We hear it all the time in advertising, some form of “right person, right place, right message.” The ubiquity of this phrase shouldn’t discount its validity—to really speak to your customers and show them something they want elevates the customer experience and drives long-term ROI.
This is personalization. While its implementation can seem daunting, it can be helpful to think of the job in increments. Some of the tools you’re already using today can be used to up-level your personalization strategies, and then you’ll be on your way to more sophisticated use cases.
Start with data activation
Data activation, or what we used to call onboarding, enables marketers to reach addressable audiences in all channels and devices. Identity translation technology bridged the various identity spaces that comprise a marketer’s tech stack, enabling seamless activation of high-value audiences. Activation is often associated with targeting, but it can vastly improve personalization strategies.
You can personalize digital ads based on de-identified offline behavior or attributes, like past purchases or interest data. This can be executed by using a data activation partner to deliver offline data to the DSP of your choice.
If you’re personalizing content based on a more complete view of the customer, that content is going to be more relevant and more likely to drive an action. A home improvement retailer can activate transaction data from customers who recently purchased a lawn mower in-store and target those users with other gardening tools online.
Personalization is often used on web and mobile, but as technology advances, we’re starting to see more sophisticated levels of personalization for platforms that were once not addressable.
Personalization on addressable TV
Addressable TV might be new to you, but that newness shouldn’t scare you away. Implementing a more personalized approach to TV can be relatively simple.
You can onboard—and model for scale if necessary—the desired audience to a leading multichannel video programming distributor (MVPD) to deliver data at the household level. This will allow you to drive more relevant TV advertising for clients and get better efficiency for an expensive TV ad spend that actually works.
For example, an auto dealership can activate customers who bought a car six months ago and target them with a commercial highlighting the dealership’s experienced staff and extended open hours for various auto services.
Now that your customers have seen your ad through an addressable TV campaign, they may want to go to your website to check out the goods or services. While a user can click on a digital ad and be directed to the related content, this doesn’t account for customers who visit your site on their own. You can easily recognize these customers if they log in, otherwise it’ll take some work.
Website personalization
Your website should welcome your users and make them feel at home, so you need to cater to them by serving personalized content in a privacy-conscious manner, but if you can’t recognize who your customers are, you won’t be able to treat them like valued guests.
If you work with a data connectivity platform, you can put a pixel on your site that will recognize the otherwise unrecognizable cookie that represents the customer who visits your site and map the cookie to a consistent, encrypted person-based ID. The person-based ID can be matched to the segment data in your CRM and you can then personalize their website experience based on de-identified attributes to a user who is not logged in.
Now, you can ethically supercharge the customer experience on your site and elevate ROI opportunity by displaying products the customer would more likely purchase. Using an identity provider’s pixel, a beauty retailer can recognize an unknown user as someone who has a long history of buying skin care products. The retailer can then personalize content and display products such as face masks on the front page, instead of eyeshadows and lipsticks.
This use case is technically sophisticated, and it’s one step closer to a complete view of the customer, which will vastly improve customer experience and drive long-term ROI.