Personalisation, the idea that content can be tailored to each customer, has been the goal of every email marketer for the past decade or more. Yet, it’s also a seemingly impossible one. How can a business cater to the whims of people as different from each other as grains of sand?
Of course, the answer is that they can’t, which is where things like customer segmentation come in, i.e. making averages of groups of people.
Genres
There are no industries immune to the need for personalisation, whether it’s in product listings or simply how people like to be addressed. According to Salesforce, 73% of people want businesses to understand their needs, while 62% take this a little further, expecting them to anticipate them.
This ultimately means that a company that doesn’t bother with getting to know its audience has very little chance in a crowded market.
Netflix and NowTV tend to opt for genre-based recommendations, i.e. if you watch Alien, you’re likely to end up with Predator on your list, while fans of particular actors are likely to find them popping up time and time again.
Put another way, entertainment uses genres and other common elements to recommend other things. Spotify also picks out songs for users based on their previous activity, while Lottoland’s new online casino provides a Just For You section with suggested slots.
“Shoppable”
Recognising all this, PricewaterhouseCoopers claims that media fans are building a “new type of personal space” fed by instant access to all their favourite things.
As this cannot exist without the input of businesses, the onus is increasingly on content providers to connect with customers at the “point of consumption”, to quote PwC. This changes the meeting point for brands from dedicated stores to anywhere an advertisement can exist.
Imagine going through checkout on a social media post, for instance, or perhaps even at a marketing board in the street. Well, you may not have to imagine for much longer as some social media sites have already taken this leap. Integrated checkout has simplified e-commerce for consumers as they’ll now be able to buy products from social media posts directly, without having to leave the app and visit a third-party website.
Netflix and NowTV tend to opt for genre-based recommendations, i.e. if you watch Alien, you’re likely to end up with Predator on your list, while fans of particular actors are likely to find them popping up time and time again.
Put another way, entertainment uses genres and other common elements to recommend other things. Spotify also picks out songs for users based on their previous activity, while Lottoland’s new online casino provides a Just For You section with suggested slots.
“Shoppable”
Recognising all this, PricewaterhouseCoopers claims that media fans are building a “new type of personal space” fed by instant access to all their favourite things.
As this cannot exist without the input of businesses, the onus is increasingly on content providers to connect with customers at the “point of consumption”, to quote PwC. This changes the meeting point for brands from dedicated stores to anywhere an advertisement can exist.
Imagine going through checkout on a social media post, for instance, or perhaps even at a marketing board in the street. Well, you may not have to imagine for much longer as some social media sites have already taken this leap. Integrated checkout has simplified e-commerce for consumers as they’ll now be able to buy products from social media posts directly, without having to leave the app and visit a third-party website.
As for entertainment, being able to buy a song whenever and wherever it is played would be a boon for artists and listeners, but it’s not easy to see how this would work without adding extra steps like an app download. There’s also a privacy issue if an app is listening out for songs you might want to buy when you’re out and about.
Instant Gratification
The technology required might still be somewhere over the horizon but the concepts involved in personalised marketing are well-known. Point-of-consumption advertising leverages one of humanity’s flaws, namely, temptation or the need for instant gratification. True or not, plenty of news outlets will tell you that attention spans are decreasing with each successive generation that goes by.
Marketers don’t want these potential customers to go home empty-handed but an unsatisfied shopper isn’t going to wait around for a store to place exactly what they want into their hands. In fact, for the moment, that kind of thing would be more than a little strange – even unnerving.