Driving Hyper-Personalization in Your Company

To be successful in e-commerce, you have to think beyond the conventional paradigm to answer the question: What do customers want?

The consumer experience has evolved from the transactional process of in-store shopping to one rooted in deep, ongoing and enriching relationships. It’s a modern experience built upon each consumer’s unique journey with your brand.

Research shows that 66% of consumers expect companies to understand their unique needs and expectations, and 52% expect offers to always be personalized. In a 2020 Statista study, 63% of marketers reported an increase in conversion rates due to personalization. And according to McKinsey, 71% of consumers expect companies to deliver personalized interactions—and 76% get frustrated when this doesn’t happen.

If you provide a unique experience for each customer, you’ll often forge a long-term relationship with them. This is why individualization is the new normal; it’s the building block for customer relationships, and it’s a critical imperative for success going forward.

Hyper-personalization is the differentiator

Hyper-personalization—or individualization in real time—will drive the difference between e-commerce organizations that succeed massively and those that lag behind in this key characteristic of the customer experience.

For example, companies typically lose nearly all of their app users within the first 90 days, resulting in a high customer acquisition cost. If businesses want to keep these users that they work so hard to acquire, they must prioritize user retention—and give them hyper-personalized content.

At CleverTap, we’ve seen brands achieve success with up to an 83% increase in conversion rates using hyper-personalization—achieved with no incremental spend—showing the tremendous demand for relevant, individualized content.

Three elements for implementing hyper-personalization

There are only three things that any company needs in order to bring hyper-personalization into its campaigns:

1. Intelligent data layer: It’s not about how much data you carry, with most organizations capturing more data than they possibly need, which leads to the creation of a dumb data layer—data that’s stored but not used. What brands need is an intelligent data layer that allows them to utilize the data in real time to provide compelling and individualized experiences to their consumers.

2. Internet scale: Scale cannot be an afterthought. It must be the very foundation of your strategy, because when we talk about hyper-personalization for large organizations, it’s about creating delightful, unique experiences for millions of users in real time, multiple times a day. If your current infrastructure cannot handle that kind of volume, it may be time to invest in serious firepower. Go big or go home.

3. Agility: Consumer tastes change quickly, and your company needs to do things rapidly and pivot when necessary. This means having everything ready—the expertise, tools and a ready-made tool kit that allows you to jump-start user retention and individualization efforts—and using approaches that can deliver strategic, measurable outcomes today, not tomorrow. Take a cue from startups that can quickly pivot when necessary to answer customer needs. Speed and agility are necessary to rise above competitors.

If you possess these three elements, then no matter what upcoming trends bring, your organization will be ready.

Effective techniques for hyper-personalization in e-commerce

To build these elements into a cohesive customer experience, you’ll need to put best practices in place. A recent report from Gartner details solid customer experience strategies including:

Making sure things work: Basic strategies include evaluating technology interfaces for ease of use and assessing customer-facing processes for efficiency. It’s about ensuring that customers find it easy to use your technology and that your touchpoints are free from friction.

The two key technologies that enable personalization: Analytics and data management are the two most crucial pieces of the hyper-personalization puzzle. Without them, your efforts fall flat.

Personalization technology requirements: Finally, the paper touches on assembling the solution using a combination of touchpoints, customer data, analytics, systems and back-office applications.

Ready for the future?

With the metaverse already in place and brands ready to use it to offer shoppers a hyper-personalized digital experience, there’s no better time to get all the pieces in place.

To succeed, your brand must offer an experience unique to each user’s tastes and shopping habits. With technology enabling brands to customize the shopping experience at scale and reach more shoppers than ever before, the only question is: Is your organization ready to take advantage of it?

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This article originally appeared in Business Reporter. Image: iStock id469781842