AI and Marketing Personalization: The Perfect Pair

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AI and Marketing Personalization: The Perfect Pair

The Gist

  • Enhanced personalization. AI revolutionizes marketing by enabling truly 1-1 personalization for brands.
  • Collaborative efforts. Marketing and IT must work together to provide better, personalized experiences.
  • Customer-centric. Understanding and catering to customer needs drives relevance and business success.

The notion of marketing personalization and even hyper-personalization is almost as old as humanity itself. We’ve always preferred to do business with people and establishments that are familiar to us — companies that we trust and that comprehend us. We like to buy from familiar faces because we trust them, and we prefer to buy from businesses that have a personal connection with us because they are well-positioned to understand our needs. There is a connection on both sides. 

Brands already fulfill the first side of the equation: We buy from them because we have developed a connection with them, so we trust them. Unfortunately, the second side of the equation — the knowledge that businesses have from us — has been sidelined, but it is coming back.

From the Corner Bookstore to Big Chains

In the old days, people frequented the small corner bookstore because the owner knew them, their reading tastes, their previous purchases and their favorite genres. Most of the time, they had the perfect recommendation.

Being the owner, she would give us a discount, maybe candy and a warm and friendly service. The butcher, the marketperson and many other small businesses delivered the same level of service. These human interactions were enjoyable and rewarding, and we came out happy with both the purchase and purchasing experience.

Then, industrialization and economies of scale emerged. Big chains delivered the same products and services but cheaper. Smaller businesses were not in a position to compete, and most of them closed their doors. Buying experiences mutated and became impersonal and artificial. You became an anonymous shopper. The focus shifted even more to the brand, but the conversation ended up being a one-way monologue between the brand and its customer. Marketing personalization was nonexistent.

Related Article: Is AI Personalization the New Cupid for Customer Experience?

The Digital Revolution and the Return of Personalization

Then, the internet revolutionized everything. It brought email, ecommerce, social media, smart mobile devices, cloud computing and big data. Companies immediately saw the ROI of these marketing personalization efforts and started trying to deliver these experiences more widely. It began modestly, maybe with a personalized email with the customer’s name on it or an SMS thanking me for a recent purchase.

From within organizations, it was messy and transformative. Marketing departments, accustomed to a one-way communication approach, were now confronted with hard data and analytics. This hard data started to show that campaigns often failed, marketing dollars did not have the expected returns, and, most importantly, consumers were expecting a different tone and pace of communications. 

At the same time, customer journeys evolved from being linear to being convoluted through a myriad of new channels and data points. Customer experience became a thing, and investing in it drove returns.

Related Article: Crafting Personalized Marketing Experiences for the Privacy-Conscious Consumer

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