The 4 stages of hyper-personalisation marketing: the road to success

Hyper-personalisation marketing is a marketing strategy that focuses on creating a better customer experience by creating personalised, relevant content that results in higher engagement and satisfaction rates, increased conversions and more loyalty to your brand.

To create a customer experience that feels unique to every user, you need to move beyond personalising the message to personalising the context in order to fully engage your customer. To achieve this outcome, a hyper-personalisation marketing strategy combines artificial intelligence (AI), advanced analytics and real-time user behavioural data.

So how do you start? In this article we unveil the 4 stages that will help you accomplish an effective hyper-personalisation marketing strategy.

During the first stage, you start by creating a robust and scalable digital foundation that can deliver content to multiple channels, websites and brands simultaneously. To organise the digital foundation, centralisation of your content across all channels is key.

When you are working on a new campaign with a very clear message, you don't want to write the same content on your website, app, displays, ads, etc. again and again on different platforms. You need to think about a central place to store your campaign content and share that content across channels. Understanding where you can manage that content in a central way is the first step to stay relevant in today's hyper-personalisation society.

Throughout this stage, it’s important to invest time in gathering data on relevant customer journeys, ensuring you have everything you need to create a strong digital foundation.

Identification is the starting point for personalisation. By knowing who your customers are at every interaction (i.e. purchases at the counter, customer service on the phone, newsletter interactions by email,...), you are able to treat them as individuals with unique needs and preferences.

Don't forget to think beyond your analytics data here. By integrating CMS data, historic purchase data, purchases made in your offline stores, social media interactions, and any other touchpoint you could potentially track, you get the most in-depth view possible of your customer. The more data you can gather across touchpoints, the more accurate your customer insights will be and the more hyper-personalised your marketing can become.

If we take our campaign example from above, you want to know what someone has already seen and done while interacting with your company so you can send them the most relevant content. When they have already purchased your product, you don't want to email them a discount code two days later for example.

You can use these insights to report and identify weaknesses, and to further adjust the digital experience. By using the right analytics toolkit, you turn vast streams of data into insights that can be acted on, bringing it all under one roof to deliver real-time insights based on true 360-degree customer views.

In stage 3, you start testing based on the available data. Small changes are made to communications and messaging to A/B test whether it improves conversion or not. From these tests, you extract conclusions and report the results.

By testing out different pieces of content, formulating new approaches based on these results, and combining them with existing knowledge, you acquire personalised parameters for communication with individual customers. And if you keep repeating this process continuously, your parameters will become increasingly accurate. 

Throughout this phase, it is important to keep these experiments contained. If you make too many changes, you won’t get conclusive results from the A/B tests. And you still have your daily operations to take care of. We know you can't just drop everything and focus solely on new experiments. Find a balance between setting up new experiments and executing your daily operational tasks. Every marketer knows the 80-20 rule so perhaps it's a good rule of thumb here as well.

During the final stage, we create specific profiles for each customer by combining their ID with the data we've collected. Every interaction this customer has had with your company, will be included in this profile.

Every person in your organisation, from a marketer to a cashier or customer service representative, will be able to use this customer profile and same shared context to have personalised conversations with each of your customers. As a result, you can go beyond segmentation and you will be able to offer them excellent customer service and guide them through their hyper-personalised customer journey.