Personalisation or Individualisation? Part 2

Personalisation or Individualisation?  Part 2 – Implementing Individualisation

What does individualisation mean for marketers?

As more and more businesses take advantage of individualisation, customers are increasingly expecting an individual experience.

When customers have sampled whats on offer by those utilising individualisation, the expectation that this will be delivered means the risk of losing customers arises when it isn’t.

The majority of customers are aware that their interactions with companies via websites, apps, email, text, social media, online ads, together with location tracking,  provide vast swathes of data. This should be highlighting their interests and preferences. They expect companies to do something with this data to make their user experience more effective and streamlined.

Unsuitable marketing at the wrong time can have a negative impact. 

Getting it right

Of course there are risks when implementing a greater amount of individualisation.  Potential customers don’t always want to feel like they are continually being tracked. Creating the feeling of an invasion of privacy could damage the brand for the long-term. Technology isn’t error-proof either, not all of the data gathered on a customer reveals exact interests. It is perhaps best to avoid trying to predict the exact feelings or preferences of the customer. Consider that your profile picture may not be flawless, even when a vast amount of data has been gathered. 

The overwhelming power of data

Individually marketing means you can respond in real-time to customer behaviour and interaction. This doesn’t supplant the necessity for a disciplined marketing strategy. Every marketing activity should form part of a wider plan. 

Although the power of technology is providing greater insight and automation than ever before, the fundamentals of marketing remain as important as they ever were.  You can only take advantage of the technology when your product, brand and values are all coherent.

Cooperation

It is more essential than ever that technology and marketing departments are working together. Without this interaction, the data gathered will never result in the most effective response. A marketing team can personalise but taking it further requires insight teams, marketers, content writers, developers etc. to all be working collaboratively.

Many businesses feel that they may not have the capability to produce pacy individualised customer experiences. However, by starting small there is an opportunity waiting. 

• Get your content right – make sure you have a broad and varied selection of content so you can decide what best fits the individual customer.
• Explore the power of automation – automation will respond to your customers, providing the right content, at the right time, based on previous behaviour.
• Train your people – You don’t want to have to rely on a tech team every time your marketers want to make a change. Empower your marketers/content creators to manage user experiences themselves.

If you are looking to make individualised customer experience work for you, Ethisys would  be more than happy to help. Just let us know.