Personalization in marketing has moved beyond simply using a customer’s name or address. ‘Hyper-personalization’ is the next stage: it involves using masses of customer data to fully customize adverts, emails and interactions based on the demographic, location and behaviors of each individual.
Driving forward this new form of personalization is artificial intelligence (AI). This technology is able to interpret huge amounts of data in seconds and then generate copy or product recommendations. In the following post, we’ll delve deeper into the world of hyper-personalization by exploring some of the different AI-based methods.
Product recommendations
Many companies now use AI to provide hyper-personalized product recommendations through their site or app. Amazon notably recommends products based on what other customers have bought (‘customers who bought this also bought…’), while Netflix’s algorithm recommends movies and TV shows based on a user’s viewing history. Then there are music streaming platforms like Spotify that generate personalized ‘discover weekly’ playlists based on the songs you are listening to. Such product recommendations typically require using CRMs with in-built AI tools to automatically track every customer’s behavior.
Cold emails
A growing number of email marketers are embracing modern concepts like vibe marketing – which involves using AI to create emotional connections. Generative AI technology can now whip up personalized emails in seconds to send to cold contacts. These emails can be creatively angled around unique struggles that different individuals may be experiencing. This can greatly boost open rates without having to spend as much time manually fine-tuning each email.
Niche blog content
AI is also being used to create unique blog content. Not only can generative AI tools write out blog posts for you, but they can help you explore new angles based on certain keywords and demographics that you want to focus on. Various analytics tools can also be used to help you create content that people are going to read by identifying trends and gaps in the market that could be worth writing about. You can also use customer data to narrow down the most common customer profiles and then create content around these customers.
Chatbots
Chatbots are essentially automated customer service agents. Many companies now have chatbots installed on their website, which customers can ask questions to. These chatbots can be trained on data to provide personalized answers just like a human. It’s a huge step up from old-fashioned static FAQs pages. On top of this, it can reduce the need to hire full-time customer service agents (chatbots are available to answer customer questions 24/7).
Push notifications
Push notifications are pop-up messages sent to your phone by apps. These apps track your behavior and use this to send personalized messages (such as sending an enticing message if you haven’t opened their app in a long time). Some companies like Burger King have also cheekily used geo-fencing to send notifications to users who go near McDonald’s restaurants, encouraging them to go to Burger King instead. App developers can help you to explore creative push notification ideas.
