Much has been written about predictive content personalisation, but what of predictive communication – hyper-personalisation. The more effective cousin, that takes the same technology but employs it in communication instead. The distinction being, one waits for the consumer to come to you, the other goes and gets it. Like the gun going off in a race between you and your competitors.

Mere content personalisation waits for the consumers to come to you, so logic dictates, to quote Linford Christie, when the gun goes off, you go on the “b” of bang,. And would achieve far more than passive tactics, no matter how good they are.

Predictive personalisation – now more commonly referred to as hyper-personalisation, is a AI machine learning algorithm that takes all the data from your site, and predicts what each consumer will buy next, and then sends each individual their own individual product selection offering.

Now more than ever, consumers want a unique experience as part of their customer journey. They expect personalisation in all aspects of your activity towards them, providing organisations with even more customer data from their reaction to those communications. As your number of customers scale, a massive question arises: How are you executing your strategy to target these volumes?

The answer should include robust predictive hyper-personalisation strategies capable to tracking the individual characteristics and nuances of each consumer’s buying signals, to the point it knows what each one is most likely to buy next.

Optimising product communication

Predictive hyper-personalisation software, it is a wholly autonomous marketing solution, that communicates personally with each consumer, based on that individual’s needs, wants and desires, not the retailers. Your site might be selling prestige products for you, but it is a source of intrigue, interest and enjoyment, to satisfy a needs or desires, to the consumer.

It perpetually changes and updates live as new data arrives, according to the whims and nuances of perpetual visits by that individual to your site, and when they do and don’t do when they receive a personal product selection email from you. It takes no regard, whatsoever, of what any other customer is doing as segmenting is abhorrent to the process. 

Being devoid of human input should offer an immmidate appreciation that the ROI has just skyrocketed. No human cost, the most expensive commodity involved in marketing. But in addition what comes with it is 24/7 attention to detail, data accuracy, individual personalisation – not what anyone else is doing, therefore all these added to gather deliver the highest ROI in ecommerce marketing today, according to McKinsey.

Autonomous solutions maximise communication ROI

Autonomy often equates to the ability to make choices and fulfil one’s interests, and computer science recognises this connection between autonomy and choice. However, irrespective of whether we adopt a legal, philosophical or practical approach, it is sometimes assumed that any reduction or manipulation of choice is negatively related to personal autonomy. Whereas reality is that the burden of choice can emancipate the consumer from that burden; the retailer’s use of relevancy selections being perpetual and so accurate that the consumer’s satisfaction is stimulated.

While time or cognitive limitations to processing information make some content moderation reasonable for the customers, there is no longer any concern of who decides which content is ‘relevant’, ‘optimal’ or ‘best’. The algorithm has used the consumer’s data to calculate this before presenting the appropriate and optimal product selection already. 

Even though content is individualised with the primary aim of increasing the bottom line rather than facilitating consumer decisions, it is not the aim to exploit. Far from it, the purpose is to eliminate the need for the consumer spending precious time, and avoid distractions from reaching the products they most want to see and buy. Especially from your competitors websites.

That this in turn negates their likelihood of looking at competitors sites as well obviously has a huge financial advantage over automatic, triggered or segmented alternative solutions. Autonomy might be assumed to have diminished when our actions are explicitly guided by the technology, but the reality is very different, as it has employed greater affinity with the consumer, and learnt a better understanding with every purchase and site visit impressions as they happen. 

It might be argued that systems do not explicitly diminish personal autonomy, but they might be perceived as creating environments where it becomes harder to change course of action even if one has reasons to do so. However, the reality is that it identifies a change of preferences and desires before it even becomes conscious to the consumer, so has amplified the autonomy not diminished it.

Why is predictive communication personalisation so important?

Inboxes are busy places, and it’s not always easy to cut through the noise. If you want readers to open, read, and engage with your emails, you need to do something to stand out — and personalisation is one method of doing so, but make sure you understand the the distinction between that, the milder form, and the much more successful predictive personalisation alternative.

Marketers who employ personalisation in their emails report 27% higher unique click rates and 11% higher open rates than those who do not. Meanwhile,  52% of consumers say they’ll look elsewhere for their shopping needs if a brand sends an email that’s not personalised.

Email personalisation isn’t a guaranteed ticket to success. But on the flip side, a lack of it is a quick way to ensure less engagement with your message. If more opens, more clicks, and more conversions are the goal, then personalisation is an essential tool to make it all happen.

Final words 

In a world where everywhere you look on your mobile or computer, there’s a competitor lurking somewhere to assuage your customer to their lair, away from yours, personalised emails offer you a lifeline to negate those advances by using your intimate knowledge of each consumer. Information your competitors don’t have.

By customising email content to individual consumers, marketers can build deep emotional connections with them, then, leveraging these relationships for higher chances of conversion.   

Install hyper-personalised product selection software  on a free trial today.