The concept of personalisation is now firmly engrained in every marketer’s vernacular. From the simple ‘salutation,’ right through to more complex behavioural tracking for subsequent ‘predictive offers’.
But despite great inroads in data and technology capabilities that can drive relevant and personalised experiences, many brands are still falling short of reaching their true potential to connect with their customers.
In this article, we take a look at five common personalisation mistakes brands make, and how we can shift our mindset to see personalisation as a ‘product’ in order to connect with customers in more meaningful ways – at scale.
1. The merry-go-round of ‘use case’ and ‘purpose’
One of the key challenges many companies face today is struggling to understand what personalisation really means to their company. This creates a merry-go-round of diving into the ‘use case’ and the ‘purpose’ and inevitably, the brand always ends up at the same point.
It’s time we strip it all back. Forget about customisation and individualisation. Forget about the use case of personalisation and the ‘single customer view.’ Instead, in this era of unprecedented change, we can start thinking about Personalisation as a Product.
So what does ‘personalisation as a product’ actually mean? It’s about taking an iterative approach to the delivery of various experiences to the market, via activating all channels with contextual relevancy. Getting it right means it enables you to scale, pivot and deliver more meaningful experiences to your customer, while testing and learning faster than before.
2. Focusing on the definition opposed to the capability
The concept of personalisation is a lot more fun and glam as opposed to its hardcore capability. Coming up with concepts around ‘moments that matter’ is great! But it’s also expensive, time consuming and has absolutely no relation to the capability that you have.
Feel free to define what it is to you – moments that matter, connected customer, audience first – and even drop the money on shiny new branding and design. But these steps should not be done at the expense of ignoring your current personalisation capability and the future capability you require. ‘But what if I don’t know what capability is needed?’ Great question, that means you are….
3. Creating a use case opposed to a product
The biggest difference with seeing personalisation work is the mentality between seeing personalisation as a tactic and personalisation as a product. Feel stuck understanding which tactics define what personalisation is to your brand? Then unfortunately you’re going to go around in circles and struggle to expand it beyond that one tactic.
Looking at it from a different lens, a product manager’s role is to connect the customer with the product, regardless of delivery or channel. Their sole focus is to scale an experience. So, if you put your focus on treating personalisation as a product, then you:
Build the foundations for scale – regardless of the use case.
Stop caring about the tactics, because your baseline product is already enabled the organisation.
Enable the organisation to take a collective stance on owning the tactic.
4. Focusing on details as opposed to scale
But what about if a customer signs up, deletes the cart, then logs in six times and then the session ends?
*Insert expressionless face emoji*
Personalisation is about delivering contextual relevancy, not edge-case fringes of the experience. An experience should always be contextual to the recipient’s current actions, then heightened by the relevancy that the messaging exchange is providing.
Think, “I want to bring my product, which is personalisation, to market, regardless of the channel. I then want to be able to iterate on my product in a cycle of optimisations.” Now that’s called scale.
*Insert thumbs up emoji*
5. Putting the channel before the customer
In a customer-centric digital ecosystem, if you find yourself incessantly talking about channels, then you’re in the wrong conversation. Personalisation when treated as a product, with capability and scale in mind, reduces the conversation about channel to a conversation around the iteration or delivery.
This is because channel is just a given. When everyone knows that it is possible to achieve regardless of channel. This shifts the conversation from ‘what about email and social,’ to ‘we have just delivered a next best product model to all the channels, and are testing with the site and email capability to then extend it to display and social – as we believe this will impact the customer the most’.
It all starts with a mindset shift and taking the tactical measures to bring the focus back to personalisation as a product. Because it’s only then when we can start to really focus on organisational enablement, to deliver context to a customer with the right brand communications. At the same time, we’re using data and technology capabilities to drive scale – regardless of the tactical iteration on the baseline product.
Where to start?
In summary, here’s a checklist of tips to help marketers start shifting towards a ‘personalisation as a product’ mindset:
- Integrate channels: Ensure that an experience can be triggered from any entry point, e.g. If a customer start’s their journey from an email, start the experience there. If they come direct, then start the experience there.
- Don’t focus on purely defining what it means for your organisation: Shift your focus to activating various personalisation products, as there is never one experience to rule them all.
- Focus on how that personalisation product will be delivered to the customer.
- Make sure that the use case can hit the masses to achieve the best result: If 5% of your audience are known on the APP, it will be hard to scale.
- Deliver data points to all channels: This will enable all channels to act on core data points – and actually build the capability for personalisation within your organisation.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ben Fettes
Co-Founder, Director & Head of Strategy at The Lumery
Ben Fettes is The Lumery’s Co-Founder, Director & Head of Strategy. With 10 years’ agency experience, Ben has worked on some of Asia Pacific’s largest brands including P&O, Jetstar and News Corp. Ben prides himself on finding actionable insights that drive measurable business outcomes for clients.