Driving hyper-personalisation in your company

Abhishek Gupta, Chief Customer Officer, CleverTap

To be successful in ecommerce, you have to think beyond the conventional paradigm to answer the question: what do customers want?

The consumer experience has evolved from the transactional process of in-store shopping to one rooted in deep, ongoing and enriching relationships. It’s a modern experience built upon each consumer’s unique journey with your brand.

Salesforce research shows that 66 per cent of consumers expect companies to understand their unique needs and expectations, and 52 per cent expect offers to always be personalised. In a Statista study, 63 per cent of marketers report an increase in conversion rates due to personalisation. And according to McKinsey, 71 per cent of consumers expect companies to deliver personalised interactions – and 76 per cent get frustrated when this doesn’t happen.

If you provide a unique experience for each customer, you’ll forge a long-term relationship with them. This is why individualisation is the new normal. It’s the building block for customer relationships, and it’s the most critical imperative for success going forward.

Hyper-personalisation is the differentiator

Hyper-personalisation – or individualisation in real-time – will drive the biggest difference between ecommerce organisations that succeed massively and the ones that lag behind. Put simply, these key characteristics of the customer experience will separate the haves from the have-nots.

Companies already lose most of their daily users within the first 90 days, resulting in a massive increase in net customer acquisition cost. If they want to keep those users they’ve worked so hard to acquire, they must prioritise user retention. And to keep them, you’ve got to give them personalised content.

At CleverTap, we’ve seen brands achieving success with up to an 83 per cent increase in conversion rates using hyper-personalisation – achieved with no incremental spend or effort – showing the tremendous demand for relevant, individualised content.

Three elements for implementing hyper-personalisation

There are really only three things that any company needs to bring hyper-personalisation into its campaigns.

1. Intelligent data layer: It’s not about how much data you carry, with most organisations capturing more data than they possibly need. This leads to the creation of a dumb data layer – data that’s stored but not used. What brands need more is an intelligent data layer that allows them to utilise this data on a real-time basis to provide compelling and individualised experiences to their consumers.

2. Internet scale: Scale cannot be an afterthought. It has to be the very foundation of your strategy, because when we talk about hyper-personalisation, it’s about creating these delightful, unique experiences for millions of users in real-time, multiple times a day. If your current set-up cannot handle that kind of volume, it may be time to invest in serious firepower. Go big or go home.

3. Agility: With the speed at which consumer tastes change, you need to do things rapidly and pivot when necessary. This means having everything ready: the expertise, the tools and a ready-made toolkit that allows you to jumpstart user retention and individualisation efforts. This means using strategies that can deliver strategic, measurable outcomes today, not tomorrow. Take a cue from start-ups that are able to pivot when necessary to answer customer needs. Speed and agility are necessary to rise above competitors.

If you have these three elements, then no matter what the upcoming trends bring, your organisation will be ready.

Effective techniques for hyper-personalisation in ecommerce

To build these elements into a cohesive customer experience, you’ll need to put best practices in place.

A recent report from Gartner lays out some solid customer experience strategies in detail, including:

Making sure things work: The paper delves into some basic strategies, such as evaluating technology interfaces for ease of use and assessing customer-facing processes for efficiency. In short, it’s about making sure customers find it easy to use your technology and your touchpoints are free from friction.

The two key technologies that enable personalisation: Gartner explains why analytics and data management are the two most crucial pieces of the hyper-personalisation puzzle. Without them, your efforts fall flat.

Personalisation technology requirements: Finally, the paper touches on assembling the solution using a combination of touchpoints, customer data, analytics, systems and back-office applications.

Ready for the future?

With the metaverse already in place and brands ready to use it to offer shoppers a hyper-personalised digital experience, there’s no better time to get all the pieces in place.

To succeed, your brand will have to offer an experience unique to each user’s tastes and shopping habits. And, with technology enabling brands to customise the shopping experience at scale and reach more shoppers than ever before, the only question is: will your organisation be ready to take advantage of it when the time comes?

Healthy retention is your key to increased revenues. Download our latest guide to learn more.