Salesforce Marketing Cloud Agency How to use hyper-personalisation to make your organisation future-proof

How to use hyper-personalisation to make your organisation future-proof.

A two-part series on hyper-personalisation and adopting a customer-centric strategy.

Data, Marketing & Technology

Estimated reading time 5 minutes

key personalised marketing takeaways

First things first.

In our previous article, we established the importance of cultivating a hyper-personalisation strategy with customer centricity at its core, got into the marketing mistakes to avoid and revealed successful examples of personalisation in practice. Now it’s time to present our tips regarding the steps you can take to make your marketing hyper-personalised.

Data centralisation: Customer 360°

When your data is scattered rather than centralised, you cannot provide your customers with one consistent message across all channels – which is what customers actually want (76% of customers expect consistent interactions across departments within an organisation).  So how can you meet and, even more importantly, anticipate your customers’ needs? 

Utilise a single source of truth: Salesforce. 

With Salesforce, silos within your organisation are broken down and all your data is aggregated in a centralised space, ultimately allowing for the creation of a 360° customer view. All teams obtain an identical data view of the client and become better positioned to deliver seamless customer experiences. 

hyperpersonalisation customer identity

Feedback and customer insights.

After acquiring the building blocks for the data and defining the customer journey you want, it is time to obtain some insights. Map all the points in the customer journey that you and the client have identified as important for the customer and mark them in terms of emotions (happy – unhappy). On the basis of this map, you can mark actions that need to be taken. Again, keep in mind that the touchpoints should be personalised.

Go for continuous dynamic profile enrichment.

In order to obtain and retain a 360° view of the client it is essential to continuously enrich customer profiles in order to make them as complete as possible. You can do so by utilising Marketing Cloud and deploying methods such as:

  • Interviews
  • Observations
  • Personas
  • Holistic Customer Journey Mapping 
  • Value mapping 
  • Context mapping

Ask customers for their preferences, lifestyle, and other relevant points for future interactions, and in doing so, make certain to have 100% empathy.

A concrete example: email communication.

Let’s take email communication, an excellent and effective way to enrich a customer’s profile. Using Marketing Cloud you can set this up dynamically and roll it out on a continuous basis in all emails of your choice.

For example, you can ask your customer a profile enrichment question in a newsletter. The question that is shown in the email will be adjusted based on the customer profile. This means that if a person has already answered question A, question B will be shown. If question B is already known, then question C will be shown, and so forth. This way, you’ll build an increasingly complete customer profile, slowly but surely, step-by-step. 

And do not worry that your customer will not respond to this method; 69% of consumers appreciate personalisation as long as they have directly shared their data with a business. This means that asking the customer directly for input is even better than obtaining data in a more indirect way.

Lastly, you can also use the input you received to come to relevant conclusions for each individual customer, such as how likely they are to churn, their CLV, their wants, needs, pain and gain points within their CLV and how they can be improved. This view should be as rich as possible. 

Turn insights into interactions.

From segmentation to personalisation.

It all comes down to this: personalisation across all channels. Using Marketing Cloud and with the customers’ dynamic DNA as your point of departure, personalise all messages and triggers within each step of the customer journey, ensuring that you’re always sending the right message, at the right time, through the right communication channel. 

With each interaction, the DNA will get increasingly refined, due to which communication with the client will become even more relevant and effective. The end goal, of course, is to draw in more customers, make them more profitable and eventually increase their CLV. 

Once you deliver these components, it’s important to implement a continuous feedback loop as seen in the image below, to continuously learn, build, measure, evaluate and optimise.

continuous loop of learning

A future-proof strategy.

There is no doubt that the expectations for consistent personalised experiences will keep rising. To remain future-proof and keep driving value organisations will need to utilise superior knowledge about their customers, meet these expectations and even exceed them, fulfilling needs that customers weren’t even aware of.

The tips we have stipulated above will help guide you to ensure that your customers receive consistent and personalised experiences in an omni-channel journey, so that you can take their experience with you to the next level.

When taking a look at the hyper-personalisation graph, remember that there exists no one-size fits all approach. Imagine where you would position yourself on the graph and take it from there. Try to think, how can you move to the next checkpoint on the graph? 

hyper personalisation graph

Questions?

Do you have questions about Marketing Cloud and how you can implement a hyper-personalisation strategy for your business? Contact us today.

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Key takeaways.

  • Getting personal is beneficial to all organisations and businesses.
  • Always empathise with your customers.
  • Aim for the creation of an intimate relationship with your customers – at scale.
  • Utilise data to continuously enrich your customer DNA.
  • Deliver personalised and consistent interactions across all touchpoints and channels, i.e., be relevant for your customer, always and everywhere.
  • Your approach to achieving hyper-personalisation should be tailored to your business and where you are in the hyper-personalisation maturity graph.
key personalised marketing takeaways