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In today's fast-paced digital landscape, personalization has proven to help customers benefit from unique experiences tailored specifically to their interests and needs. However, these experiences can be unsatisfactory at times 😔.
Let me explain this to you with an example. For instance, a website might warmly greet you by displaying your name or designation but later provide you with an incomplete personalization experience. Thus, it is important that businesses use real-time data to give a genuine and up-to-date experience to its customers. Truly, this is what real-time personalization is all about! ✌️
This article aims to discuss everything you need to know about real-time personalization: how it is structured, what its implementations are, and what challenges it faces. And so much more! 👍
What is Real-Time Personalization? 🤔
Real-time personalization refers to the practice of delivering personalized content to each customer “instantly” based on their interactions with your company.
It is a step ahead of traditional marketing, as it is often facilitated by machine learning, artificial intelligence and big data analytics. Whereas traditional marketing still uses conventional methods of promoting products, typically involving mass marketing strategies aimed at reaching a broad audience through static content and pre-planned campaigns 🫣.
Hence, we can say that in the modern digital era we are living in, real-time personalization is no longer an optional thing; rather, it has become a necessity for marketing purposes. In fact, a recent report published by McKinsey made this evident by quoting, “Personalization drives performance and better customer outcomes. Companies that grow faster drive 40 percent more of their revenue from personalization than their slower-growing counterparts.”
So if we wish to make the maximum use of real-time personalization, we first need to understand how it works in today’s world.
How Does Real-Time Personalization Work? 🧐
Real-time personalization is a dynamic process that depends on several elements functioning together, such as an appropriate data structure, a marketing plan, and a marketing technology. The two main tools needed for effective real-time personalization are a customer data platform (CDP) and a marketing automation platform (MAP).
The CDP ensures that with all the customer data you have, a unified view of your consumers is generated, and once it is done, you can make use of this data in your MAP. From there, you are all set to design real-time personalized marketing that increases consumer engagement. Isn’t this interesting and easy? 🤩
Importance of Real-time Personalization 😇
Real-time personalization helps businesses achieve a win-win scenario on every level. This means that if you give your customers the personalized experience they expect, your business reaps the benefits.
According to a recent survey conducted by Marketing Acxiom, “The Future of Personalization in B2C Marketing," various brands mentioned their top three benefits of real-time personalization, and that is what the customers said:
- 44% said heightened customer retention
- 43% said enhanced lead nurturing
- 39% said increased CTA conversion rates
- 37% Increased customer trust
- 34% increased customer stickiness.
The above survey makes it evident that real-time personalization has the following benefits:
- Enhanced user experience: Real-time personalization makes the user experience more relevant and personalized, which can lead to higher levels of customer satisfaction and loyalty.
- Increased customer engagement: Real-time personalization ensures you are not sending outdated content to your customers, thus increasing their likelihood of prolonged engagement.
- Boosted sales: Real-time personalization shows customers relevant content, products, and offers based on their interests and needs, which helps businesses boost conversion rates and generate higher revenues.
Are you excited to take advantage of all these benefits of real-time personalization?
Come join us as we unveil the most popular and best examples of real-time personalization, which once implemented, leads to higher revenues and customer engagement for sure 💯.
Examples of Real-Time Personalization 🔀
Personalized marketing can be implemented across all channels and touchpoints; hence, we now look into a few examples of how businesses can use real-time data to make their campaigns more attractive and personalized.
🔸 Customizing content on the basis of location
This real time personalization strategy refers to adapting the user interface according to the customer’s location. You may improve the relevance of each user's customer experience by presenting local or regional content.
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Localization also allows you to display pricing in various currencies for certain locales, thus making it more user-friendly and easily understandable.
Additionally, if a customer has turned on location tracking on a store’s app and is two miles away from it, your brand can send them a notification with a special discount and a link to turn-by-turn directions.
🔸 Customizing content on the basis of user behavior
This refers to analyzing the behavior of a customer to find out how he has landed at a particular website page. This means that if a customer has visited a specific web page four times in the last two days, real-time personalization helps him view relevant content and page variations, depending upon his specific interests and persona.
🔸 Product recommendations
One of the most common personalized marketing strategies is product recommendations. It is a real-time marketing tactic in which suggestions for products are made to a customer based upon his individual browsing behavior, purchase history and other interactions with the brand.
Let’s take the example of an eCommerce website, which is a multi-product store offering clothing, groceries, and electronics. A customer wishes to buy a panini maker that has a few specific features and a low price range. By making use of this customer’s browsing and click history as well as search queries, the website directs him towards the page having all panini makers according to his interest, usage, and budget. Hence, real-time personalization has certainly helped him filter and find the required product.
🔸 Celebrating milestone accomplishments of a customer
Real-time personalization can be used to cheer on and celebrate customer milestones. This means that when a customer completes a certain step, he is appreciated and rewarded for it. We take the example of Calendly, which sends out a celebration message after a new user reaches the activation point and schedules an event. Such compliments have proved to be rewarding and motivating, thus improving customer experience.
Moreover, as an additional gesture, some websites also offer promotions and discounts on various milestone achievements.
🔸 Sending personalized offers to unsatisfied customers
Another real-time personalization example involves satisfying customers who leave a particular webpage, hit the cancel button, or remove items from their cart. It is first necessary to understand the reason behind this by knowing the customer’s response or feedback.
For instance, if the customer feels his required products do not fall within his budget, real-time personalization helps provide him with more affordable alternatives or personalized promo codes to be used for discounts.
🔸 Providing upsell opportunities to customers when needed
This real-time personalization tactic refers to the promotion of upsells, which are upgraded versions of an item a customer has initially planned to purchase. This helpful tactic not only increases conversion rates but also provides customers the opportunity to utilize a product or service with additional features and capabilities.
We take the example of Spotify where, after a certain playlist limit has been reached, the customer is encouraged to update his version to enjoy premium and ad-free music from all regions around the world.
Certainly, we are now well-aware of the best examples of real-time personalization in today’s digital world. We further review how these can be implemented seamlessly to achieve higher revenues and customer satisfaction.
Implementation of Real-Time Personalization ⚙️
There are a few actions your business must take to make your real-time marketing strategy a reality after you have made the commitment to do so. Let's examine this guide to ensure that personalization is effective for you.
1️. Define your personalization goals
The first step in the implementation process is to decide and define what you wish to achieve with real-time personalization. Is your priority revenue increase or do you aim at customer engagement and satisfaction? Once this is finalized, you can effectively create your personalization strategy to get the desired results.
2️. Collect your customer data
The core of real-time personalization is customer data which involves information regarding their demographics, interests and behaviors. This data is collected either as direct customer feedback using in-app surveys, or in the form of behavioral data by looking at a customer’s completed actions, interactive features, and visited pages.
Once this data is collected, it is analyzed and used effectively to resonate with your target audience, which is to be discussed later.
3️. Understand and group your audience
For successful personalization, it is essential that you understand your target audience first and then identify definite client groups based on demographics, behavior, and preferences. Once this is done, like-minded audiences with similar interests can be grouped together, and content can be tailored according to their needs, thus leading to an effective campaign.
4️. Implement real-time data processing
This step in the implementation process is the essence of real-time marketing which requires the capacity to process customer data instantly. But storing and processing data efficiently requires technical and technological capabilities. For this purpose, you should choose a website personalization tool that offers real-time analytics for optimizing customer profiles and tracking the performance of personalized campaigns.
5️. Do your A/B testing
The step of A/B testing involves creating multiple content variants, such as Version A as the original and Version B as the personalized version. The audience is then randomly segmented into groups, each exposed to a different variant. The test is run in real-time, ensuring each group only sees their assigned version. Once it is done, user interactions and performance metrics are collected and analyzed to determine which variant performed better based on the personalization goal set by your business. Your selected variant is then displayed to the entire audience.
6️. Analyze your campaign success
Since personalization is not a one-time event or a static approach, your personalization features and campaigns must constantly learn from and adjust to the changing preferences of your target audience. This means it is important to analyze whether you are able to achieve your personalization goals or not. These analytics will help you decide and make well-informed changes and enhancements, as you are now aware of what is functioning and what is not.
The above six steps have well-explained the process of implementing real-time personalization, however, when implementing this strategy, there are some common challenges faced. The section below discusses these challenges along with their solutions for a seamless experience.
Challenges and Solutions of Real-Time Personalization 💪
Real-time personalization is quite powerful and can greatly benefit your company in terms of marketing, however, its implementation has a few obstacles.
Let’s now explore in detail how we can address all these challenges through their potential solutions.
▶ Technical infrastructure
In businesses offering real-time personalization, various teams collaborate closely to ensure a seamless and effective implementation. The data science, IT development, product management, customer support, sales, and marketing teams have to be aligned in order to create a consistent and accurate customer experience.
Relevic makes sure to invest in its people and thus fosters a collaborative culture across all its teams with the aim of providing the greatest personalized experience to its customers.
▶ Data privacy and security
Utilizing customer data for targeted marketing campaigns requires extreme care and accountability. This is because customers are trusting you with their information, and you need to honor that trust. Hence, it is important for marketers to take privacy issues into consideration when building data-driven campaigns.
Additionally, personalization also involves dynamically analyzing and integrating large volumes of user data in real-time to ensure the personalized content remains accurate and timely.
Using a platform like Relevic, businesses do not have to worry about data privacy invasions of their customers. Their data is kept completely confidential to build a trustworthy relationship with them. Also, to handle large volumes of data, a balance is well-maintained to enhance the user experience without causing discomfort or inconvenience.
▶ Cost and resource allocation
Cost and resource allocation is another major challenge of real-time personalization because it demands significant investments in advanced technologies, such as data analytics, machine learning, and robust IT infrastructure. Moreover, the maintenance and scaling of these systems require continuous resource allocation and financial investment.
The web personalization platform, Relevic makes sure to use cost-effective solutions and scalable infrastructure for gradual allocation of resources and minimizing initial costs. Managing these costs while keeping the pricing plans low for customers is the main objective of the company.
Conclusion
Real-time personalization is helping your business do wonders, such as increasing your conversion rates and enhancing your customer engagement. But at the same time, it is important for you to ensure that its implementation is transparent and respects customer privacy.
And for that purpose, all you need is the right tool to make it happen. And for a marketing platform that has it all, discover Relevic.
Click on Relevic.com to explore all the features of real-time personalization and get your journey started today!
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