Unveiling the Dynamics of Personalization in The Modern Day Marketing World

Before we talk about how personalization is becoming increasingly popular among brands, let us understand what personalization is. It talks about the feeling an individual gains through his experience while buying a product or service that makes them feel warm and special. Today, brands are leveraging this feeling to gain a competitive advantage over their rivals, reduce customer acquisition costs, and increase customer satisfaction.

Personalization is broadly categorized into three parts.

1. Explicit: When a customer creates a profile, a particular app gives its user the freedom to save contents of their own choice. Ex: When a profile is created on a brand website, customers put up the profile picture of their choice and search for the contents they want to buy. According to their needs, the customer may change their preference.
2. Implicit: Based on browsing behaviour, suggestions for a particular product come to the customer's social media page. If a customer searches for a particular book, similar suggestions and advertisements from publishing companies will keep showing up on the customer profile page.
3. Adaptive: The company can easily understand customer preferences and inclinations through their account. Ex: In the Myntra App, whenever a customer opens their profile and searches a particular segment of garments or saves their choice, next time Myntra offers garments of similar choice as suggestions, it has a metric system that says whether a particular fashion item will match a person’s own style statement based on their previous purchase history.

Mediums through which we can achieve customization are websites, mobile apps, email, online ads, etc. Mainly, these mediums trace geolocation, buyer personality, time of day, browser or device used for search, number of site visits, logins into portals, purchases made since the last visit, number of emails opened, affinity towards a particular brand, color, tags, keywords, and many other small things.

To achieve personalization successfully, good coordination between the marketing department and the IT department is required. The product manager will communicate the message regarding their offering to the software engineer and data scientist. A data scientist and software engineer will develop an advanced tool using AI and ML that will detect its target customers and store the relevant data.

There are various ways brands can create personalized content for their customers:

1. With the help of emerging technologies, companies can keep track of the things a customer searched for but did not go ahead and buy. They can recommend similar products to them to remind them of their needs. But the tricky part is that if not executed cautiously, it can irritate the customer at the same time.
2. Observe customer behaviors, patterns, and habits. The timing of sending a personalized recommendation must be proper. It will make sure that the customer opens the message and receives the information.
3. Once a customer has bought a product or availed of a service, if a new upgraded version comes into the market or an out-of-stock item comes back into the shop, it is important to let the customer know that if they are interested in buying, they can visit the shop or its online website (whichever is applicable).

Using this above-mentioned data, the analytics department will try to understand the brand’s pain points, where they need to improve, what product offerings the customers like, emerging trends regarding customer preferences, and everything else that can be analyzed.

The benefits of personalization are:

1. With the right kind of personalization in marketing, a prospect can easily be turned into a loyal customer. It often gives the feeling that the company understands what the customer wants and cares about their opinion.
2. If a customer enjoys a personalized experience, they will recommend it to their friends and family, which will help increase brand affinity. Customers who have received relevant messages will become loyal customers and will want to stay associated with the brand.
3. If brands know the customer’s choice of communication, they will channel their messages through that medium only. This will make customer acquisition easier.

But this personalization has its own challenges. For example, a company may struggle while compiling data regarding a specific customer. The chances of error are there. After that, there are concerns regarding consumer data privacy. While opening a profile on a brand's website, consumers enter their personal data. Companies have to make sure they comply with data privacy regulations. Sometimes companies use so much data that users get apprehensive about it. Companies should use data that is relevant and does not make the user uncomfortable or cautious. Although personalization has some challenges, its benefits exceed its negative side. With the discovery of new technologies, personalization is becoming essential to attract customers.