Article Type: Personalization
Published: May 6, 2024
Reading Time: 4 minutes
Marketers have long been talking about the importance of understanding their customers at an individual level and engaging them in a more relevant and personalized way. Gone are the days of generic marketing strategies that treat all customers the same and focus on averages; understanding your customers at a deeper level has become imperative for businesses.
But what does it really mean to track and engage customers at an individual level? Does it mean knowing each of your customers by name? Knowing their birthday or what they like? Yes and no. It's more complicated than just using a few personalization tokens. As much as adding a dynamic field for the customer's name in an email is a step towards personalization at an individual level, it's very far from true customer-level tracking and engagement.
By analyzing customer data at the individual level, businesses can uncover unique preferences, behaviors, and needs, allowing for highly personalized and targeted marketing strategies. This level of granularity enables businesses to build more accurate customer profiles, predict future behaviors, and tailor offerings to meet specific customer needs.
Mass discounts and promotions can eat into a business's profits. By targeting discounts and promotions only to customers that need a nudge based on their individual behavior and preferences, businesses can reduce their discount budget while still driving sales.
Engaging with customers before they leave is key to customer retention. By tracking customer behavior at an individual level and identifying signs of disengagement, businesses can intervene with targeted offers or communications to re-engage customers and prevent them from churning.
By tracking your customers at an individual level, you can build better customer profiles and find your most profitable customers. You don't buy clothes for your 2-year-old and your 10-year-old children based on the 6-year-old size. So why would you do it in marketing?
Talking to customers as individuals helps create deeper brand connections. Customers who feel understood and valued are more likely to remain loyal to a brand, leading to repeat purchases and long-term relationships.
The foundation of modeling customer behavior begins with data. To truly understand each customer and engage them at an individual level, brands must go beyond demographics and surface-level data. Brands need to focus on collecting diverse data across touchpoints which involves gathering deep insights into customer behavior, preferences, and purchase history.
To build a comprehensive customer profile, brands need data across channels. Customers rarely engage with a brand in a linear way. One might like to check out the new brand collection on Instagram but will buy products based on personalized recommendations via email. Another customer might head straight to the store but then buy via a mobile app. All of these touchpoints are valuable signals that can help a brand build a holistic customer profile and understand individual purchase behavior and preferences.
What superpower should a marketer have? How about reading the minds of the customers? Well, that's what AI is for. Just having access to data is not enough to have a deep understanding of your customers. Brands should leverage AI to transform data into intelligence and insights into customer behavior, affinities, and preferences. With the help of AI, brands can analyze vast amounts of data, find patterns in customer behavior, and provide insights at a 1:1 level for a deeper understanding of each customer.
One of the key steps in customer-level engagement is modeling customer behavior to predict future actions. By analyzing past behavior and preferences, brands can predict customer propensity to take or not to take a certain action and offer personalized experiences that resonate with them. With the help of AI, brands can move from descriptive and diagnostic statistics to predictive and prescriptive insights and recommendations.
As one of Kognitiv's data scientists once said: "I don't need AI to tell me that my wife is mad at me, but I want AI to tell me when she's going to get mad at me and what I should do to prevent it."
Customer-level engagement strategies can only reach their full potential with access to real-time data, which needs to be transformed in real time to actionable intelligence. Without real-time insights, businesses risk missing critical moments to connect with customers effectively. Knowing that your customer needs a baseball hat but sending a baseball hat offer after they've already bought it from a competitor likely means you lost a customer.
A crucial part of engaging your customers at an individual level is having the right tech stack that can analyze customer data, deliver predictive and prescriptive insights, and enable real-time customer marketing.
Modeling customer behavior and engaging them at an individual level requires a comprehensive approach that goes beyond traditional data collection methods and simple personalization tokens. By collecting diverse data, gaining deep insights into customer behavior, predicting future actions, and leveraging real-time data, brands can create personalized experiences that drive engagement and loyalty. So, why treat all customers the same when you can treat them as individuals?
Kognitiv offers a suite of AI-native customer intelligence and activation software to help brands build deeper relationships with customers and grow a loyal customer base:
Track, predict, and optimize your customers' lifecycles with AI/ML-powered insights and activation to maximize customer lifetime value.
Enable 1:1 personalization at scale with AI-native data activation for personalization at scale across owned channels.
Launch and manage a successful loyalty program with a quick-to-deploy, scalable loyalty system with 200+ connectors for easy omni-channel activation.
Intelligently acquire and engage customers across paid channels with outcome-based AI/ML optimization for paid display, video, social and programmatic.
Kognitiv provides AI-native customer intelligence and activation software that helps brands inspire loyalty and maximize customer lifetime value through personalized engagement at scale.
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