Making It Personal for Every Customer

TECHNOLOGY’S ROLE

Delivering personalized experiences at scale requires the right tools, experts emphasize. “Regardless of their personalization strategies, marketers can’t go at it blindly,” Burns says, noting that technologies for data management and campaign orchestration are critical. As these tools continue to become smarter and more advanced, they can often be integrated into a unified architecture that allows them to communicate and collaborate on a much larger scale.

Niemiec agrees. “If you think of personalization as a one-to-one interaction, completely customized and almost human in nature, the prospect of managing personalization with a growing customer base can seem daunting. In reality, customer interaction technology, from CRM tools to call centers, should do much of the heavy lifting, as long as it has been designed correctly,” she says.

She goes on to say that there are three layers of marketing technology solutions that make personalization at scale possible. The bottom layer is responsible for customer data and enables the processes of storing, managing, and moving that data to the systems responsible for executing personalization. The middle layer is responsible for coordination and features tools that plan experiences based on integrated information, such as a campaign management tool. The top layer is responsible for execution and includes any tool that a marketer might use to deliver an experience, such as a CRM solution, website, or mobile app.

All too often, though, the data and execution layers are sufficient to scale with growing personalization efforts but the coordination layer is overlooked, which can result in poor execution and, by extension, a bad customer experience, Niemiec says. “An ad that stalks you to purchase a product you’ve already purchased is typically the result of a nonexistent or non-functioning coordination layer,” she adds.

“The scale of crafting hyper-personalized experiences can quickly become insurmountable without the right tools and technology,” Burns says, adding that artificial intelligence technologies such as machine learning and data science “hold the key to creating the most personalized experiences at scale.” With these technologies, marketers “can evaluate all available traits and profile variables about their customers and deliver them the next-best optimized experience at any digital touch point,” he says.

In fact, Burns believes that AI can make marketing more precise than ever. “By tapping into artificial intelligence and machine learning to create spot-on relevant experiences and automation at scale, brands can curate unparalleled customer journeys that far exceed what human marketers alone can deliver,” Burns says. “By leveraging artificial intelligence, marketers can also take the guesswork out of learning what does and does not resonate with consumers. This ensures that customers receive only the most relevant experiences. As such, brands can go even further with their personalization efforts without having to worry or feel like they’re taking risks or making assumptions with their valuable traffic. The result is that the best experiences will only get better.”

Niemiec outlines three things to keep in mind as companies scale their personalization efforts:

First, having more customers might mean having different customer needs. To keep an eye on this, companies should regularly run broad-based customer analytics to identify behavior changes that should be addressed by their personalization strategies.