Hyper-Personalizing the Digital Experience
Hyper-personalization, coupled with a data-driven approach, is an excellent method of giving clients what they expect: individual treatment at every stage of their customer journey. It paves a completely new way for companies to design digital experiences.
Offering personalized and consistent experiences to clients across all channels and on all devices is a must for any organization trying to fully grasp the meaning of the digital revolution.
A hyperpersonalization-based marketing strategy puts the customer in the center of all company activities. It creates communication around customer experiences and emotions. And it’s a way for brands to build a base of loyal customers who have higher buying propensity and more frequently make personal recommendations. A competitive advantage gained this way is more lasting and effective than one hinging mostly on product functionality or pricing.
Personalization 2.0
Making decisions based on data analysis is no novelty in the world of business. Yet, as analytical technologies expand, the amount of information we can access and must process to draw relevant conclusions is continuously rising.
Advanced methods of user behavior tracking, social media monitoring, the Internet of Behaviors, or even facial recognition technologies have all dramatically improved companies' ability to match content to particular clients (rather than to invented personas!).
Consumers nowadays expect more than personalized messages – they want all their experiences at all brand touchpoints to fit their preferences. At the same time, preparing a comprehensive personalization process is very time consuming and resource heavy.
Customers Buy Experiences
According to Salesforce, 52% of customers will switch brands if they do not receive sufficiently personalized content. Collecting and classifying data using modern tools like Google Analytics, Hotjar, or Kissmetrics is the key to creating truly personalized digital experiences. However, there is more to it.
Today’s expanding customer databases generate a very strong need to employ advanced analytical methods. Complex Artificial Intelligence (AI) or machine learning algorithms are increasingly used to that end. They help automatically combine various content elements and generate consistent, personalized messages in real-time.
Trends in Practice: Data-Driven Hyper-Personalization
Personalization is at the heart of all modern marketing efforts. For example, Heathrow Airport uses geolocation data to determine the physical whereabouts of its customers at particular stages of their customer journey. As a result, AI algorithms allow the airport to give passengers highly personalized content across various channels, which has increased average passenger spending by 40 percent.
The American industrial automation system distributor Marshall Wolf Automation is another example. They have increased customers’ average order value by 20% after providing data-backed personalized product recommendations to their clients.
Digital Experience Platforms Set New Quality Standards
However, ensuring personalized digital experiences in omnichannel is not effortless; it requires the real-time collection and analysis of data from multiple sources.
The CMS systems marketers have long used for creating and managing content are no longer enough. Such systems cannot handle the creation of hyper-personalized digital experiences and in-depth marketing analyses. Nor can they cope with increasingly complex buying paths and the omnichannel sales model.
An entirely new class of solutions called digital experience platforms (DXPs) has been developed to address the needs of modern digital marketing. DXPs allow you to easily create, unify, and optimize digital experiences across all brand touchpoints and all stages of the customer journey. Their key tasks are:
- Creating user process areas (i.e. personalizing web pages or e-mail automation mechanisms).
- Optimizing complex personalization processes.
- Handling sales-related processes (e.g. self-service or onboarding).
- Collecting and sending content to external channels and applications.
- Providing hyper-personalized digital experiences in real-time.
Trends in Practice: Digital Experience Platform in Omnichannel
Ensuring excellent digital experience across all sales channels is the National Bank of Canada’s (NBC) greatest competitive advantage.
However, financial sector clients tend to have exceptionally high expectations. They want to do their banking using their choice of channel (e.g. via an online portal, in a bank branch, over the phone, by text message, or even through the mail).
That is why NBC decided to adopt a heterogeneous approach towards building their digital experience. As a consequence, they treat the digital experience infrastructure more like a complex ecosystem than a closed platform.
This means the bank does not depend on a single supplier or technology; instead, it uses an array of solutions and is free to select the tools that best meet clients' needs.
Hyper-Personalization Requires Innovation
Developing personalized experiences across multiple channels requires continuous innovation. Collecting customer information and addressing customer needs is a complex, never-ending process. High responsiveness to change is necessary to succeed in this area.
Monolithic systems, on the other hand, can no longer meet all the challenges of digital brand experiences. They are inflexible, unable to adapt to the newest trends. They stifle innovations instead of encouraging them.
Thus, we can see the advantage of digital experience platforms that are created to support companies’ digital transformations. DXP can effectively integrate various systems and apply available knowledge to focus organizational efforts on ensuring excellent personalized digital customer experiences.
Are DXPs the Future?
Digital experience platforms are gaining popularity every year. In 2018, the global DXP market was estimated at $7.53 billion. Between 2020 and 2025, it is forecast to grow by as much as 12.07 percent.
In a world where digital experiences are as important as product price or quality, customers’ needs rule. Companies that want to succeed must address these needs, usually via digital transformation. It’s the only strategy that will allow organizations to redefine internal processes and tailor technological solutions to contemporary standards.
All of this points towards digital experience platforms that will allow companies to efficiently address both their own and their clients' needs. This will make the business highly flexible and ready to implement further innovations.