Personalization Variables: The building blocks of personalized experiences

Evolution of Personalization

It began the usual way: a forsaken email with the visitor name on top, and a message below that hoped to find the visitor well and urging them to buy. And to buy now. That strategy might have worked for the last two decades, but with 80% of customers now saying they will choose, and spend more, on brands that offer a great personalized experience, marketers need to reinvent their personalization strategy.

What began as a one-directional approach to personalization by uploading excel sheets with restricted user attributes, now needs to be a seamless “one brand to one customer” experience. Today’s new-age personalization is expected to have these characteristics:

• Individualized experiences not just for known customers, but also for anonymous customers
• Continuous and real-time data capture to calculate intent and deploy relevant personalizations
• Consistent delivery across all devices, screens, and channels to build an integrated customer experience

What are Personalization Variables?

Customer data is a treasure trove of information when you want to build long-lasting relationships. Insider’s Growth Management Platform collects a variety of customer data, depending on the products and integrations you’re using. Every data point, whether it is collected by Insider or sent to us via API, helps build unified customer profiles that capture who each customer is and what they want with the help of AI.

We refer to these data points as events and attributes. Before we move ahead to explain how we use these data points or ‘personalization variables’ to deliver hyper personalized experiences, let’s define  attributes and events:

• Attributes
  ​​Any user-related information such as first name, last name, email,and the last visited product are stored as Attributes. Such information is obtained through Insider Tag or Insider SDK. Attributes help you to filter and segment your customers and personalize your content. For example, you can personalize your cart reminder notification content with a ‘cart_abandoned’ attribute for each customer.
• Events
  Events are all actions of customers recorded via Insider Tag, SDK or API. Each event can have parameters. An event parameter is an event’s detailed information. For example, your event parameter can be “shoes” and “color red” when your event is “bought a product.” You could use events as campaign triggers and also create more personalized content.

By leveraging attributes, and event parameters marketers can build dynamic content like product images, links, messages and more to create hyper-personalized messaging and deliver experiences that are more relevant and engaging for their customers. 

How can you leverage Personalization Variables?

Re-engage Inactive Customers with recurring push notifications that are relevant and engaging.

• Target customers based on their behavior, for example by highlighting the last visited product that they did not buy from your website to recover browse abandoners.

• Create unique individualized off-site experiences on channels that customers love. Use interactive WhatsApp templates to boost engagement and recover abandoned carts.

• Personalize your onsite layouts by adding dynamic elements like customer attributes to homepage banners and hellobars to deliver an individualized experience for every user.

• Orchestrate seamless customer journeys to create a ‘wow’ moment for your customers. Curate paths across channels like SMS, Email, App Push, Web Push, Onsite recommendations, and more to get to your goals faster. Here’s a customer journey that one of our partners leveraged to bring their referral programme to life.

Wrapping Up

Traditional marketing advocates that good personalization practices result in an uptick in engagement. It should be clear by now that customers today are setting the agenda for how and when they interact with brands. They are in charge of their own journey and therefore their engagement with brands. The demanded experience is now a differentiator, and the service is what intrigues them.

Engagement nowadays represents and signifies the personal relationship that offers customers value wherever they are and whenever they are willing to engage—this, ultimately, is the experience they expect. With the common language of ‘personalization variables’, seamlessly delivering individualized user experiences across channels is now achievable, and relatively easy, with Insider. 

Insider’s service offers convenience, relevance, speed, and top-notch timing that will drive repeated customer visits, purchases, and engagement.

Insider is an all-in-one marketing platform that empowers global brands to create one-to-one personalized experiences at scale and see faster time to value. Please see our success stories with clients Virgin and Philips, who have leveraged personalization to deliver highly impactful user journeys.