Going beyond marketing automation with hyper-personalized experiences

Under the hood: Everything you need to know about personalized experiences

What marketing automation is

Marketing automation platforms focus on automating everyday marketing actions. Digital marketers have the need to automate sending out emails, managing social media and other repetitive actions across touchpoints. Marketing automation technologies simplify operations, increasing the efficiency of marketing teams.

Optimizing conversions with on-site personalization

Personalization means delivering an experience that is unique to each and every visitor across digital touchpoints. Delivering hyper-personalized content significantly drives loyalty and growth in your business. Personalization at its core is a big data problem. Mining data to gather meaningful insights and making data-backed marketing decisions in real-time is the key to success for today’s digital marketers, across industries.

Transforming your channels into spaces where visitors can see your brand in their way is not an easy goal to accomplish. Reshaping customer interactions on digital channels by transforming them into more flexible and personal spaces requires personalization technologies, which go much beyond marketing automation.

Marketers have been struggling with managing fragmented technologies, making sense of data and technology roadblocks for decades. Personalization technologies help marketers easily act on ready-to-use and high-impact segments powered by an advanced data engine. As a result, visitors can enjoy personalized and relevant offers in real-time, improving their interactions with the brands they love, whether it’s a financial institution or an eCommerce business.

Segments are only as good as the data underpinning them. Collecting, analyzing, unifying and mining data for insights to deliver personalized experiences is a much deeper process than what’s needed for sending out automated emails to different segments. Understanding the meaning of pages on a given site, purchase paths of visitors and predefined custom events on pages to deliver algorithmic as well as rule-based responses computed and rendered in real time goes beyond automation.

Tracking behavioural patterns, thoroughly understanding visitor preferences as well as understanding what’s offered on each page of a given site or screens of an app including custom events to deliver real-time personalizations is not what most automation tools are built to do. Running on advanced machine-learning algorithms, personalization tools are capable of dynamically changing up the content on digital channels, based on rule-based triggers. Today, some personalization tools run on predictive segments allowing marketers to act on the future behaviour of their visitors if they do not have enough historical data to infer likelihood to purchase probabilities of their visitors. Personalization tools take data mining to the next level to power segments which are at the core of truly authentic experiences.

In short, personalization is far more than sending out segmented emails or generating traffic to digital channels. Some of the marketing automation tools attempt to involve personalization functions or extensions, yet they leave marketers confused as they are not built for that purpose to start with.

Delivering real-time personalized experiences in a split second

At Insider, we have a unique approach to personalization technologies. We provide real-time personalization and predictive segmentation technologies for marketers from a unified data engine allowing them to make data-backed decisions. The goal of our platform is to provide the right technology stack for marketers to deliver 1:1 real-time personalizations which goes much beyond marketing automation.

Email is a channel where your customers are required to opt-in, find the email interesting enough to open it and feel compelled enough to click through to your website. That’s a conversion goal for marketers using marketing automation tools and automation ends where the conversion goal is accomplished. Understanding the difference between web and app personalization and email and SMS automation is crucial for marketers trying to deliver seamless customer experiences.

Combining a visitor’s historical data and real-time behavioural patterns in a given session and comparing one visitor’s behaviour to other visitors journeys and historical data, Insider’s customer experience delivery platform helps marketers deliver relevant and personalized experiences in a split-second on web, mobile web and apps.

Delivering real-time data-driven personalizations across channels is the key to every digital marketer’s success. Looking deeper into marketing automation and personalization tools and understanding their uses and benefits will help marketers build the right technology stack to achieve their goals.

Marketing automation is not magic. It is generally believed that you can “set and forget” relevant content and it will reach the right groups of prospects turning them into leads — automagically. But this isn’t more than a myth.

Digital marketers need to dig deeper into the capabilities of martech vendors they are evaluating. Turning to marketing automation tools to solve personalization needs is not a sound strategy as these technologies serve different needs of marketers. Email has been a primary channel for marketers in conventional marketing however, digital marketing needs are evolving and new marketing technologies are emerging at a remarkable speed. Therefore, delivering automated emails will remain as only a small fraction of delivering personalized experiences.

Delivering personalized digital experiences at the speed of customer expectations is not an easy task. At Insider, we believe in the power of enabling digital marketers to take data-based actions in real-time and work on reshaping customer interactions on digital channels. Discover how leading brands across industries are leveraging martech to deliver truly unique experiences for each and every visitor, driving business growth and brand loyalty by reading our success stories.