Hyper-personalisation – Blessing or Curse?

Ever get the feeling that your phone is spying on you?

That somehow you get a very specific advertisement for a product or service that you and your friends were just talking about?

Or perhaps you start seeing Facebook or Instagram ads for something just minutes after you searched for it on Google?

Don’t worry, you’re not going crazy – this is simply hyper-personalisation at its best.

Gone are the days when one marketing message and one digital channel was being used to target all customers at the same time. Internet savvy consumers, who’re often using multiple devices such as their laptops, phones, and even wearable tech to shop online, are expecting a tailored digital customer experience from brands everywhere.

While no one wants to be stalked or have their privacy invaded, we as humans want to feel special and only want brands to reach us at the right time and at the right place. So is hyper-personalisation as an online marketing tactic a blessing or a curse? Let’s take a look:

Hyper-personalisation allows brands to leverage omnichannel data and artificial intelligence (AI) to deliver relevant content and create a personalised experience for every customer in real time. Also called Personalisation 2.0, this approach allows brands to anticipate user needs, predict customer behaviour, and sell with an extremely curated offer at the right moment. This digital marketing tactic can involve targeting new users, remarketing to previous customers, and is an effective technique for encouraging overall customer satisfaction and loyalty.

To get a complete 360-degree view of any customer, companies can use real-time offline data via in-store touchpoints, as well as any behaviour on digital platforms such as social media, emails, or website interactions.

You probably agree that it’s extremely convenient to see ads for products you’ve just searched for on Amazon or any eCommerce website. Hyper-personalisation takes it a step further by showing you products that complement your previous purchase, driving you to consider making another purchase! Although that isn’t the best thing for our wallets, there’s no denying that this makes shopping online way more humanistic and definitely much easier.

But this form of online targeting isn’t just about selling us goods – hyper-personalisation is also about enhancing a customer’s life in a less intrusive way that doesn’t break any consumer data protection laws. For example, by segmenting people according to their website behaviour – such as products viewed, hours spent on the website, time they visited the website – brands are also able to deliver their marketing messages via email campaigns at the optimal time. Taking it a step further, by using email metrics to track when customers open their emails or which links they click, companies can send out marketing campaigns at the specific time that their customers are most likely to convert.

Another method of digital targeting is listening in on social media. Observing the latest trending hashtags or tweets, reading what the target audience is talking about and interested in can make creating marketing messages much easier for the company. From a customer perspective, knowing that your thoughts and opinions are being heard by a brand makes for a great user experience in return!

Overall, the future is clearly leaning towards more rapid hyper-personalisation. A way to make new or existing customers feel heard and special, as well as improving conversion rates – it’s a win-win situation for all!

If you want to learn more about the different types of targeting tactics, sign up for our Online Digital Marketing course here.