Free Guide to Building Personalization at Scale
By: Amperity
Exclusively for CDPa subscribers, we are providing unlimited access to a preview of Amperity's recently published guide, "This Time It's Personal: The Enterprise Guide to Personalization at Scale." Read on for the first section of the guide and a link to download.
Personalization is a powerful method to achieve key goals. It’s such a compelling idea that the buzz surrounding it has made it seem like the goal in and of itself. But in fact it’s a means to end: building relationships with your customers so that they stay with your brand and bring you outsized results.
At the most basic level, personalization means using what you know about a customer to make interactions more relevant to them. Personalization at scale ensures your interactions with customers are always relevant. Scale in this sense has two dimensions: scale across millions of customers and scale throughout the key journeys that make up the customer lifecycle. It means speaking to their interests, preferences, buying habits, and history with the brand no matter when or where they engage.
This isn’t a simple thing to pull off. Just getting started on personalization means having full command of your customer data. Data provides the insights, context, and analytics that make personalization a powerful way to drive business results and delight customers. Without usable data, personalization is just a buzzword. With data that teams can access and rely on, it’s a powerful key to unlocking your business goals. The good news is that customers are willing to provide data in exchange for improved experiences. The challenge for brands is first in making that data usable, and then finding innovative and meaningful ways to use the data to make each step of the journey feel authentic and personal.
“Customer data management remains one of the biggest challenges for marketers because data is so critical for generating customer insights, personalizing experiences, and executing across touchpoints and devices” - Forrester Research
In our work with brands, we have identified three fundamentals that are critical to any personalization at scale initiative: access to reliable customer data, intelligence to use customer data effectively, and activation tools to put it to work. By focusing on these fundamentals, you can accelerate business and customer value, avoid common pitfalls, and and put personalization at scale to work for great customer experiences and strong business results.
Why now?
The Covid-19 pandemic brought a flood of customers onto digital channels, where customer expectations for personalization are heightened. In addition, competition and the sheer number of options have exploded as businesses shift online, making it harder to retain customers and driving up the cost of acquisition.
This has forced brands to rethink how they grow their business. The reality is, brands get 50% of their business from 10% of customers and 90% of business from 20%. This means they need to figure out how best to retain those top customers and find more like them. And one of the best ways to grow and retain customers is through personalization at scale.
Three Fundamentals of Personalization at Scale
Access to trustworthy customer data
You can’t use customer data for personalization if you can’t get to it, or if it’s not accurate. A key component of access is collecting customer data in one place, typically a Customer Data Platform (CDP). This can be challenging because as businesses have adopted more and more technology, customer data has been siloed across the enterprise. Once you have it in one place, it’s critical that marketers and other business teams be able to access data and have confidence in its accuracy so they can discover, create, and optimize segments.
Intelligence to use customer data effectively
What to do with customer data isn’t self-explanatory — which means businesses need insights and intelligence to know how to use data to power personalization and drive specific outcomes. Customer intelligence helps you take a strategic objective and identify the right tactics for business teams. That might be identifying which customers are fading away creating a campaign that brings them back, or it might be finding customers who have a high predicted lifetime value and nurturing them into the loyalty program — or it might be one of dozens of other strategic goals. This is where the status of personalization as a means and not the end itself becomes clear. The point is not to send a personalized communication so that people click through (an action), it’s to send the right kind of message to someone you’ve identified with insights and predictive analytics as at-risk or high-value or discount-prone to increase their overall relationship with your brand (an outcome).
Activation to bring customer data to life
Activation is the crucial final piece of the puzzle. You might have the best customer data in the world, but you can only realize value when you take action. This involves having seamless connections to the right omnichannel tools so that you can meet your customers wherever they are with messages that make sense for them. The last mile of personalization at scale brings together the benefits of customer data access and intelligence to create smooth, individualized experiences across channels.
Download the Full Whitepaper
If you liked what you’ve read so far, the full guide includes:
- Hows to get started, with examples from multiple industries
- Case study: Alaska Airlines
- Common pitfalls of personalization initiatives
- The technological capabilities needed to make it happen
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