Why To Considering Using Personalization At Scale

Basic personalization is easy to implement and common eCommerce practice. Customers expect it but it does not excite them. Merchants are faced with the challenge of providing unique personalized experiences across channels, whilst complying with stricter data protection and privacy laws. This is where personalization at scale comes in. With its ability to understand input and data across different users, channels and lifecycle stages, it makes sense that it’s a key tool in your handbook.

What Is Personalization At Scale?

Personalization at scale means using reliable data such as:

  • On-site actions
  • Survey responses
  • Purchase history
  • Click profile data

In order to deliver personalized experiences to large numbers of customers across multiple channels. Personalization at scale can be found in different situations, such as eCommerce, music or video streaming services or any brands with strong digital presence. 

It works through three steps:

  1. Unifying customer data
  2. Segmenting audiences
  3. Building and launching personalized campaigns through this

Why Use Personalization At Scale?

There are several benefits to using personalization at scale. To start, it contains all the benefits of personalization that are well established, but allows these to succeed despite new challenges being faced. Ultimately it can lead to higher customer satisfaction and higher conversion rates; a win-win situation.

Your customer base will grow more loyal to your brand, increasing the chance of lifetime customers. This will be as a result of successful personalization, and awareness that your brand respects their data privacy. 

Importance Of Data

Data collection and analysis is the foundation of your personalization at scale. Data needs to be collected, rather than scattered across various platforms. Customer data should be integrated within one platform, that allows the potential for it to be analyzed efficiently. 

Once the data is gathered, it can be used to create 360-degree customer profiles. These profiles contain everything needed to make data driven decisions and successful personalization campaigns based on:

  • Demographics
  • Purchase history
  • Channel reachability
  • Predictive characteristics
  • Previously bought/abandoned products
  • Interactions/engagements
  • Survey responses

The benefit of using this kind of system is that you only need a few key data points to begin. You can just use click profile data from on site action and immediately you are able to create successful personalization campaigns from this. Once you start from this data, it can develop over time as more patterns and themes become established.

Anonymous/First Time Visitors

A great benefit of personalization at scale is that you can offer personalization to anonymous or first time visitors to your website. This hasn’t previously been possible. It gives you the capacity to tailor your personalization in real time, for example through personalized recommendations. It also means you can engage anonymous visitors with personalized web push notifications. 

Personalized Outreach

Rather than just exclusively on site, you can also use personalization at scale to reach customers over different channels. Email or SMS marketing platforms can use the personalization at scale data gathered to reach out to shoppers in new and relevant ways. This enables marketing outreach to continue within data privacy regulations. Through integrating different platforms (those that collect the data, and those that outreach), you can create a holistic and successful personalized marketing approach.

Maximizing AI Potential

Successful personalization at scale over a large audience base is a fine art. There’s a lot that needs to go into it, and it’s important to utilize the capability of AI to achieve this. AI and machine learning technologies can help organize and understand vast amounts of data. This can help you create campaigns that are optimized in performance and engage with the right customers for your business. 

Marketing automation, as well as email and SMS marketing platforms can help ensure that all of the elements of personalization at scale come together to achieve the optimal results. Reaching people in the right way, at the right time, with the right language is of key importance when it comes to personalization. Platforms such as Attentive and Klaviyo are great at achieving this.

Conclusion

The combination of data analysis, AI optimization and data privacy is what defines personalization at scale. When it comes to outreach, the future of marketing is based in data analytics. Knowing all of this it is clear why personalization at scale is so vital to any eCommerce strategy. It allows us to keep audiences engaged and entertained, whilst respecting their personal security and pushing business interests forward all at once.