What if marketers could create a highly personalized communications plan for every individual in a database? What if the personalization was reflected across more than just content, but also cadence, preferred channel, layout, offers, and more? Further, what if your brand’s marketing plan could adapt in real time to meet each customer’s evolving preferences and needs? That’s infinite personalization.
Today marketers can achieve large-scale, hyper-personalization of communications with the use of AI marketing tools to:
1: Create data fusion to curate customer insights at scale
When it comes to applying data analysis to campaigns, context is a critical part of honing personalization efforts.
Consider the scenario of retail brand app users who only rely on the app to locate items in stores and get product recommendations based on shopper reviews. Traditional analytics would classify this customer as a low priority for app marketing efforts because they’re not making direct online purchases. Yet brands could view this unique behavior as a key engagement signal to monitor in their customer data platform or customer relationship management system. Then brands would have an opportunity to leverage the context of this specific use case to create differentiated messaging aimed at maximizing store visit experiences for this group of app users.
2: Use adaptive content to enrich personalization
Achieving deep personalization in communications requires the capacity to recognize the evolving preferences of each customer and adapt content to reflect their views, needs, and behaviors. Not only does predictive AI expand traditional data models to leverage real-time insights, its counterpart, generative AI, allows unique content versioning for every individual. These capabilities form the core of infinite personalization—i.e., the potential to seamlessly deliver completely unique content to every individual at every new interaction.
3: Individualize the delivery cadence
Knowing how and when to deliver a message is as important as determining what to say. Today’s predictive AI campaign capabilities can drastically enhance the effectiveness of communications delivery. It’s easier than ever for marketers to precisely align the frequency, send time, and prioritized channel to each customer’s demonstrated preferences.
4: Take split testing to the nth degree
Like other personalization efforts, predictive AI tools can now pinpoint split testing for each consumer. Rather than testing across entire contact groups or smaller cohorts, A/B testing is run at the individual level. It can also be scaled to go far beyond a series of tests to consider an unlimited number of testing scenarios—in other words, an A/B/n approach. Then, illustrating incredible content adaptivity, changes can be made instantaneously.
As marketers, we know every customer interaction is an opportunity to deliver new value in the customer relationship. Now, with properly connected data and trained AI, the possibilities to enhance individual customer communication experiences are truly limitless. The primary skill AI marketing tools lack (at present anyway) is imagination, but that’s where marketers can lead the way. Let’s dream big to achieve and implement greater personalization experiences for customers.
Key Takeaways
Todd Hedberg is a senior director, Digital Strategy, with The Lacek Group. For more than 30 years, The Lacek Group has been perfecting the art and algorithms of brand devotion. We help world-class brands identify their highest-potential customers, engage them across channels throughout their lifecycles, personalize each relationship for optimal long-term results, and measure the true effectiveness of those efforts. The Lacek Group is an Ogilvy One company.
I removed the parenthetical acronyms after these terms because they aren’t used again in the piece.