Recent studies show customers are more likely to purchase from businesses that provide a personalized service or experience. Marketers confirm this since they say they have seen increases in conversions, sales, revenue, and other crucial metrics once they implemented personalization into their marketing strategies.
However, everyone is doing it, meaning your personalization efforts must go beyond using the customer’s name where appropriate. Hyper-personalization takes personalization to the next level and is the difference between businesses that do the bare minimum and whose customers will forget them, and those businesses that customers will remember.
Understanding Hyper-personalization
Hyper-personalization entails collecting customer data in real time to tailor products, recommendations, services, and experiences depending on their needs, behavior and interests. Hyper-personalization is only possible when businesses have a 360-degree understanding of their customers. They also must understand what products customers are interested in and which ones they add to their shopping carts. All the above is only possible if businesses know how to collect relevant data and leverage machine learning, data analytics, and data science to make the most of this data.
How Does it Differ for Typical Personalization?
Personalization uses personal and transactional information, such as a name or organization, to give customers a better experience. Hyper-personalization goes much further than this by understanding customer intent. Doing so entails using real-time data to understand browsing behavior on e-commerce stores, on-site or in-store behavior, and engagement data that makes a customer’s intentions clear.
When businesses understand their customers at this level, and their intent, they can provide contextualized information and communication. Doing so leads to higher conversions and better marketing outcomes.
To better understand the nuance, think of an upsell offer. When using personalization, businesses would send an email or other notification about a product they could purchase according to their past purchase history. With hyper-personalization, the businesses would use a Shopify upsell app to send a notification about an offer or discount when a customer is on the website depending on what they are looking at or what they have looked at in the past.
What Your Business Needs for Hyper-personalization
As mentioned above, the most important thing a business needs to do hyper-personalization effectively is personal and behavioral, real-time customer data. The added benefit of collecting such data is they can use it to segment their customers into narrower groups that are easier to target.
The goal of collecting this data is so that the business and its marketing team can use language that individual customers can understand and respond to as opposed to doing the same for a group in a segment.
The second thing you need is personalization marketing tools. The right marketing tools should help you dig much deeper into customer data to find nuggets of information that enable hyper-personalization. Such tools should leverage data science and technologies like machine learning and artificial intelligence to help with this.
Every business is already leveraging personalization in their marketing so you will not get much benefit from doing the same. Instead, turn to hyper-personalization that understands individual customers at a much deeper level and enables you to target them individually.
