Ok. I’m dating myself here, but have you ever seen the classic 1980’s sitcom, Cheers? Remember that line from the show’s theme song, “You wanna go where everybody knows your name“?
Going much further back, to 1936, Dale Carnegie, in How to Win Friends and Influence People, talked about how people love the sound of their own name and crave feelings of appreciation and significance.
In 1937, Robert Collier, in his self-titled Robert Collier Letter Book, a marketing classic, talked about the importance of “entering the conversation in your reader’s mind”, in order to have a successful marketing outcome.
In marketing, and life in general, we love being treated in a meaningfully personal way. We are drawn to things we view as relevant to us. We even have a “switch” in our brains, the RAS, that filters out irrelevant data.
So personalization in marketing matters. It’s important to you when you are being marketed to. And it’s important to your customers.
According to a 2018 study, 92% of your marketing peers are using it in at least one form. So by all means, include personalization in your approach to marketing. You will benefit as a result.
But guess what? Today’s buyers are even more demanding than they were a few years ago. And your competition is more intense. Your buyer’s attention spans are shorter. You need to go a step, or many steps, further than mere personalization. So let’s talk about how you can incorporate hyper-personalization in your quest to win more sales.
Enter Hyper-Personalization
First of all, what is hyper-personalization? According to one definition, hyper-personalization “combines behavioral and real-time data extracted from multiple channels and touchpoints, for brands to create an extremely customized marketing strategy. This allows them to tailor products, services, and advertising content to each consumer for maximum relevance and conversion potential”.
It incorporates personalization and takes it to a new level by unleashing the power of technology, think AI, machine learning, and real-time data, to give buyers customized content, offers and a customer experience they find more relevant. Not to mention a customer journey they find more rewarding, one that could very well lead to those all-important repeat sales.
A prime example of personalization is including the reader’s first name in an email. What’s an example of hyper-personalization? Let’s say you run a B2B ecommerce site that sells construction supplies. Someone in charge of buying for a building contractor browses your site looking for concrete rebar tie wire. They don’t buy. You could then send them an Amazon-style email with links to the very supplies, and ones similar, they were browsing earlier.
Do you see how this could boost your leads, traffic and sales? Hyper-personalization can indeed be a valuable asset to your marketing campaigns. And it’s rapidly moving from “nice to have” to “must have”.
A lot of marketers are interested in hyper-personalization, but according to a recent survey, only 9% have completed a strategy to help them do it. This means you can get a leg up on many, or most, of your competitors if you implement and carry out a hyper-personalization strategy.
But this low number also begs the question, “Why have so few marketers adopted hyper-personalization, given how powerful it is?” Also, you might be discouraged, because a lot of the hyper-personalization success stories you read mention giants like Amazon or Starbucks.
The prospect of hyper-personalization can seem daunting. And keep in mind that hyper-personalization, unlike personalization, is typically done in real time. It requires a lot of data often taken from many data points. Therefore, it requires AI. So how can small companies like yours get started with it? You need the right tools. Although a detailed explanation of individual solutions is beyond the scope of this brief article, fortunately, these tools exist.
As you are considering the right solution for your needs, think about what you actually need in a hyper-personalization software package. For example, let’s say a particular tool focuses heavily on ecommerce, but you don’t do ecommerce, nor do you have plans to. That tool may not be the right solution for you.
Strategy First. Tactics Second
In your choice of hyper-personalization software, as with all parts of your marketing, focus on strategy first. Then find the tools and tactics to help you carry out that strategy.
But with any strategy, tools or tactics you choose, always use hyper-personalization to give your potential and current customers better levels of engagement, and content and offers they deem to be relevant to them. Use it to enhance their customer journey.
So bottom line, in 2020, hyper-personalization is rapidly becoming a “must-have” for marketers like us. But if the prospect still feels overwhelming to you, take heart. The team at Guerrilla Marketing Agency is here to help you. Reach out today to schedule a no-obligation discovery session. We look forward to helping you learn more about how to unleash the power of hyper-personalization in your marketing!
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