Hyper-personalisation can be interpreted to mean something different. It can be daunting when choosing a provider, to sift through 400+ email service providers (ESPs), all chattering on about what personalisation they offer. Let alone be able to make sense of what the distinction between each is. It was about ten years ago that the lights began to go on, as people realised each consumer bought more of what was offered if it was pertinent to them.
Back then this appreciation was believed to apply to the use of just a few elements, like the consumers [name]. Indeed it is a sad indictment today that there are still so many who still haven’t moved on from this. If you Google email hyper-personalisation now, you’ll find even the search engines struggling to offer clarity among, what has become the real principles of personalisation. So many people still regurgitate the spiel they heard at university, banging on about it being name, age, geography, gender etc.
So what about product relevancy? Hang on, that’s just opened another can of worms. As soon as we discuss product content the next word you will hear is segmentation. But a segment is not personal. If you, as one person on an ecommerce database, bought a pair of jeans in the last 3 months, the adopted inference is that you have a positive inclination (and the money/propensity) to buy another pair now.
It doesn’t matter what else you bought, tops, coats, boots, socks, jumpers indeed anything; you just get lumped into a corral of people that bought that item too. There is little if any correlation between the two, just a sliced and diced database. This is just about the furthest you could get from personalisation, but because time is money, there are deadlines to meet, and a CTR target to achieve, off you go. A missed opportunity to utilise the nuances and subtleties of the data your platform gathers every day is lost.
Hyper-personalisation of email marketing
The main reason retailers continue to use segmentation is because it’s easy. It is not viable for even the most competent marketing staff to have the time to drill down to each customer, especially if you have millions of people to look after. It can’t be done, or so you may think, as Deloitte explained until hyper-personalisation came along. Could this be a deliberate belligerence towards all that AI has to offer?
Segmentation has now been replaced by a 1:1 level personalisation, widely now entitled hyper-personalisation, to make the distinction. However, the boffins quickly appreciated that it wasn’t just the products themselves that had a measurable sequence. These metrics track both product purchases, and the sequence of navigation used to arrive at that purchase. The amount of time that each specific individual views each SKU, how many times, and the individuality of that whole sequence, make up the structure of the buying decision itself, and have become the focus. If they only ever bought a product having looked at it 5 times, and they are looked at something 4 times, suggests a higher propensity to buy.
This has fragmented each discipline into specialist pockets. It has now become lucrative to be a data analyst. Data management is now big business. Hyper-personalisation, through the advance of technology, and by its success has, just like cells, become sub-divided.
Before we explore this, we should just make a distinction here. Another popular topic when dissecting the advent of hyper-personalisation is content. The platforms themselves want their pound of flesh too, as it offers them the biggest voice and additional revenue.
But by doing so, assumes the consumer is locked in. However, loyalty is not guaranteed. None of us go around with VR goggles on, only looking at our favourite websites. There is a small matter of going to work, sleeping, family, friends, health, car, mortgage, kids, TV, holidays, sport and of course food to fit in. So the only way to consider the machine learning element of AI hyper-personalisation, in its purest form is where it meets the consumer.
It must involve going to them, to capture, entreat and nurture their attention away from all the myriad of interests clawing them away. Put bluntly you need to allow to AI solution to send hyper-personalised product selections by email. To invite them back to your site to buy, again and again. The degree of your success of this has, and remains, the most effective focus of all ecommerce marketing disciplines. It is the leading provocateur of interaction, and therefore one that enjoys familiarity, which consumers verify by subscribing to your site.
How to make hyper-personalisation work for you
Hyper-personalisation, is typically a plug-in that once installed on your platform acts autonomously without any human involvement whatsoever. If you involve humans they have a habit of detracting from the purity of the data, which is telling you exactly the perfect products unique to each individual, and the time to offer it, again unique to each one.
Gone is sending out 50 segmented emails a day. With AI technology installed on your site, the AI/ML algorithm is already delivering the maximum return possible. It doesn’t need to be adulterated by adding left-field interest products too. That can be reserved for triggered solutions. When you start offering the purity and clarity of each selection, purposely relevant to that individual, it doesn’t go unnoticed, and denigrate the purpose. If you are on the money every time, people are going to love what you offer. it’s all about them, and less about you.
Consider your whims for a moment. If you have looked at a product a couple of times, to consider something you’re thinking of buying, and then as if by magic, that very item lands in your inbox on payday (or as the algorithm sees it – the day you are most likely to make a purchase), you’d likelihood to buy it goes through the roof. That’s exactly what happens with everyone else too. The effect is so prolific, that the stats suggest the return on investment is 20x higher than email marketing and omnichannel marketing combined.
Conclusion
When installed AI hyper-personalisation negates the need for any staff cost. Installing allows you to have a catch-all, so you can move on to getting new customers instead. More customers, then feed into the process, fed autonomously, capturing the maximum amount of sales – the perfect cycle.
AI hyper-personalisation selection software maximises the ROI, increases basket size (AOV), and delivers the highest rates of customer lifetime value. Therefore your first and foremost marketing tool should be this software.
