Not Stacking Up.
What does “Hyper Personalisation” mean?
Increasingly organisations are aggressively pursuing personalisation as a cornerstone of their direct marketing strategy.
The approach is founded on the general expectation that customers want personalised experiences – because A: everyone is special, B: as a reasonable exchange for the continued harvesting of their data and C: consumer research says that’s what people want.
As more and more people talk about “Omnichannel Personalisation”, and “Connected Customer” appears frequently in roadmaps, we see marketing leaders and teams grappling with a central issue – “How do we make all this work? How far are we meant to go?”
Conversations are turning to “We don’t think Personalisation is right for us” or “We’re not the kind of business that benefits from it” or “We don’t see the benefit”.
Typically, the first port of call is always “Technology will solve it” - technology though is also failing many organisations – often because technology needs to be in service of a clear strategy and ambition and not the other way around.
And so, you need to be clear on the ambition as the journey to great personalisation is not easy.
The important question is – “Do you even need Hyper Personalisation?”
For those that have trodden the road and are well down it – we’ve observed and lived clear lessons on pursuing hyper personalisation:
1. It’s hard.
2. It’s expensive.
3. It’s a long game.
4. It’s not going to be perfect or anywhere near the idealism that is sold.
5. When it works it’s beneficial for both sides.
6. When it doesn’t work it’s disjointing and detrimental.
7. Customers care – but probably not as much as you think
What it often boils down to is that success is a question of personalisation depth – how far do you take it before the returns diminish?
Here are detailed tips for success…
1. Where’s your strategy?
2. Understand why it’s hard and expensive and what to focus on.
3. Be ready for the long game.
4. Simple is better – right size.
5. When it works it’s glorious… wait, how do you know it’s working?
6. Align internally.
Where’s your personalisation strategy?
For those that think strategy is a waste of time – please skip on – we however find strategy useful when applied to many facets of marketing – including personalisation.
The benefit of sitting down and nutting out a strategy is it forces you to consider and purposefully design the foundation from which you can then make decisions.
The number one thing to work through is to be clear in your definition of the words “Hyper Personalisation” (Or Hyper…or Personalisation).
A personalisation strategy (Hyper or otherwise) should answer the most important questions:
What does personalisation look like for you and your customers?
What is the value of personalisation to you and your customers?
How will personalisation be experienced by your customers?
What is the blueprint for people, capabilities and data needed to achieve the vision?
Underpinning these questions should be clarity of vision, purpose, and ultimate objectives of personalisation within your context (backed by data is always helpful).
A good strategy will help you make better technology, data, and people investments.
If you don’t have a strategy – start here.
Why is it hard and expensive?
Truly good personalisation – that brings tangible benefits, often measured in the millions, is difficult to achieve at scale, all the time.
Why? Because it involves the right alignment of people, process, skills, data, and technology. If you have any of these things out of sync and not matched, it is going to seriously impact your ability to deliver good personalisation outcomes for your customers.
Data all over the place, siloed and not integrated? That will impact your ability to understand customer context and slow down your ability to properly respond to customer use cases.
People not trained or versed in the fundamentals of direct marketing? Then not only is execution going to be poor and technology use hampered – the experience of your team will suffer.
Massive over investment in technology? Everything else suffers because you didn’t leave enough money to focus on the more important aspects outlined below.
The path to good personalisation requires (in a general order):
Clear uses cases – remember the strategy part? Defining what personalisation looks like for customers enables focus on tangible outcomes.
Data – the ability to have good clean data and connect that data together to power technology and your channels is critical to scaling personalisation.
The right team and skills – you require data driven marketers, technology support and channel enablement.
Clear processes – structured processes enable time and care to craft the right customer segments, focus on customer experience and allow each moving part to operate correctly.
Measurement – beyond the fundamental need to understand performance of investment in personalisation, measurement in personalisation allows you to manage the depth with which you take your strategy.
All these are key foundational items for success.
But wait – where is technology in the list?
It isn’t - because if you don’t nail the above 5 points technology will fail. Focus on the 5 above and then work out if the technology you have can’t deliver – and if you need new technology, you have a clear view of how you are going to support it and what it needs to do.
It’s a long game.
Just like reaching peak physical fitness – personalisation success is won through incrementally doing the right things, day in day out over a long time period.
It takes years to build to a good consistent level of capability to deliver personalisation to a standard where you start to see meaningful returns. It can easily take 2-3 years to build the foundational capabilities to get going properly.
This means leaders, investment cycles and supporting teams (think tech, analytics, operations, contact centre and so on) need to be behind and ready for a multi-year journey - in fact delivering a solid personalisation ambition is a never-ending activity.
Returns and measurement also need to be clearly developed to continue support of investment and focus.
What personalisation will demonstrate is uplift in revenue, conversion, and customer satisfaction – if people can see this, you will continue to build support.
Simple is better: right size.
A driver of disenfranchisement with Personalisation is that it can be overwhelming.
There are many moving parts, lots of things to get right, fragmented customer engagement, alignment internally, pushback, sceptics, and technology challenges to name a few of the obstacles to overcome.
Very few people achieve what is portrayed in the media and marketing of the big vendors – in fact the hype (and fantasy) is proportional to the size of the vendor.
Yes, they will roll out the best keynote speakers and brands as use cases however those organisations usually have had:
1. The right investment, resourcing and have ticked off people, tech, data alignment and so on.
2. The kitchen sink thrown at the projects by the vendors to ensure success – they won’t wheel out the basket cases.
What does that mean for you? Keep the approach to personalisation simple.
Pick clear and achievable use cases (that ideally meet customer need). Don’t over complicate the customer journey or experience and minimise complexity.
Align your internal skills, capability and data to your ambition and use cases.
When you hit technology constraints (true technology constraints – not ones created through poor data or bad implementations) then look to solve them with additional capability, not before.
The other reason simplicity is useful is because on your side of the fence it is easy to get swept up in trying to create complex, connected customer experiences.
Be mindful, personalisation is not like UX – where a customer is constantly experiencing a consistent set of interactions as they move through your site, ecommerce, or app environment – and personalisation is part of CX but not the exclusive experience.
This means that by nature Personalisation is going to be impacted by two truisms.
1. Fragmentation – in a complex omnichannel world two things are true;
a. Attention spans are short – people can’t follow complex narratives – experiences are often very discrete as people are time poor.
b. Customers are not engaging consistently in each channel all the time – again this lends to snippets of focus.
This means your carefully crafted long winded personalisation journeys are not necessarily going to make sense in the way you think they will.
2. Personalisation is generally a numbers game – without good measurement it is easy to be lulled into a false sense that your personalisation efforts are creating outcomes – when in fact you just happen to be getting in front of customers.
This is why measurement is so important – is it the personalised products in your email or the fact that 30% of people opened? And a certain percentage are going to click and buy.
Those two truisms also speak to the fact that while customers want personalisation and relevancy, your personalisation isn’t like sitting down to a film for 2 hours… most customers aren’t in a position with the time or attention span to follow narratives you might be trying to layout.
The answer is thinking about where and when applying simple, pointed personalisation is going to be most effective.
When it works it’s glorious… well how do you know it works?
The final word on succeeding in hyper personalisation is that the real success lies in a continually cycle of hypothesis, experimentation, and refinement – all anchored in a strong measurement methodology.
Measurement needs to be central to personalisation as an art and science – machine learning, cheaper processing and storage have opened comprehensive techniques for understanding performance.
Applying good measurement principles enable you to hone in on what is working and either scale or refine it.
And the inverse is true – surprisingly, personalisation doesn’t always generate positive results.
Align Internally.
Larger businesses and those maturing their digital capabilities are starting to run into an interesting issue – everyone wants a bit of the personalisation pie.
This will start to create all kinds of chaos and headache – you’ll have ecommerce, loyalty, analytics, marketing, customer care, operations, digital and who knows all trying to deliver personalisation benefits.
Not only will the experience be even more fragmented for a customer (if not governed well), but you will also start to run into arguments over investment and attribution of success.
Energy will be directed away from focusing on customer outcomes and toward empire building.
And back to our first point – with a clear strategy and ambition – aligned internally will be the first step to success.
Many great brands have invested in, and proven personalisation provides significant uplift in revenue, conversion and customer satisfaction – but everyone’s maturity and journey are different.
Don’t buy into the hype – focus on your vision of Personalisation – hyper or otherwise – and map out what it means to your customers and what your organisation needs to do to fulfill it.
You may be surprised to find you don’t need to take it as far as you think to be successful.
If you would like to explore any of the themes in more detail – feel free to reach out to us.