Nothing is worse than searching for a forthright explanation of what something is, what it does, and a genuine measure of its effectiveness, only to encounter those, who don’t understand it, yet spout forth a steaming pile of irrelevancies, misconceptions and untruths. Life is too short and aggravating enough, without spending years of your life under misapprehensions caused by disinformation from the wrong people.
As hyper-personalisation has been around for just a few years now, you will most likely have encountered it, but perhaps without appreciating it. The greatest proliferation of its application is in ecommerce retailing. It is not, as some believe, Amazon’s “people who bought this, often buy that“, which is called “remarketing”. Hyper-personalisation has arrived as a capability derived from AI. So the first rule is if there is no AI, there is no hyper-personalisation.
Mere “personalisation” involves tailoring experiences based on basic user information including segmentation, while hyper-personalisation strategies use advanced data analysis, including real-time data, to create highly specific and individualised user experiences.
Therefore hyper-personalisation is the next level of tailored customer experiences. Distinct from basic personalisation, which might just use your name in an email, hyper-personalisation digs infinitely deeper. It uses every nuance and subtlety of captured data including impressions, time on page, frequency of repeat page views in what time frame, and purchase-patterns – in order to establish similarities to previous purchases that culminated in a purchase, preferences, trends, affinities, loyalties, desires, needs and wants all of which culminate in being able to offer a truly individualised experience, to each individual consumer. All of which have zero connection to any other consumer on your database.
Years of building a relationship between you and the customer have directed the retailer down a path of being somewhat ego-centric. You can fall into the trap of believing it’s all about what you want to offer them, as opposed to what they want. Hyper-personalisation turns this on its head and delivers customer-centric product selections/offerings of what they want (not what you want to sell them) when they want it, without it having anything to do with you other than being their preferred source.
This echoes that common analogy of the lady’s fashion atelier who at the appearance of a regular customer through her door, says “Oh lovely to see you, I just got something new in, which I know you’ll love, so I put it aside for you”.
The nah-sayers and gloom-merchants will be on their soap-boxes demanding absolution from any intrusive unwarranted invasion of their privacy, oblivious of the necessity, by law, of the retailer maintaining data-privacy legislation. Also, in light of the much-vaunted cookie laws, hyper-personalisation can only ever apply to sites on which every individual consumer has, by explicit agreement, agreed to the use of their data for exactly what hyper-personalisation does.
So what does hyper-personalisation offer the retailer, and exactly how powerful is it?
There are a plethora of software houses around the world professing to offer their version of hyper-personalisation. Sadly, our investigations revealed that many are gas-lighting the retailer, often using the disguise of having been a prolific personalisation solution provider over the previous years, and in some cases admirably so.
Our research on the distinctions among the top 30 hyper-personalisation solution providers is available to read here.
How should you appreciate the power of hyper-personalisation, in your consideration of it as a priority within your business? In examples we regularly see, among FMCG (CPG as they say in the US), its value is 20x greater than every other respected form ecommerce marketing channel combined. Bear in mind that this includes their visiting your website. So by definition, to surround each customer with products unique to them, by implication, necessitates you to take your product to them, not wait for them to come to you – the obvious means being by email.
If you do the maths, then each channel that offers returns, despite requiring a significant number of staff in many cases, with their inherent overheads, before you see a return. So your comparison/consideration calculation should include social media marketing, Google Ads, promotional email marketing, and even wider TV and press advertising. It is summed up succinctly in the explanation that “if you offer what people want when they want it” they are far more likely to buy it. Further the chances of them returning it are consequently a lot lower. Yes, it is that powerful.
In support of our work, much research has been done into hyper-personalisation by many leading business authorities and highly cited research companies around the world:
Forbes: Hyper-Personalization Is Already Here — Its Future Is Even More Cutting-Edge
Deloitte: https://www2.deloitte.com/ui/en/blog/life-deloitte-blog/2020/hyper-personalization-paradox.html
McKinsey: Hyper-personalized care and ‘care of one’
Forrester: Unlocking Hyper-Personalization At Hyper-Scale
Bain: The Art and (Data) Science Behind Effective Customer Personalization
If you would like to discuss the opportunity of introducing hyper-personalisation into your FMCG ecommerce retail site, then please drop us a line, we would be delighted to chat, without obligation.
