What is hyper-personalization? It’s an innovative method companies use to “tune” their marketing communications content to individual customers. This is done by creating targeted experiences through the use of data, analytics, and advanced technology solutions.
Why the Old Ways of Personalization Don’t Work
When companies take a legacy approach using broadly defined recipient segmentation and then build individual versions of marketing communications for each segment, the work can be overwhelming. The difficulty is not only in the number of versions that need to be built and maintained, but also the version multiplier that exists when delivering via multiple channels. Glaringly apparent is that the old ways don’t work.
The primary issue with the customer communication management solutions most businesses have in place today is they focus too much on fully composed documents versus a more flexible message content block approach. This requires management of every version of a marketing communication as an individual document. When it comes to any form of personalization, let alone hyper-personalization, every recipient segment typically requires a new version to be built. This leads to an explosion in the number of individual templates, which is incredibly resource consumptive, slow, and expensive to maintain.
Exacerbating this issue, when companies focus on a multichannel marketing strategy, content for each channel may be managed by different departments, meaning each channel has its own independent collection of content. This makes the idea of coordinating personalized content across channels difficult, and results in inconsistent levels of personalization across multichannel customer communications campaign delivery. This also creates challenges for expansion, adds cost, and expands complexity. It’s the reason many companies are still sending marketing communications using outdated workflows, which are resource intensive, less dynamic, and offer substantially fewer options for personalization and multichannel delivery.
Another problem with this is it results in a significant reduction in the capability to properly evaluate the response impact to different marketing communications layouts and messaging. Getting the right balance of personalization to increase responsiveness without being overly disturbing to the recipient can be a subtle process. Marketing teams need the flexibility to implement changes quickly to optimize the experience for their customers.
Four Simple Steps to Developing Hyper-Personalized Offers
Customers are more likely to respond when their experiences are personalized, fortunately there are new and better ways to achieve this. Here are four simple steps to follow.
Step 1: Eliminate the Legacy Approach to Managing Content
It’s time to stop thinking about communications as fully composed documents that need to be created and maintained separately. Instead, customer communications should be created using impactful personalized content blocks that improve rapid change management and overall scalability. Hyper-personalized content comes through a variety of ways such as a phone number, regulatory disclosures, product descriptions, offers, and images. The options are virtually endless and can be shared across all marketing communications. Personalized content can be displayed in a way that’s appropriate for each channel while still being centrally created, edited, and controlled through a central solution and workflow. For instance, a message used in a print communication may require abbreviated content when delivered via email.
A content block approach streamlines the creation of marketing communications and cuts down on redundant work. When a content block is edited, the change is instantly reflected everywhere that content is used, across all channels and communications. Content blocks can also have unique targeting rules, based on each customer’s information. This approach delivers a more personalized and targeted experience without adding a new set of templates to manage.
Step 2: Manage Content Centrally
Central management simply means content is no longer stored in separate channel-specific systems and is instead managed centrally within a single customer communications management solution that easily incorporates data and analytics. This is more efficient, and also gives businesses more time to add new channels and experiences without introducing the cost and risk of another application.
For most companies whose content is distributed across different applications, consolidating all this content can be an exhausting proposition. But it is not an insurmountable task. IWCO Direct offers tools that can ingest legacy communications, then automatically divide them into content blocks. Tools like this can identify when content is duplicated across communications and consolidate multiple instances into single content objects, thereby simplifying the process for migration.
Step 3: Accelerate Change Cycles by Empowering Business Users
Speed and agility are necessary to effectively implement hyper-personalization in a customer communications management system. Marketers need to be able to change messaging, gauge response timing, and evaluate the impact of different types of personalization to create the optimal customer experience. With a centralized content management solution, marketers can have full control over the creation, evaluation, and implementation of content changes across all channel communications.
Step 4: Partner with a Company with Dedicated, Proven Resources that Specialize in Configuring Solutions to Meet Your Needs and Not Theirs
The good news is that you don’t have to do it alone. Identify companies that specialize in the configuration of robust marketing technology solutions that seamlessly integrate with your existing strategy and workflow while delivering expanded capabilities. In addition, look for those organizations that have dedicated resources devoted to supporting your requirements during this period of evolution. IWCO Direct offers all this to our clients.
Ready for Hyper-Personalization?
Hyper-personalization involves communicating directly to individuals with messaging relevant to their needs. That means using response modeling and analytics to proactively anticipate a customer’s requirements. Achieving that level of personalization in customer communications builds stronger, more profitable, and more profound customer relationships, but it requires many marketers to rethink their current approach to customer communications management.
Until marketers adopt marketing communications management solutions designed to support hyper-personalization across all delivery channels, they will be forced to use broad segmentation and deliver generic experiences to customers who have the flexibility to easily go elsewhere.
IWCO Direct has been partnering with companies to provide proven, powerful, industry-recognized solutions to deliver hyper-personalization, with fewer resources and reduced costs. The resulting flexible design, ability to change content quickly, real-time validation, and unparalleled workflow and support has not only improved processes, but more importantly, has eliminated costs.
Contact us to learn how IWCO Direct can assist in your marketing transformation.
