By Kalpit Jain
Brands are building giant audiences on the social channels, and engaging with them strategically has become more necessary than ever before. For a brand to market relevantly, it needs to generate real-time content and engage through it with customers on a regular ‘real-time’ basis.
The genesis of the principle to make content more real-time and engaging lies in the fact that today consumers are suffering from an ‘information overload’.Over 270 billion emails are being sent every day. In a day, the average number of emails received by a user is 121. Thus mobile devices are now inundated with communications that seldom wins over the attention of the recipient. Add to it the complexity of the Indian market where a section of mobile users own more than one device. It has therefore become extremely tougher for brands to catch hold of their consumers’ time and make a meaningful impact.
Key search engines such as Google and Bing too have been waging an algorithmic battle to direct more personalisedand relevant searches, products and news feeds. Similarly, the rise of digital nomads has led to the acute need for hyper-personalisation that categorises users into neatly defined clusters based on their search history, buying behaviour and social trending—and even geolocation and behaviour.
Real-time marketing has risen from the dungeons of being a jargon and proved that it can effect great turnaround in conversions and increase ROI. Earlier, marketing tactics were executed based on sample data. However, with developments in technology, marketers have moved towards relying on historical as well as real-time customer engagement data to build an intuitive and accurate marketing workflow.
It is this war of screen and dwindling attention spans that has made consumers more impatient and demanding. Consumers expect a seamless and hyper-personalised experience to be delivered by brands. It’s lethal to adopt a one-size-fits-all approach. Organisations must stop viewing their audiences as segments, but rather as unique individuals. Simply listening to what consumers are saying, using that data to build intelligent customer profiles, and tailoring each email communication to reflect the interests and preferences of specific consumer segments is critical to realizing a hyper-personalised marketing strategy.
While FMCG brands are yet to test the waters, other sectors such as BFSI and e-commerce have already started minting benefits of adopting hyper personalisation through the use of marketing technology. For instance, a leading fashion e-commerce player witnessedincreased market share and an increased demand by using real-time email engagement. Being the first online personal styling app, its proposition of using the power of their technology i.e. machine-based predictions and the power of expert curation, cumulatively helped it solve a timeless problem of every woman: “What should I wear today?â€
It capitalised on the 10,000 rule algorithm that powers its website and which helps users find the right product on the basis of filters like skin tone, body type and preferences and this content is reflected real-time on each email communication they sent out to customers. The leading fashion e-commerce player utilised this efficiency in its email campaign by mirroring it in the email campaigns that it sent to its customers.
The result was a 26 per cent increase in the session time through email as a channel, 118 per cent increase in the brand’s overall revenue through real-time and urgency-based email. There was a 10 per cent increase in the overall engagement from subscribers. Likewise, it is necessary for every brand to send out to a consumer, a hyper-personalised and real time communication message.
Data analysis is a critical step in executing on a hyper-personalised marketing strategy. Organisations must have a large accumulation of consumer data, but if marketers aren’t able to interpret what the data is telling them, they’re missing out on a huge opportunity to connect with their audience on deeper and more intimate level. While it’s unrealistic to assume that marketers have the capacity to scrutinize each individual piece of raw data that’s made available to them, marketing automation tools have made data aggregation and interpretation much less of a manual and  time-intensive process.
Today, the competitive landscape is defined by customerexperience. The future is going to be dominated by brands that have customised their marketing activities to consumers. With multiplicity of devices or mediums consumers today are inundated with marketing messages. So, relevant and hyper personalised messaging is the critical differentiator that will save messages from being ignored or spammed.
Hyper-personalisation is all about maximizing opportunities to customize content that fits your customers’ needs. Companies should use these opportunities to consistently target the right audience throughout the customer lifecycle. Creating meaningful connections and driving engagement among your audience allows for more leads and better conversions.
Kalpit Jain is CEO, Netcore
