Personalization strategy

Marketers, beware! Don’t let segmentation drive your personalization strategy 

If you’re a marketer or advertiser, you’ve most likely seen a stat like the below:

91% of consumers are more likely to shop with brands who provide relevant offers and recommendations. 

As an industry, we all know that consumers prefer brands who tailor messaging and offers to reflect their individualized taste. In actuality, it can be difficult achieving this level of one-to-one marketing. When it comes to personalization, there are three great truths to it:

  1. Every business needs it

  2. Every marketing tool is keen to “help” you achieve it

  3. Rarely, if ever, does it actually involve a real-time personalized experience for the individual shopper on the other end.​

PERSONALIZATION TODAY

For the last few years, personalization has been a buzzword on everyone’s lips. Most have been unable to deliver true one-to-one marketing, leveraging real-time intent and interests to inform messaging, creative, and sequencing. 

The reality is that most solutions offer up a segment-based approach and label that as personalization. As a result, marketers have adopted this definition of personalization. Let’s take a look at how some ecommerce sites use a segment-based approach to personalization: 

  • Shopping Cart and Purchase Analysis: This shows consumers things like ‘Top Sellers,’ gathering the best recommendations to show based on analysis of overall product sales, ultimately delivering the same experience to everyone. 

  • Collaborative Filtering: This approach shows things like ‘Others Who Bought This Also Bought’ or ‘People Who Viewed This Also Viewed,’ based on group behavior, ultimately delivering recommendations based on product clicked, not the individual. 

  • Customization: This technique can vary. For example, Geo-targeting would filter recommendations by region, Weather would react to current weather in the region and customer segmentation would filter by set segments. While this approach is highly targeted, it still is not individualized.

Don’t be fooled; individualization is not just another buzzword! It ultimately is what marketers aspire for when implementing personalization strategies into their campaigns and plans. While personalization has historically been driven by segmentation, it should not drive it today. We, as marketers have grown and have more sophisticated goals. Personalization based on segmentation provides the wrong experience for most consumers and marketers. From the marketer’s POV, it is not helping to connect with individuals in a way that speaks to their real-time interests. Segmentation uses single data points to personalize the entire customer journey. Just because you know one thing about the customer doesn’t mean you know everything about the customer.​

By taking all attributes and real-time interests into consideration, marketers can have a full 360 view of the consumer and power individualization. For businesses seeking to gain a competitive advantage, it is important to understand not only the functional requirements for true personalization but the right degree and combination of these that will achieve the elevated customer experience. 

HOW ZETA CAN HELP

We combine the world’s third-largest proprietary data set and real-time signals to give you a real-time understanding of consumers. With permission based profiles of approximately 750 million+ people, that means Zeta can help power 750 million individualized experiences. In fact, we take signals from this group every second and connect the dots, so you have access to real permissioned identities. Not only are you getting a full 360 view of the consumer, showing interest and intent, but you can act on these insights, enabling you to deliver individualized experiences at scale.

 

Let Zeta take leg work out of it for you. Get in touch and learn more.

 

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