There is a new way of creating customer personas based on real time data, otherwise known as ‘fluid personas’. This creates continuing and evolving profiles based on an individaul’s digital and in-store experiences, giving you an idea of what kind of personalisation customers really want to receive. This allows brands to target customers with their preferred types of content, such as discounts, events and new launches, at a frequency they want.

If a key part of personalisation is using technology to mimic how brands would engage with customers face to face, then personalisation strategies need to aim to be as nuanced as human interaction is. A huge barrier to this is that currently most brands don’t have an omnichannel personalisation programme. This means brands are unable to bridge the same experience across in-store and online for consumers, causing the customer experience to be jarring and anything but ‘human’. This still hasn’t been cracked yet and is an area that brands should be investing in getting right now.

Sephora, however, has created a strong sense of connected personalisation through their app, merging their instore and online experience, but there is still an absence of a fully personalised omnichannel experience.

Brands have become very good at data capture, but that’s the easy part. Many still struggle with connecting all of the dots: devising a strategy on how to leverage the wealth of data at hand to deliver genuinely personalised customer experiences. As a result, a lot of personalisation strategies end up being very transactional, offering discounts or deals that customers can quickly tire of unless they’re extremely targeted. Brands need to move on from this transactional relationship to deliver customers something unique or different that is genuinely tailored to them. This is where real time data and fluid personas will come into their own.

We often notice clients treating personalisation as a singular tool in the hope it increases customer loyalty, again making it feel very transactional. The focus tends to be on how it can benefit the brand instead of focusing on how it can benefit the customer. We actively consult our clients to have a multilayered approach when it comes to personalisation and to think about loyalty more as a fluid ecosystem that you submerge your customers in. This allows for evaluating and embedding loyalty and personalisation strategies across the entire customer journey, not just at isolated points that are convenient for the brand.

Consumers are becoming more aware that their data is valuable, and they expect that when you collect their data, they are entering into a relationship and will hope to get something meaningful back in return. This means remembering the ‘personal’ in ‘personalisation’. Sending a newsletter with the customer’s name in the header doesn’t cut it. Technology now exists that allows brands to have a truly personal conversation with customers at scale.

An obvious example is Spotify’s end of year “ Wrapped” campaign, rounding up their year of listening to share with friends. Exercise app Strava did something similar by celebrating progress and achievements of their users.

At the heart of all of this is investing in genuinely getting to know your customers. This will help avoid gimmicky approaches and help set the frequency and relevance of engagement for each individual customer profile. This might mean investing in the right technology, or in the right people, to help you deliver on this and to ensure your personalisation strategy is well and truly up to scratch as tech and consumer behavior continue to rapidly evolve.