Hyper-personalization in marketing

Hyper-personalization delivers one-to-one customer engagement. With a target segment of one, marketing messages can be custom-fit with offers and experiences at the individual customer level. Advances in AI, data analytics and cloud infrastructure are enabling businesses to implement hyper-personalization to meet customers’ needs and preferences. In this article, we’ll explore how hyper-personalization works in marketing, the opportunities it creates and the essential role that a cloud data platform plays in helping businesses bring together, analyze and act on their customer data. 

What is hyper-personalization?

By treating customers as individuals, marketers can move beyond striving to simply meet their needs and wants to anticipating and surpassing their expectations. Hyper-personalization uses AI tools such as machine learning, natural language processing, advanced data analytics and automation to analyze, understand and react to customer inputs with precision. It relies on a wide variety of customer data, including information about in-app browsing behavior, purchasing patterns, customer relationship management (CRM) data, social media activity, customer service interactions and data-sharing partnerships. 

Hyper-personalization vs. segmentation

Hyper-personalization and traditional market segmentation share the same goal: to provide customers with offers, incentives and experiences that they value. But there are key differences in how the two approaches target customers. With traditional marketing segmentation methods, customers are divided into personas or groups based on shared psychographic, demographic and/or behavior traits. On the other hand, hyper-personalization uses powerful AI algorithms to uncover minute differences between customers and their respective needs. Using it to create a “segment of one,” businesses and brands can provide customers with the right message, at the right time, through the right channel.

Why adopt a hyper-personalization strategy for your marketing program

Today’s consumers and businesses expect more from the brands and businesses they buy from. In the business-to-consumer (B2C) world, customers see more authenticity, more value and more highly personalized touch points as proof  that the business understands them. In the business-to-business (B2B) realm, more relevant content and engagement opportunities  demonstrate a business’ understanding of  market or industry, and other pain points. And as competition intensifies, businesses are under pressure to differentiate themselves with their target audiences. Adding hyper-personalization to their marketing program places this goal within reach.

Deliver customer-level personalization at each stage in the buyer's journey

Hyper-personalization can transform the entire customer journey, providing consistent and memorable experiences that strengthen connections and build brand loyalty throughout. By connecting internal in-store, in-app and online data with data from second- and third-party sources, businesses can engage their customers in more meaningful ways. One example is the use of past purchases and browsing behavior to personalize website search results, ranking the products most likely to be of interest at the top of the search result. Other applications of hyper-personalization include offering individualized pricing, tailoring landing page copy, customizing product recommendations and promotions, and personalizing customer interactions. 

Leverage advanced data analytics and AI-enabled marketing tools

AI systems are essential for analyzing large amounts of customer data—especially in real time—and for using it to predict customer interests, preferences and behaviors. Machine learning-enabled marketing systems aggregate and analyze data from diverse sources, making required connections between data to build unified customer profiles, which then support personalization engines, dynamic ad content generation and personalized customer service. 

With their ability to learn and improve, machine learning (ML) models grow more intelligent over time, enabling marketers to optimize and refine their hyper-personalization marketing across channels. One example is AI's role in generating hyper-personalized offers for customers: Using real-time data, ML algorithms can analyze customer preferences, past purchasing patterns and current activity to select and send a customized message to a selected list culled from hundreds of thousands of possible variations.

Optimize marketing spend

Hyper-personalization helps marketers maximize ROI on marketing spend. Tailored content, data-driven product recommendations and—for B2C specifically—customized promotions and rewards can boost revenue by increasing customer lifetime value. With more engaged customers, businesses  can also reduce churn rates, retaining more customers for longer periods of time.

The cloud data platform’s role in hyper-personalized marketing

The modern cloud data platform is an essential technology for implementing hyper-personalization at scale. It equips businesses to collect and activate enormous quantities of customer data and power the AI-enabled tools required to realize true one-to-one customer personalization across channels.

Securing a single source of truth

Hyper-personalization in marketing begins with creating a single source of truth for all relevant customer data. A cloud data platform serves as the unified source for all your customer, marketing, campaign and enterprise data. This gives marketing teams a 360-degree view that includes every interaction with the business or brand alongside detailed demographics data and data gathered from third-party sources. 

Customer data platforms (CDPs) are gaining prominence as a way to help businesses capture and understand customer data. With the deprecation of third-party cookies, 

retailer data will become an even more important window into the buyer’s journey. Some cloud data platforms support CDPs with a single source of data that can be shared by all apps in the stack so businesses can activate quickly. 

Activating compute resources required for advanced, AI-enabled marketing tools 

Once organizations have unified their data, they need to support concurrent workloads, which is difficult on legacy platforms that have only a fixed number of servers. A cloud data platform is optimized to support compute-intensive AI and machine learning models, multi-channel personalization and real-time reporting. With the ability to instantly scale capacity to deliver more compute power on demand, a cloud data platform can accommodate dozens or even hundreds of users as they run a range of data processing and analytics workloads concurrently—including workloads for personalization, attribution modeling, ad hoc analysis and regulatory reporting. This ensures an organization has the compute capacity to conduct advanced analytics without bottlenecking other processes, which can negatively impact operations. 

Leveraging sensitive customer data while preserving privacy 

Data clean rooms enable simple, secure data collaboration, allowing for sensitive data derived from unique identifiers (such as emails, encrypted email addresses, names, device IDs and IP addresses to be leveraged while preserving privacy). Marketers can segment and target existing customers, using this secure data to enrich customer profiles. Data clean rooms can also be used to enhance campaign measurement, planning and attribution.

Hyper-personalize your marketing with Snowflake

Snowflake helps marketing organizations simplify complex data architectures, deliver superior customer experiences, maximize marketing and advertising ROI, and drive long-term growth by building a modern marketing data stack on the Data Cloud.

For advertisers and media and entertainment marketers, the Snowflake Media Data Cloud provides the modern infrastructure marketers require to realize next-level personalization. With a single, integrated view of all customer data, powerful analytics and AI-enabled development and deployment capabilities, Snowflake’s cloud data platform provides the essential capabilities needed to create truly tailored, meaningful engagements with each customer—allowing businesses to build customer loyalty, boost revenue and increase market share.