What is customer personalization?
Customer personalization is a marketing strategy that uses customer data to offer highly tailored and individualized experiences with a brand throughout the customer journey.
Brands collect information from every interaction with prospects and customers with the goal of understanding their wants and needs. Then, they can use that information to:
- Create ads that are targeted in messaging and by channel
- Send direct outreach through channels like email or SMS
- Recommend products a customer is likely to purchase
Customer personalization requires marketers to understand big-picture categories and customer personas within their audience as well as nuanced characteristics that can change buying behaviors. For instance, they might personalize and segment campaigns based on:
- Which products someone has viewed or favorited in the past
- How recently they made a purchase
- How often they engage with the brand’s content or campaigns
- Loyalty program membership
Brands can use a variety of customer segmentation models, including demographic data (like age or location) and behavioral data (like clicks or website cookies) to personalize and target their campaigns.
The role of data in customer personalization
Customer personalization will always be out of reach without a solid foundation of customer data. It’s impossible to tailor a campaign to the individual without knowing anything about them or having the context and history of their buyer journey.
Marketers don’t need just any data, either — they need reliable, accurate, and current data. This should be from a single, centralized source of truth like a data warehouse that enables flexibility and ongoing data-backed decisions.
Historically, marketers struggled to access and activate customer data from the data cloud without the help of a data scientist or IT team. But now, with a tool like a composable customer data platform (CDP), marketers gain “self-service” access to activate data, create audiences, segment campaigns, and apply personalization for better targeting all around.
When marketers try to personalize campaigns without customer data, they create generic campaigns that customers don’t care about. But if they try to use outdated or inaccurate data for personalization efforts, they’re likely to send misplaced, poorly timed campaigns — the kind that can make a brand lose the right to contact an audience.
For instance, when customers receive too many irrelevant, impersonal campaigns, they might unsubscribe from email updates or SMS marketing or hide ads from the brand on social media. And enough content or campaigns like that will make them think twice about buying from that brand ever again.
Trying to win someone back after a disappointing experience is an arduous uphill battle. So, the best course of action is for organizations to keep data clean and organized so campaigns can be properly personalized and well-executed.
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