Do you have what it takes to deliver meaningful micro-moments?

When was the last time you felt offended because someone was trying to get a bit too personal? I recall a recent occasion when someone vehemently questioned my dislike for Vegemite. So, for brands trying to get more personal with their customers, it’s critical to get it right. And rightly so.

According to the Adobe Incisiv Failure to Scale Report, there’s a whopping 40 percent jump in value when businesses move from segment to micro-segment personalisation, and a further 11 percent increase when you deliver one-to-one personalisation.

But how can organisations gain momentum to take this leap towards hyper-personalisation? The challenge today for most organisations is to deliver these relevant, timely, and personalised experiences in a matter of seconds to millions of customers across touchpoints.

The need to build capabilities to deliver these meaningful micro-moments has been the recurring theme at some of our recent events, including Adobe’s International Roundtable conference. It was a great opportunity for me to reflect, share, and hear from our key customers on how they are refocusing their short- and long-term strategies to accelerate their personalisation pursuits.

Here are some of my key takeaways.

Revisit the personalisation landscape

With cookieless becoming the new norm, and privacy concerns peaking across the internet, most organisations are trying to explore ways to recalibrate their personalisation strategy. There are three important areas to consider as you navigate your way through complex digital dynamics.

• Data: Third-party cookies can no longer be your data currency. It’s the right time to build your first- and second-party data strategy so you can ensure there isn’t a huge impact on your personalisation programs. Deploy a customer data platform and come together as an organisation to collectively eliminate data silos across every business unit and region.
• Privacy: Data regulations are getting stricter by the day. Stop, assess, and establish a data governance framework that ensures your personalisation initiatives are built only around customer data, acquired and managed using data protection and privacy-compliant processes. A platform like Adobe Real-time Customer Data Platform comes with built-in data governance capabilities—ensuring end-to-end customer data compliance, helping your brand achieve privacy by design.
• Relevancy: There is a plethora of digital solutions available out there, and this number is constantly growing, resulting in a lot of digital noise. Don’t rush to jump on the bandwagon to deploy new marketing technologies just because those are trending. Instead, focus solely on your customers’ end-to-end experience demands. Carefully evaluate which tools and platforms will enable you to meet customer expectations, boost brand value, and drive customer loyalty in the long run.

Key milestones to chase

Creating truly connected experiences demands a well-strategised personalisation blueprint. Digital transformation is a long journey - perhaps endless. And navigating the road intersecting data, technology, and privacy isn’t easy.

Setting realistic goals and timelines is critical to driving early wins on your journey to delivering hyper-personalisation. Here are three key milestones to set and achieve along the way.

1. Build a unified customer profile

Having a holistic view of your customers, their online and purchase behaviours is imperative. As Manuel Valdes, EVP & chief technology officer - SEA, Central Group, says, “Consumers are assuming what organisations are personalising—they are not hoping or expecting—they are assuming we know who they are and what they want.”

Creating a unified customer profile is the starting point to understanding your customers and what’s driving them. You can infer insights from this information to build a precise marketing strategy for both registered and anonymous users. Capturing data that is relevant and actionable across multiple channels is what will drive your unified customer profile. It always helps if you are prescriptive about the use cases that you want your teams to accomplish. Remember to put your use cases through a privacy assessment to review the associated legal implications.

2. View personalisation as an enterprise-wide strategy

The pandemic exposed the need for technology-driven organisations to cater to different operational demands of various industries faster than humanly possible. For example, the eCommerce and food and beverage industries needed quick implementation of the last-mile delivery mechanisms, like shipment tracking and 24-hour delivery options, to make online shopping even more accessible than it already was.

As Paul Wallace, Digital Area Lead, 7Eleven says, “There is a fast-changing customer perception around what convenience actually is. The digital experience is making life convenient as opposed to a specific product delivering convenience.”

So, it’s not just the technology or data that needs to deliver an experience—it’s the whole organisation that needs to come together to establish an operating model with a faster time-to-market to make your customer’s life convenient. For this transition to happen smoothly, it’s important to review your organisational processes from a digital lens and let go of some of the legacy processes that may not be relevant anymore.

Consider building an enterprise architecture with help of an expert who has been there and done that. Fix and tweak processes that aren’t working well. Optimising your organisational processes related to content creation, conversion rate optimisation, testing, redesigning, and templatising environments can prove instrumental in driving content velocity, essential to delivering a successful customer journey. This can only happen when all internal teams are aligned with your data and personalisation strategies.

3. Add scale to your people capabilities

Although organisations across business verticals are deploying technologies to deliver hyper-personalisation, often their teams lack the essential skills around understanding and analysing data.

“We are looking at standardising the way we use our data in terms of expanding our capabilities to progress rapidly because with content and experience, you need to react rapidly,” says Manuel.

Turning data into actionable insights is not only relevant for management teams - it’s equally important to democratise data and make it accessible across teams so they too can decode, understand, and use data to make informed decisions and contribute effectively to the enterprise-wide personalisation strategy.

If finding the right talent is a problem, try and establish an enterprise-wide model to build agile teams that continue to upskill. Allocate annual budgets to invest in their training and development so they can match steps with the pace of digital change.

Building teams that can not only write code but also implement strategies to deliver value will be key. It’s essential to get the right people first before you deploy expensive technology, so you don’t have to play catch-up.

Guiding your personalisation journey

Bringing together people, processes, and technology to put customer experience at the centre of your digital transformation efforts is key to achieving hyper-personalisation at scale.

Adobe Professional Services can help guide you through this journey with easy implementation of platforms and practices that bridge the gap between your data, business units, and marketing initiatives.