Network Personalization And...
Personalization provides experiences, suggestions, and content based on a user’s previous behavior.
Personalization – The Big Picture
The recipe for personalization is data, content, and automated systems. Personalization starts with A/B testing. A/B testing reveals what content different people in your customer base engage with.
With this knowledge, you can then segment your audience. You can divide your audience into as many segments as you want. Just remember, the complexity of your campaigns increase with each added segment.
Here’s where personalization enters the picture. It is the tool that will make managing your segments much easier. That’s because personalization uses automation to provide tailored customer content. Trust the machine learning algorithms to make decisions on sending personalized content to the right person.
Sometimes people get confused between customization and personalization. Some marketers out there don’t even know there’s a difference and use customization and personalization interchangeably. So we’ll get the record straight once and for all.
Customization is when the user chooses their preferences.
Personalization uses an automated system to deliver content based on the user’s past behavior.
Customization is largely a manual process that takes place on the user’s end. For example, a person can pick and choose the type of emails they subscribe to when signing up for a newsletter. From their customized choices, a personalization system can remember that customized choice and suggest future content based on it.
Here, we can see where a lot of the confusion between the two come from. Customization and personalization are two separate processes, but they can also be used to support and enhance each other.
Why Personalization?
Personalization is the direction the future is headed. If you haven’t taken steps to incorporate personalization into your marketing strategy, you will find yourself falling behind.
Take a look at this. By 2020, 51% of consumers will expect a company will anticipate and provide their needs before they even make first contact with that business.
Research also shows:
- 48% of consumers spend more when their experience is personalized
- 90% of marketers believe personalization is the future
- 74% of consumers get frustrated when content has nothing to do with them
Personalized content is what people want. Actually pretty soon, personalized content will be the only type of content consumers will engage with. We live in the age of peak content. More content is being created than can be consumed.
The team at Domo released their “Data Never Sleeps 5.0” infograph that looks at the world’s data generation and online behavior. Within the last two years, 90% of all data that exists today was created. That’s 2.5 quintillion bytes of data per day. The human race has been very busy.
Domo goes even further and breaks down how much content was created every minute in 2017:
- Youtube users watch 4,146,600 videos
- Google conducts 3,607,080 searches
- 103,447,520 spam emails are sent
- Netflix users stream 69,444 hours of video
- Amazon makes $258,751.90 in sales
- Tumblr users publish 74,220 posts
- 15,220,700 texts are sent
- Americans use 2,657,700 gb of internet data
Let’s just repeat this so it sinks in. All that activity happens in just one minute.
What else did they find? More than 7 billion people use the internet (the world’s current population is 7.7 billion).
Now you can see why personalization is so essential going forward. In that massive sea of content, only content that touches people on an individual level will stand out.
