Future Personalization Opportunities in Business
Of the myriad new marketing opportunities made possible in the digital age, personalization, arguably, offers the most potential. Personalization doesn’t just work alongside other marketing systems in improving reach; it provides a level of pseudo-intimacy only previously possible in smaller businesses. It builds relationships, maintains them, and offers new avenues for businesses to explore.
Taking advantage of these opportunities as a business means looking not just at changes that you can apply directly, but also at how the personalization technology affects people on their own systems. Today, we want to explore what this means, and how businesses might better position themselves to take advantage of new tech systems going forward.
Exterior Personalization Systems
New generations of personalization begin not within businesses, but through the smartphone and home computer technology we use every day. The biggest avenue for exploration here is likely to arrive through the growing personalized AI assistant market. These are already included on platforms like Android and Apple phones, and are growing more powerful with each iteration.
One of the ways these systems work and grow is by looking at user purchasing patterns and using these to build recommendations for the future. If someone has a habit of trying new restaurants on the weekend, a personal AI could look for new local restaurants, explore their menus and the user’s tastes, and then make a recommendation.
Taking advantage of the recommendations of this exterior personalization could start from simple questionnaires tied to special promotions or draws. Have people fill out a form that enters them into a competition, and in this questionnaire, a business could learn if and how an AI led them to this or another store. By then catering to the AI’s reasoning through publicly available marketing materials, it would be possible to influence the AI’s likelihood of favoring one business over another.
Approaches Within a Business
Future personalization opportunities within businesses can be explored the first time a new customer accesses a business. Again turning to AI, modern user activation platforms can track online user access patterns across multiple sessions, even if nothing is purchased and no account is created. With this system, AI can then create user journeys for subsequent visits, continuously focusing on user wants and delivering a more personalized experience.
User journeys might also explore ways to guide personalization journeys in ways that encourage a natural growth or interest in a business’s sector. For example, consider if a customer was interested in DIY hobbies like creating small decorations around the home. In addition to offering similar goods to what these users have enjoyed before, a journey could point towards increasingly complex pursuits, guiding them towards additional products and ideas in the future.
Within a physical location, personalization could be leveraged to work with modern store digital guidance systems. If a business uses an app, then customers could be sent to a login screen through a QR code at the entry of the store. A logged-in account would then look at user history and cross-reference that data with a store’s physical layout. A map of the store would then guide users to their most likely purchases.
Logins within stores could also prompt workers with the details of each customer. This could prime them to quickly look up customer patterns and explore which stock is best suited to their probable needs. Similarly, a login could suggest staff with the most relevant experience or expertise to each customer, or recommend staff who have worked with these customers before. These approaches would benefit both product personalization and interpersonal relationships, which so often form the backbone of customer retention.
With so many potential avenues in personalization to explore, it’s important to note that not every approach will work for every business, or for every customer. Instead, the better solution would be to closely explore what each wider customer base prefers, using that as a starting point. From this position, a business could begin by focusing on the most likely profitable options, fine-tuning, and then moving on to exploring other areas. Even just one of these systems, properly implemented, could make a significant difference going forward, and every one is likely to become easier to implement in the future.
