Infinite Personalization: AI Makes it Possible

What if retailers could create a highly personalized communications plan for every individual in a database? What if the personalization was reflected across more than just content, but also cadence, preferred channel, layout, offers and more? Furthermore, what if your brand’s marketing plan could adapt in real time to meet each customer’s evolving preferences and needs? That’s infinite personalization.

According to a recent report, 70 percent of brands agree that artificial intelligence adoption will bring personalization to new heights and build deeper, more meaningful connections with their audiences. Let’s explore four key steps to putting infinite personalization into practice.

Elevate Customer Insights by Fusing Data With Context

When it comes to applying data analysis to campaigns, context is a critical part of honing personalization efforts. Consider the scenario of shoppers who only rely on the retail brand app to locate items in stores and get product recommendations based on shopper reviews. Traditional analytics would classify these customers as a low priority for app marketing efforts because they’re not making direct online purchases. Yet brands could view this unique behavior as a key engagement signal to monitor in their customer data platform (CDP) or customer relationship management (CRM) system. Then brands would have an opportunity to leverage the context of this specific use case to create differentiated messaging aimed at maximizing store visit experiences with this group of app users.

Use Adaptive Content to Enrich Personalization

Achieving deep personalization in communications requires the capacity to recognize and adapt content to each customer’s evolving views, needs and behaviors. Not only does predictive AI expand traditional data model views to leverage real-time insights, but its counterpart generative AI allows unique content versioning for every individual. These capabilities form the core of infinite personalization — i.e., the potential to seamlessly deliver completely unique content to every interaction.

Individualize the Delivery Cadence

Poor cadence management often leads to an abundance of unengaged communications, oversaturation of key messages, or frustrated customers unsubscribing in droves. Today’s predictive AI campaign capabilities make it easier than ever for retailers to precisely align the frequency, send time and prioritized channel to each customer’s demonstrated preferences.

One of the most beneficial AI capabilities is engagement frequency, which is now part of all major CRM platforms. This tool proactively sets the pace of communications for each recipient to the cadence that will drive the highest engagement level, preventing over- and undersaturation of messages.

Additionally, send-time optimization, another common campaign AI tool, allows brands to deliver communications on the specific day of week and hour of day when each recipient is most likely to engage.

Lastly, predictive campaign AI can determine the best channel split for delivery of key messages to each contact by measuring historical and recent channel engagement.

Take Split Testing to the Nth Degree

Split-testing analysis has been a great way to fine-tune marketing content attributes, lifting engagement and conversion rates. Brands that have successfully deployed multivariate testing have been able to fast-track their optimization efforts even further. Yet, with each test result, an either-or decision is the only possibility — which means those consumers in a test’s minority group must adapt to the preferences of the majority.

Like other personalization efforts, predictive AI tools can now pinpoint split testing for each consumer. Rather than testing across entire contact groups or smaller cohorts, A/B testing is run at the individual level. It can also be scaled to go far beyond a series of tests to consider an unlimited number of testing scenarios — i.e., an A/B/n approach. Then, illustrating incredible content adaptivity, changes can be made instantaneously.

Retailers know every customer interaction is an opportunity to deliver new value to the relationship. Properly connected data and strategically deployed AI open limitless possibilities to enhance communications for individual customers.

Todd Hedberg is senior director, digital strategy for The Lacek Group, a leading loyalty, CRM, and brand marketing agency that creates customer engagement through brand devotion.