Personalisation Starts with Finding the Right Insights from Customer Data
How are marketers in South Africa balancing personalisation in a privacy age? Martechvibe spoke to experts in the region to understand how they are putting data-first strategies into action.
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This is the era of Netflix and Amazon. Customers have witnessed hyper-personalisation, and they expect nothing less from any brand they engage with. Any time a customer chooses to purchase from your brand, it’s your chance to convince them they made the right choice. There is no time or place to explain why you couldn’t offer them a personalised recommendation. In the age of smartphones and fast internet, customers won’t think twice about switching.
Research shows that 80% of consumers are more likely to make a purchase from a brand that provides personalised experiences. Additionally, 83% of shoppers would exchange data for a more personalised experience. But marketers continue to face challenges with gathering customer data in compliance with privacy regulations, scaling their personalisation strategy, gathering enough data to help inform decisions, and more.
Martechvibe spoke to industry leaders who shared their experience on perfecting personalisation in the current martech landscape.
First party data – The new informer to personalisation
The death of the third party cookie has immensely impacted marketing and advertising functions, but first party data is becoming marketers’ refuge to personalisation. It is a cornerstone for businesses looking to excel in personalised marketing.
“This invaluable resource is directly collected from a company’s interactions with its customers, encompassing website visits, app usage, email interactions, and social media engagement. By mining and analysing this data, businesses gain profound insights into individual customer preferences, behaviours, and interests,”
says Romeez van der Schyff, Digital Executive at Clicks Group, explaining the sources of first party data. Using customer segmentation, brands can offer personalised product recommendations and tailored content across multiple channels. By following this, Schyff says first party data unlocks the potential for dynamic website experiences, automated behavioural triggers, and effective A/B testing for optimisation. Further, user-generated content can also inform personalisation effectively.
Information shared by the users in the form of ratings and reviews, comments, social media posts, etc., contributes to user-generated content. Amrish Singh, Global Director of Customer Experience Advisory at SAP, says when user-generated data provides insights into user preferences, interests, and behaviour,
it offers a direct window into what users like, dislike, and engage with. Since customers voluntarily share this data, it is typically considered authentic and trustworthy. “By further analysing reviews, ratings, comments, and social media interactions, businesses can better understand individual preferences and tailor personalisation efforts accordingly,” adds Singh. This helps businesses understand how users interact with their offerings, gather feedback, and uncover trends or patterns in user behaviour. By leveraging these real-time, authentic, and granular insights into user preferences, behaviour, and sentiment, brands can deliver more relevant, engaging, and effective personalised experiences that meet individual user expectations and drive customer satisfaction.
Balancing the privacy and personalisation see-saw
There is an increased awareness about privacy rights amongst consumers. While they wish to be provided with offers tailored to their preferences, they also expect their data to be safe and secure and their information to stay private. Achieving this balance between privacy and personalisation is a huge challenge for marketers in the current landscape. “It all starts with an understanding that customer data belongs to the customer and should be used to serve them in the best possible way.
By proving the value of personalisation and using data to create delightful customer experiences, customers will be happy to opt-in to us using their data,” says Mariska Oosthuizen, Chief Marketing Officer at Sanlam, South Africa. She suggests following certain principles like putting the client in control and
obtaining consent before using customer data for marketing purposes, only collecting data that is relevant, and using security measures to protect customer data. Emphasising what Oosthuizen says, Schyff adds that data minimisation is essential, ensuring that only necessary data is collected for personalisation purposes, avoiding excessive intrusion into individuals’ privacy. Listing a few ways to balance privacy and personalisation, he says that preference controls can be offered, allowing consumers to manage their personalised content and settings, and contextual personalisation, based on immediate user actions, can be favoured over long-term tracking. “Regular data audits ensure compliance with privacy regulations and best practices while respecting consumer rights and being responsive to data-related requests show a commitment to privacy,” adds Schyff.
“It is essential not only to assure customers that their data will be kept safe and used only for the intended purposes they subscribed to but also to give them the ability to update, change, download, and delete the shared data, putting them in control of their own information,” says Singh, stressing on the importance of letting customers have the control over their data. It also helps to educate consumers about the benefits of sharing their data with the brands. Clearly communicating that sharing their data will provide them with additional privileges that non-data-sharing customers will need access to can encourage participation.
Further, Singh continues, brands can offer customers incentives for proactively sharing their data. This could be in the form of awarding loyalty points, discounts, or one-time vouchers.
Data drives personalisation
Personalisation begins with a robust understanding of what your customers want, and what your customers want can be best known from data points. Access to the right data, in the right form and at the right time, can act as a catalyst in scaling a brand’s personalisation efforts. Triya Govender, Head Of Marketing & Client Experience at Floatpays, agrees.
She believes a data-driven approach allows for scalability while maintaining a degree of personalisation. At Floatpays, Govender says the team “utilises advanced data analytics and machine learning algorithms to derive insights from customer data.” By analysing large volumes of this data, Floatpays can identify patterns, preferences, and trends, enabling them to provide personalised recommendations to their clients on improving their offerings.
Data collection and analysis are key in designing a company’s personalisation strategy. At The Heineken Company, large amounts of data from various digital touchpoints provide insights into consumer behaviour, preferences, and regional trends, says Coogan Pillay, their Data Lead in Marketing Insights.
This enables the company to understand regional tastes more effectively. By leveraging data analytics, Heineken Beverages segments its consumer base based on regional preferences, demographics, and purchasing behaviours. This segmentation allows the company to create targeted marketing campaigns specific to each region, ensuring the messaging, visuals, and offers resonate with the local audience. Collecting behavioural data is just one of the many methods to implement seamless personalisation, says Singh. “Behavioural data tells us more about the person than static segmentation data, enabling companies to truly learn what a customer truly wants and when to interact to enable a truly hyper-personalised experience,” he adds. Information in the form of browsing history, purchase patterns, and content interactions can help tailor personalised recommendations.
New approaches to customer feedback
Customer feedback doesn’t come in all at the same time, but when collated across touchpoints and journeys, it acts as an asset that informs personalised recommendations. A challenge in this process is to convince customers to share their feedback consistently. More often than not, a customer would make a purchase and move on without the time to fill out a feedback form. If you have a customer willing to share what they think, there still are chances that they might not like being pinged every other moment to talk about their experience with the brand’s product or service. Singh offers a solution to this struggle — progressive profiling.
It is a strategic approach that helps businesses gather customer feedback in a non-intrusive manner in small increments. “For instance, during initial interactions, only essential information such as name and e-mail address may be requested. Subsequent touchpoints can then gather additional data points, such as preferences, interests, or feedback on specific experiences,” says Singh.
Customers don’t like filling out long surveys, and with digital channels, it is much easier to gather feedback in small increments through the customer’s journey. “Pop-ups in apps to gather feedback at moments of truth throughout the journey lead to a higher response rate and a more valid response, as customers do not encounter fatigue when completing a long customer survey where they want to get through it to submit,” Singh adds. This approach not only makes the customer feel at ease but also brings forward a likelihood to purchase again with the brand. And naturally, the data collected in this interaction informs the recommendations for the next purchase.
Singh explains that this gradual approach reduces the burden on customers and increases the likelihood of obtaining accurate and comprehensive feedback. Instead of overwhelming customers with lengthy surveys or forms right from the start, progressive profiling enables businesses to gather data incrementally.
Pillay offers a diverse yet relevant perspective to collecting customer feedback – with social media engagement. Suggesting that social media platforms offer opportunities to engage with consumers on a more personal level, he says companies can utilise social listening tools to monitor conversations and sentiments specific to their target demographic. If you are a company with an international presence and need to cater to regional diversity with personalised offers, social listening can go a long way. “It helps the company understand local trends, interests, and cultural nuances, allowing them to create tailored content and engage with consumers in a way that resonates with their regional tastes,” adds Pillay.
Personalisation has a number of fronts that brands can leverage to offer the best to their customers, but the services should also be followed up by personal assistance to truly close the loop. “We don’t believe in just ‘dropping’ the technology into people’s laps and leaving them to their own devices – we strongly believe that the ‘human touch’ actually enhances the perception and experience of personalisation,” adds Govender.
Schyff, Singh, Oosthuizen, Govender and Pillay were speakers at Vibe Martech Fest, South Africa, on 26-27 July 2023. This year’s edition focused on emerging martech solutions, bringing together the region’s leading CX and martech experts.
