Today’s customers expect personalized experiences, full stop. That means your content needs to speak to the right people, in the right way, at the right time. To do that, you need a plan that puts people first.
Great personalization starts with high-quality content. It’s smart, timely, and tailored to what your audience actually wants and it’s delivered in their language, on their terms. But here’s the catch: you can’t personalize if you don’t know who you’re talking to. That’s where data-driven customer profiles come in. They help you understand your audience so you can create content that truly connects.
The evolution of customer profiling
Customer data used to be gathered via face-to-face interviews and paper surveys; that meant a lot of assumptions were made when designing products, services, and content. But in the late 1990s, software designer Alan Cooper presented the idea of “personas” to the design community, suggesting professionals use them as a tool for thinking about segments of their audience as living, breathing people, with goals, needs, and desires.
Personas are incredibly popular and they’re useful for targeting the market at large. But today, marketing teams can go beyond basic customer segmentation. B2C, B2B or B2EveryoneUnderTheSun, you can now collect an incredible amount of useful customer data from purchase history to lifetime value and customer experience.
With the right tools and techniques real-time data can be transformed into powerful, relevant content that improves the user experience.
Today, the power of data is helping us create 1:1 customer profiles, unlocking metrics and powering algorithms that allow us to create more effective, dynamic personalization that improve customer engagement.
Creating dynamic content for real people
It is those businesses taking their personalization effort further, owning detailed and dynamic customer profiles, that are leading the market. Experience leaders are leveraging the full potential of first-party data and automation technology.
Going beyond simple segmentation by demographics or geographical location, these businesses can create content that is as dynamic as their customers.
Dynamic personalization — an omnichannel personalization strategy that evolves with your customers — enables you to deliver targeted content with pin-point precision. To reach this state, your business will have to supplement “persona thinking” with customer intelligence, analytics, and “journey-orientated” content and messaging.
Go omnichannel for a more personal journey
Embracing omnichannel marketing is key to dynamic personalization. Your goal should be to have a 360-degree view of your customer’s needs and their journeys.
Be sure to collect customer data from as many channels as possible, unifying them with device IDs, cookies, POS data, loyalty program information, and similar unique identifiers. All of this, when combined, can help you create a more complete, dynamic customer profile for known customers.
Dynamic personalization needs to account for more than just the buyer’s characteristics and behavioral data, it must be relevant for their individual preferences and where they are in the customer journey. You can use the data profile you’ve built to predict intent and deliver contextualized content.
You could, for example, offer an automated special discount code to a customer that has been authenticated on your website, read a number of related blogs, shared product recommendations on social media, visited your retail store, and then browsed a product page. This tactic, which goes beyond simple persona or segment-based offerings, could really increase conversion rates as well as building customer trust and improving customer loyalty, retention, and customer satisfaction.
Keep in mind that when using personal data to drive dynamic personalization, safeguarding privacy is a trust-building essential. Customers are increasingly savvy and selective about who they share their data with, so marketers must strike a careful balance: collect only what’s necessary, be transparent about how it’s used, and give users control through opt-ins and clear consent mechanisms. As privacy regulations including GDPR tighten and third-party cookies fade, first-party data becomes gold, but only if it’s handled with care. Prioritizing privacy by design ensures your dynamic personalization efforts feel empowering, not invasive, and keeps your brand on the right side of both ethics and engagement.
Meet today’s high CX expectations
Today’s customers expect you to treat them as “a person, not a number”. With advances in omnichannel marketing technology, it’s easier to deliver on this expectation as long as you have the data-driven content to authentically connect with them.
Treat your customers as the individuals they are by digging deep into the data. You’ll be surprised at how easy it is to get to know and impress them.