Everything To Know About Hyper-Personalization Marketing

March 25, 2022 (Updated: May 4, 2023)

Personalized experiences make us feel good, like someone out there—whether it’s a marketer or a friend—pays attention to the things we do, say, and like. This kind of behavior can increase our trust and loyalty to the person or company providing it. But for businesses, implementing a hyper-personalization experience requires data collection, planning, and strategy to make it effective. Those new to personalization may wonder if the time to make it work is worth it. To help you decide if hyper-personalization is right for your clients and business, in this article, we discuss:

What Is Hyper-Personalization?
Personalization vs. Hyper-Personalization
Why Should You Use Hyper-Personalization?
Do Clients and Customers Like Hyper-Personalization?
How To Use Hyper-Personalization in B2B Marketing
3 Hyper-Personalization Marketing Examples

What Is Hyper-Personalization?

Hyper-personalization is the process of gathering real-time customer data to tailor messages, services, and experiences to their wants and needs. There are seven major components to hyper-personalization to make it effective with your audience. They include:

Data: The information that tells you who your customers are and what they want from your company
Goals: The aims that establish what your brand hopes to achieve by engaging in hyper-personalization
Journey: The path a client takes from learning about your brand to becoming a paying customer
Metrics: Data to track throughout your hyper-personalization campaigns to determine if they’re working and how to improve future campaigns
Segments: The smaller groups of your larger audience to which you target your hyper-personalization efforts
Strategy: The plan to determine how you expect to reach your goals
Technology: The tools, programs, and services you can use to collect data, plan strategy, and share hyper-personalized content with your audience

Personalization vs. Hyper-Personalization

Traditional personalization is surface level. You can complete it without too many extra tools or data. This tactic has a deep understanding of buyer personas, old data, and basic analytics. It includes demographic and transactional information—like your purchase history, name, title, or company—within direct communications. An example of traditional personalization may be adding a customer’s name to the introduction of an email newsletter.

Hyper-personalization takes everything another step further. It uses behavior, personality, real-time decisions, and engagement data to choose what to offer a customer or client, and when to do it. Hyper-personalization is more than just knowing someone’s name or where they live. It also explores why they make certain choices, how often they make them, and what their intent is behind those decisions. It cares more about the context of decisions rather than the outcomes.

Why Should You Use Hyper-Personalization?

Hyper-personalization has benefits for both the clients and the business implementing the marketing strategy. Some of these perks include:

Reduced customer effort: With hyper-personalization, customers have to do less work to get the results they want, which can increase their favorability with a brand.
Narrowed choices: This strategy eliminates giving customers too many choices, which can sometimes become overwhelming. You can make the choice simpler, by turning it into “do I want this or not?”
Catered to shorter attention spans: Hyper-personalization lets you show customers what they want right away without wading through irrelevant information. This can help you capture their attention faster and have a clearer mind when reviewing what you do put in front of them.
Improved customer experience: The more data you have on your audience, the more you can learn about what they want and need. This allows you to customize what you present to them and how you do it, which can also improve your marketing performance and return on investment (ROI), plus increase your customer’s happiness when interacting with your assets and content.
Enabled business proactivity: By using real-time data to drive your campaigns, you can see when things shift in customer habits or perceptions and change your efforts accordingly.
Increased data monitoring: Because hyper-personalization relies heavily on good data to work correctly, it can make you more conscious of your data collection and use practices and making sure they’re accurate.
Increased focus on intent, messaging, and timing: Hyper-personalization makes you focus on what works best for the customer and when they’re most receptive to receiving marketing messages.

Do Clients and Customers Like Hyper-Personalization?

According to a SmarterHQ study, 72% of customers say they only engage with personalized messaging from brands and marketers. But why? Overall, hyper-personalization makes your clients and customers feel seen, like you’re paying attention to their wants and needs. By paying attention to what they do or say, you take away some of the research or work they may have to put in to find the right products or solutions.

A Genesys survey also found that while 70% of people want businesses to ask before they collect or share their personal data, less than half of them actually try to limit or protect their private information. That means people are more willing to trade their data for some benefit, like personalized communications. To make sure your clients are on-board with your hyper-personalized marketing strategies, monitor only data your clients give you permission to track, which can prevent hyper-personalization from becoming invasive.

How To Use Hyper-Personalization in B2B Marketing

Use these steps to set your hyper-personalized marketing strategies for your business-to-business (B2B) company:

1. Set Goals

Why are you engaging in hyper-personalization marketing? Setting goals for your campaigns lets you get specific about customer interactions, desired outcomes, and the opportunities and risks associated with choosing different approaches. Because a primary aim of all hyper-personalization marketing is to guide people on a specialized journey from company awareness to paying customers, you may use that principle to guide your goal setting. For example, you may set goals that have to do with increasing web traffic, collecting qualified leads, or increasing sales.

2. Select Tools

How are you going to find the information you need to create hyper-personalized content? You can often collect real-time data through artificial intelligence (AI) platforms and services that you develop or from third-party offerings. These tools may include things like heatmaps to understand how people browse a website, or screen recordings to watch a real-time customer journey online. While real-time data is the basis for hyper-personalization marketing, it’s not the only kind you can use in your strategies. Self-reporting, reviews, and services requests are also part of data collection and help you provide a better user experience.

Other considerations for tools include a place to store all your data for future reference and ways to share out your personalized content once it’s ready for public consumption. Deciding early in your planning phase what tools you can use may help you learn what capabilities you have available. Just as hyper-personalized content favors specific individuals and segments, your tool stack can differ by campaign and targeted audience segment.

3. Collect Data

To hyper-personalize your content, data collection goes beyond knowing someone’s name, age, gender, and geographic location. Collecting data in real-time helps you better understand your different audience segments and groups of users who may need your products or services, but for different reasons. Automated customer engagement platforms may help you collect this data to watch how people react to your content or behave on your web pages. These actions show audience habits and intent.

Hyper-personalization often works best when you’re transparent about the data you collect from your clients, followers, and customers. Be sure that when collecting data, you give people the choice to opt-in or opt-out of some or all of the collection features. While you, as a marketer, want as much data as possible, the best way to get it is through honesty and trust. Providing people with freedom of choice sets the groundwork for it and is likely to increase customer satisfaction and brand loyalty.

Image via Unsplash by @homajob

To collect as much data as possible about your audience, competitors, and your own business, request your free content analysis report from CopyPress. This report tells how your current content stacks up against your top three competitors. It also shows you gaps within your current marketing strategy to find new keywords and angles to target with your hyper-personalization campaigns. Once you have the report, contact CopyPress to see how our services help our clients to find content marketing success. Our large team of professional writers and editors makes sure you have quality content that gets you noticed by your target audience.

4. Segment Customers

The data you collect from all your sources can help you understand how your clients and customers interact with your brand. You can then group them based on actions, interests, and other relative factors. Doing so helps you create hyper-personalized messages and experiences. Each of these groups may share the common theme or goal of needing a solution that your products or services can provide. But how they get to that conclusion, or the customer journey they take, may differ.

Segmenting your clients based on the data you collect can help you craft those personalized journeys so that everyone makes it to the bottom of the marketing and sales funnels in a way that makes sense to them. This abandonment of one-size-fits-all marketing can help you get more conversions and sales because it accounts for customer behavior and experiences that they dictate, not just what you, as a marketer, think they should want.

5. Choose Channels

Choosing the right channels and the right times to share messages makes hyper-personalization work so well. Some platforms lend themselves better to hyper-personalization than others because they’re data abundant and places where people feel secure sharing their information. For example, emails and eCommerce stores are places where an audience often accepts hyper-personalized content. That’s because the data collection and recommendations stay contained on one platform or channel, so seeing personalization feels natural in those settings.

Social media feeds are another place where people are receptive to personalized content. These platforms often curate content based on the user’s interactions across the service. While you can’t directly choose if your post shows up on a feed without engaging in pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, you can write your posts and use hashtags and media elements that increase the chance of them appearing in the feeds for your target audience.

6. Develop Content

The more relevant the content and messages you create, the better chance you have at making a hyper-personalized conversion. The content itself, derived from the data you collect across your services, and from client self-reports, makes this strategy work. Use that information combined with what you know about buyer psychology to craft the right content to get the conversions you seek.

Or better yet, leave the content creation to the professionals. At CopyPress, we develop written content with you and your audience in mind. Start a call today to learn how we support marketing teams and agencies in targeting the right clients at the right time with the messages they expect from your organization.

7. Use Retargeting

Retargeting, also known as remarketing, is an important strategy in hyper-personalized marketing. Why? Because it lets you further communicate with and persuade visitors and potential leads based on their real-time actions on your website. In B2B marketing, client orders or partnership commitments can be lengthy and costly. It’s understandable and even expected that leads may spend more time on your website or choose to navigate away to think before making a purchase. This strategy allows you to keep them in your sales funnel and remind them about the great services you offer, right before or even after they navigate away.

You can conduct retargeting through email or on your website itself, depending on your audience preferences. For example, if a potential lead takes your marketing services interactive quiz, browses the services page, and then tries to close the window, you may insert a retargeting pop-up to ask them if they’re sure they’re ready to leave. Alternatively, you could include them in a retargeting email drip campaign triggered by taking the quiz and closing out from your site without making a purchase.

Another popular retargeting method is through advertisements on social media. Say you own an e-commerce company. You may employ cookies on your website to follow your visitors to social media and then deploy social media advertisements that directly relate to the type of items that individual was browsing on your website.

8. Test Algorithms

Test your hyper-personalized content to see if it’s hitting the mark. There are many pieces of the personalization process you can tweak and adjust, such as the channels, messages, and delivery methods. Using A/B or split testing for any of these areas can help you see what creates more conversions or appeals better to your audience. Because hyper-personalization is digital and runs in real-time, if you find that there’s a better way to run your campaigns, you can change them on the fly. You can also use the information to influence your future hyper-personalization efforts.

9. Measure Results

With any marketing campaign, it’s important to track your results. This can help you determine if what you’re doing is working. Testing is one way to track campaign progress, but you can also measure things like web traffic, the number of qualified leads you receive, the open rates on emails, and ROI for each campaign. These and other metrics give you additional data to use in the future with hyper-personalization. The more data you have, the more successful your next campaign can be.

3 Hyper-Personalization Marketing Examples

See how other companies use hyper-personalization marketing to appeal to their customers and clients:

1. Netflix

In 1997, Netflix became one of the first “streaming” services, by allowing people to mail-order DVD rentals to their homes. The company eventually added in-home and device streaming in 2007, which allowed them to deal more heavily in real-time hyper-personalized marketing. The service uses this technique to suggest what a user may want to watch next based on their previous viewing and search history. Netflix also allows customers to rate certain programs, add or remove them from a watch queue, and share other preference information with the company.

For example, if you watch an action movie and give it a high rating, the service may suggest an additional group of movies with similar plots, casts, or time lengths you may enjoy. But Netflix doesn’t use this information just to suggest pre-existing content. The company also takes all subscribers’ preferences into account when developing exclusive programs, like The Crown or House of Cards. Other streaming services like Hulu, HBO Max, and Disney+ use similar strategies and technology to provide hyper-personalized content to their audiences.

2. Spotify

Since its founding in 2006, the audio streaming service Spotify has thrived on hyper-personalized user experiences for both free and paid members. The service includes personalized playlists for each account user by genre, recently played content, and new releases. Some of their most popular personalized content includes:

Discover Weekly: A curated playlist of songs based on your most frequent artists, genres, and tracks to provide new music suggestions.
Blend: The service curates a playlist based on musical interests and profiles from two of its service users. The feature also shares the taste similarities of the two accounts and gives a song that links both users’ musical styles.
Wrapped: An end-of-year feature that creates playlists for a user’s top songs and artists from the past 12 months. When viewing the playlists for the first time, there’s further personalized content that includes a data-based guessing game about your listening habits, an audio aura visualization, and statistics about your listening preferences from the past year.

3. Stitch Fix

Stitch Fix is a clothing curation company founded in 2011. It allows subscribers to get new outfits and accessories shipped to their homes. Subscribers keep and pay for the items they like and send back what they don’t. Stitch Fix uses AI to help pick the content for customers’ boxes. The company collects data through account sign up about sizing, style preferences, and pricing expectations. But through subscriber browsing and shopping, it also collects data from surveys, questionnaires, and social media.

Stitch Fix’s goal is to provide boxes for customers where they want to buy everything inside instead of returning items. From each kept and returned item, the company’s professional stylists and analysts can collect more information to refine the AI software used in the curation process. The data from customer surveys and feedback also helps target exactly what the customer wants, hoping to send them a perfectly curated box.

In today’s marketing, clients and consumers like to have a more active role in their customer journey. Hyper-personalization experiences can provide that specification your audience craves and help your brand stand out amongst your competitors for its care and attention to detail.

Christy Walters

CopyPress writer