalization: A personal approach
Explore the world of delivering a one-to-one marketing strategy, the key benefits, and eight steps that will help your brand optimize the customer experience.
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McKinsey & Company research shows that 71% of consumers expect companies to deliver personalized customer experiences and 76% get frustrated when personalization efforts are lacking — or go wrong. In this article, we’ll explain the world of one-to-one personalization and why it matters to your digital marketing success. It’s easy to see how one-to-one personalized marketing can be a critical driver of differentiation in competitive markets. Ideally, you want to use both approaches for an optimized one-to-one personalization strategy. Like any strategic initiative, best practices for implementing a one-to-one personalized marketing strategy on a branded website calls for stating your goals, adding data and defining business rules, and then iteration.
AI Summary
Customer experience is personal
Imagine visiting an online retailer in search of a new pair of running shoes. Instead of landing on the brand’s main homepage, you’re ushered to a special place that is set up just for you. This page suggests the best models to consider based on your past purchases. It knows your shoe size, whether you run on trails or roads, and whether you’re a middle-distance runner or an ultra-distance athlete. While it may feel so, this isn't magic. It's one-to-one personalization in action, and before long every brand will need to learn how to do it right.
At a time when customers expect brands to know their individual needs, wants, and desires, yesterday’s generic shopping experiences fall flat. McKinsey & Company research shows that 71% of consumers expect companies to deliver personalized customer experiences and 76% get frustrated when personalization efforts are lacking — or go wrong. The new imperative is to create hyper-personalized journeys that resonate with individual customers. In this article, we’ll explain the world of one-to-one personalization and why it matters to your digital marketing success.
What is one-to-one personalization?
McKinsey & Company defines personalization: “when seller organizations use data to tailor messages to specific users’ preferences.” Taking this explanation a bit further, we can think of a one-to-one marketing strategy as making data-driven efforts to tailor content and brand experiences for each individual customer rather than simply targeting groups, demographics, or customer segments.
To do this well, brands must leverage advanced behavioral data and artificial intelligence (AI) driven insights to deliver highly relevant offers and messages across channels — in real time. The results can range from successfully acquiring new customers to stronger customer relationships, customer retention, and unprecedented customer loyalty. (More on these and other benefits below.) It’s easy to see how one-to-one personalized marketing can be a critical driver of differentiation in competitive markets.
What are the two types of personalization?
If you’re new to the concept of one-to-one personalization, it helps to understand that personalization strategies can be divided into two main categories: explicit personalization and implicit personalization:
Explicit personalization involves collecting information directly from users, often through actions such as creating an account, completing a preferences form, or sending feedback via email or chat. This method relies on user-provided data to create tailored customer experiences.
Implicit personalization operates in the background, analyzing user behavior, data analytics, and touchpoints to infer preferences without requiring direct input from the visitor. The brand can observe these actions in their customer journey, like click-through paths, time spent on certain pages or channels, sentiment of past conversations, and purchase history to gain sight into the visitor’s ever-changing interests. Implicit data can help reveal their customer needs and desires that cannot be captured by explicit data.
While explicit personalization offers a more direct approach, implicit personalization harnesses the full power of data analytics to adapt a brand’s content based on customer interactions, shaping the customer profile as they behavior patterns change. It provides a seamless and automated experience that can delight the customer without requiring a lengthy back-and-forth communication thread to get input.
Ideally, you want to use both approaches for an optimized one-to-one personalization strategy.
What are the benefits of website personalization?
One-to-one personalization unlocks a host of measurable business benefits, starting with its ability to build trust and foster customer loyalty. When customers have a memorable interaction that reflects their preferences, it builds a sense of connection. Whether the website serves up the next-best course to study or the right music playlist at that moment, these on-point customer experiences add up over time to increase customer satisfaction and loyalty.
When customers have a memorable interaction that reflects their preferences, it builds a sense of connection.
One-to-one personalization can also drive brand awareness as customers share stories of companies meeting and exceeding their expectations. Each time a brand innovates and evolves its approach to customer engagements, there’s an opportunity for the word to spread.
Finally, don’t underestimate the role that one-to-one personalization can play in driving sales. An ecommerce storefront using personalized product recommendations can influence purchasing decisions in a big way. By tailoring offers to individual preferences and browsing history, companies can create a personalized shopping journey that not only boosts conversion rates but also maximizes the value of each transaction.
Plus, machine learning and AI-driven personalization can fine-tune customer experiences over time to enable brands to create a recommendation engine that anticipates customer needs or preferences. Brands like Netflix and Amazon are prime examples.
How can I personalize content on my website?
As you dive into the possibilities of one-to-one personalization, think about how you can make first-time visitors feel welcome and recognize existing customers from the very first click on every visit. These basic steps will generate easy wins, and you can build on the strategy from there. Like any strategic initiative, best practices for implementing a one-to-one personalized marketing strategy on a branded website calls for stating your goals, adding data and defining business rules, and then iteration. Follow these eight steps to make sure you maximize the benefits of this effort:
1. Define your one-to-one personalization goals
Begin by outlining your objectives. Identify specific areas on your website where personalized experiences can make the most impact, whether it's product recommendations, content customization, or targeted promotions.
2. Collect relevant data
Gather data from various sources to understand user behavior and preferences. You may want to leverage a customer data platform like Sitecore CDP to make sure you can drive personalization at scale.
3. Segment your audience
Divide your audience into segments based on shared characteristics, behaviors, or preferences. Leading platforms like Sitecore Personalize enable dynamic segmentation, ensuring that you can categorize users dynamically based on real-time interactions.
4. Create personalization rules
Next, you’ll need to establish the rules for content and experience personalization. Decide which conditions will trigger personalized content delivery based on user attributes, such as location, device, or past interactions.
5. Design personalized content
Craft content variations tailored to each audience segment. For this step, you can leverage content optimization tools to create dynamic content that adapts to individual user preferences for a seamless and individualized experience.
6. Implement A/B testing
You’ll want to try different hyper-personalized experiences to identify the most effective strategies. Built-in support for A/B testing allows you to refine and optimize your efforts based on the customer’s response to each option.
7. Monitor and analyze performance
To monitor the performance of one-to-one personalization, you need robust analytics tools that deliver insights into user engagement, conversion rates, and other key metrics. This capability should be a part of any personalization platform you choose.
8. Iterate and optimize
Here’s where it gets interesting: You’re going to keep evolving your approach based on the analytics and feedback you get to fine-tune the customer experience, One-to-one personalization is not a set-and-forget marketing campaign. Iterate and continually optimize, so that your website keeps pace with changing user preferences and market dynamics.
As the digital landscape continues to evolve, the need for marketers to embrace one-to-one personalization has become increasingly urgent. Customers expect it, and every brand can benefit from it. By following these guidelines we’ve mapped out, you can seamlessly integrate one-to-one personalization into your existing web experience, as well as other channels such as a mobile app or email marketing, and begin delivering the kind of standout customer experiences that make a difference to the bottom line.
Ready to get started? Learn more about personalization with Sitecore.