Top 3 tips to improve personalization

While more businesses are attempting to personalize ad campaigns, customer experiences, and branded content, many are also falling short. This shortfall has a lot to do with how businesses use personalization; here are three tips to a better personalization strategy.

by Kristina Knight

Expand your perspective on and definition of what personalization is.

"As consumers' expectations continue to rise, your standards for delivering individualized experiences should also rise. First and foremost, personalization should be purposeful. Treating consumers as individuals means that personalized communications are purposeful and proactive--using data in a way to tell an engaging yet effective and relevant story to create an emotional connection. This is not a revolution against "Happy Birthday" messages or "Hi Jim" greetings, but rather a natural evolution of mature marketing strategies," said Jim Dicso, President & CRO, SundaySky.

Shift from "next best offer" to "next best action."

"We often see personalization efforts focused on the transaction, rather than building the customer relationship. It's easy to take a "next-best offer" approach to suggest a customer buy this related product after purchase. Rather, advanced personalization strategies take a "next-best action" approach to provide more value to the customer beyond a sale. Next best actions that provide relevant information and proactively educate the customer organically build brand loyalty and distinguish the business as a valuable resource," said Dicso.

Use multiple data points.

"Personalizing the entire customer journey based on one single data point--i.e. an individual bought a particular product, booked a trip, or entered a store--is ineffective. Layering multiple data points, such as online behavior and historical interactions, the channel and medium where the customer interacts, and the customer's touch point in her journey with your brand, creates a holistic perspective of the individual. When designing new or redesigning existing personalized digital experiences, develop them with customer data collection in mind, so that you communicate one-to-one, while collecting more data for response, real-time marketing," said Dicso.

Tags: ad targeting, advertising, advertising trends, SundaySky, targeted advertising