How personalisation is helping brands transform ‘analysis paralysis’ into clever communications

Retail­ers com­pet­ing to get the best out of peak shop­ping sea­sons are sharp­en­ing their per­son­al­i­sa­tion strate­gies to cre­ate more nuanced and effec­tive cus­tomer com­mu­ni­ca­tions. 

Yet accord­ing to the Retail Road­blocks report by cus­tomer engage­ment plat­form Emarsys, which sur­veyed 500 mar­keters from glob­al retail brands, 30% say they are lack­ing the abil­i­ty to seg­ment by behav­iour and pur­chas­es. 42% are devot­ing more time to prepar­ing and seg­ment­ing data than doing any­thing else, with 67% com­mit­ting more time to improv­ing per­son­alised prod­uct rec­om­men­da­tions.

Brands like the Very Group (which oper­ates Very.co.uk), Hotel Choco­lat and Love­honey are fol­low­ing this path. They’re invest­ing sig­nif­i­cant amounts of time and resources into opti­mis­ing not just the cus­tomer data they have, but how they access, inter­pret and act on it on a reg­u­lar basis. Three senior com­pa­ny lead­ers shared their expe­ri­ences at the lat­est Racon­teur round­table on ‘The pow­er of per­son­al­i­sa­tion,’ spon­sored by Emarsys. 

Hotel Chocolat: using data for myth-busting

Hotel Choco­lat has seen “huge­ly bet­ter con­ver­sion rates” after tran­si­tion­ing from a mass email approach to one that is high­ly tar­get­ed. It has just recruit­ed a direc­tor of cus­tomer insight and ana­lyt­ics to help “join the dots,” as chief mar­ket­ing offi­cer Lysa Hardy described it, even doing some cru­cial “myth-bust­ing” ahead of devel­op­ing the company’s next three-year busi­ness strat­e­gy. 

“We’ve been able to iden­ti­fy oppor­tu­ni­ties that I had­n’t even thought about, or in things that I thought might be an oppor­tu­ni­ty, the data is telling me that it’s not what I thought it was, and that we should tack­le that in a dif­fer­ent way. So it’s real­ly inter­est­ing to see how it’s all con­nect­ing,” Hardy says. 

“Unlock­ing that insight allows us to join it togeth­er quick­ly, so we can be more nim­ble and con­fi­dent, because we’ve got that data behind us to take more deci­sive actions. We’ve seen some real evi­dence of that in some of the cam­paigns that we’ve been work­ing on.” 

Hardy gave the exam­ple of the Vel­ve­tis­er hot choco­late machine and the company’s abil­i­ty to per­son­alise with greater detail. Hotel Choco­lat now looks at con­sump­tion rates by cus­tomer type, send­ing indi­vid­ual reminders to repur­chase and resup­ply, while also sug­gest­ing new flavours. 

“Cus­tomers real­ly appre­ci­at­ed that because it felt like it was easy to replen­ish their sys­tem. We saw a bet­ter repur­chase and high­er con­sump­tion rate,” says Hardy. “That was a neat way of how we start­ed to glue togeth­er some of the var­i­ous bits that were work­ing in silos into one pro­gramme tar­get­ed at a spe­cif­ic prod­uct and group of cus­tomers.” 

The Very Group: ready to act on 20,000 personalisation possibilities 

The Very Group’s chief mar­ket­ing offi­cer Car­ly O’Brien described the company’s chief data offi­cer as one of her “most impor­tant inter­nal rela­tion­ships.” Togeth­er they have aligned not just the mar­ket­ing and data teams, but the strat­e­gy and dig­i­tal cus­tomer expe­ri­ence teams over the past 18 months to reseg­ment cus­tomer data and “get under the skin of which insights are most impor­tant for us to look at,” par­tic­u­lar­ly as cus­tomer behav­iours evolved dur­ing the pan­dem­ic. 

“We track more than 100 mil­lion tags on our web­site dai­ly. We have so much infor­ma­tion, we could eas­i­ly drown in it. So, the first step real­ly was about organ­is­ing it. The sec­ond stage of it was then what I would call human­is­ing that data, to under­stand what else is going on in their lives and why they make the choic­es they make,” says O’Brien. 

She adds: “Our whole cus­tomer base is split into sev­en seg­ments that are clus­tered togeth­er by the way they behave, and the way we believe they think about their shop­ping expe­ri­ences with us and the way that they make their deci­sions. The insights give us good direc­tion on what might be the next best action. If you’ve got a seg­ment who are shop­ping for a house­hold ver­sus a seg­ment who like to have the lat­est tech first, the way we would bring our propo­si­tion to life to those two seg­ments would be very dif­fer­ent.” 

Now, O’Brien says, it’s time for the Very Group to deploy per­son­al­i­sa­tion vari­a­tions against its organ­ised data, of which she esti­mat­ed there are around 20,000 pos­si­bil­i­ties and described as “super excit­ing.” 

Lovehoney: managing ‘analysis paralysis’ 

Lovehoney’s chief com­mer­cial offi­cer Deb­bie Bond believes the brand has rein­ter­pret­ed its approach to per­son­al­i­sa­tion. No longer does it sim­ply add a customer’s name to an email, instead it per­son­alis­es the expe­ri­ence across the whole web­site using behav­iour­al seg­men­ta­tion. 

“We’re able to inject real-time con­tent based on whether a cus­tomer came from an email or a Google search, and their pur­chas­ing his­to­ry. We’re also able to help if we see peo­ple get­ting stuck. For exam­ple, they might need live chat sup­port, so we can inter­ject in a way we could nev­er have done before,” says Bond. 

She adds: “Cus­tomi­sa­tion also means we won’t fright­en off a cus­tomer who is new to our cat­e­go­ry and just inter­est­ed to have a look around, ver­sus a reg­u­lar that’s com­ing in to see what cool new thing they can add to their tool­box at home. 

Under­stand­ing cus­tomers at that lev­el is crit­i­cal to get­ting the right mes­sage and the right prod­uct at the right point of their shop­ping expe­ri­ence.” How­ev­er, Bond not­ed that per­son­al­i­sa­tion, when done incor­rect­ly, can lead to “unnec­es­sary com­plex­i­ty.” 

“It cre­ates an enor­mous amount of work, with very lit­tle pay­back. One of my biggest chal­lenges with the team is man­ag­ing ‘analy­sis paral­y­sis,’ and know­ing when to stop because you’ve got enough infor­ma­tion to make a qual­i­ty deci­sion,” says Bond.

Emarsys chief exec­u­tive Joan­na Mil­liken acknowl­edged how the “mas­sive amounts of data” mar­keters are work­ing with is “a bless­ing and a curse,” feel­ing like “a nev­er-end­ing game.” 

She adds: “The more solu­tions and chan­nels we have, the more data they cre­ate, and we need to con­sume. We’re just in this per­pet­u­al cycle of how we man­age and bal­ance that, using just the right amount of data to act in the right way.” 

Mil­liken con­cludes: “The prin­ci­ple of mar­ket­ing has­n’t changed. The intrin­sic val­ue of what we’re doing is to con­stant­ly improve how we meet cus­tomer expec­ta­tions. I see a lot of pro­gres­sive think­ing with­in this group.”

For more infor­ma­tion, vis­it emarsys.com