Personalization has been the “talk” of the marketing world for years. More recently, the practice of personalization has become increasingly important within other corporate disciplines such as customer success and sales. It’s easier said than done, though, and it’s not uncommon for marketers to consider personalization from only one perspective. For example, you might be focused on only messaging personalization—sending emails or messages with relevant, timely content to each of your users. While personalization and content segmentation are critical in today’s landscape, as the world digitizes further at a rapid pace, customer experience analytics becomes key. Providing the best user experiences online will help your brand differentiate itself from the competition.

Personalization is the means to deliver such premier experiences, but to truly achieve marketing personalization in 2021—and to do it better than your competition—direct your efforts on these three approaches:

1. Focus on real-time personalization

Data is crucial to personalization—of course—we all know that. But what data we use drives outcomes. While historical data is useful for uncovering trends by measuring performance over time, delivering the best customer experience requires real-time data.

Customers’ behaviors can change quickly and if you base your personalization experiences solely on historical data, many of the experiences customers encounter might be irrelevant by the time they see them. Real-time customer experience analytics can account for changing individual behaviors, seasonal changes, and market trends.

To capture real-time patterns and behaviors and personalize experiences in real-time, marketers must invest in a customer experience solution.

2. Use customer experience analytics to go beyond content segmentation

Today personalization might be limited to sending content deemed relevant to similar groups based on data. But your customers are so much more than just the demographic, sociographic, and psychographic data that’s associated with their user profiles.

A best-in-class customer experience solution will enable marketers to go beyond audience segmentation to really understand each user’s experiences along the customer journey. A customer experience solution should be capable of uncovering and resolving any issues along the customer journey before they’re found. A tool that can track each user’s session to find the bumps in the road as well as leverage artificial intelligence to pinpoint any struggles through thousands of modeled real-world customer journeys is the ideal state.

3. Creating a curated experience for each customer

Marketers can reinvent marketing personalization in 2021 and expand it to more than just segmentation. Achieve this milestone by creating a curated experience for each user instead of simply sending content deemed relevant to them based on data. It’s worth repeating that customers are more than their data and their behaviors and interests frequently change. Sending out relevant offers and content based on data to each user is no longer enough.

Create a curated experience by extending the lens of the customer beyond just their first encounter but well into each becoming a loyal customer. The entire customer journey has to be examined and marketers must tweak their understanding of each customer as they (and the company) change.

“…companies either attempt to push new and improved offerings out to every customer or fail to notify customers at all of offerings that might be particularly relevant. Experience Curation requires active participation from both sides of the equation to continuously make small and large adjustments across every interaction.” — Norman Guadagno, CMO of Acoustic for ClickZ

Understanding the need to go beyond content segmentation in your pursuit of marketing personalization is the first step. The best brands today will focus on a more expanded, holistic view of marketing personalization to encompass every inch of the customer journey. A customer experience solution can be the tool to unlock true marketing personalization in 2021.

How can you achieve marketing personalization in 2021?

Want to learn more about this topic?