What is hyper personalisation and how do I use it?

Mass marketing is over. There, we said it. It’s no longer enough to shout into the void hoping that your marketing message resonates with someone. Or anyone.

The data required to deliver a personalised experience is already there, we’re just not using it. The reality is that many website owners are too busy getting bogged down in outdated tasks. They simply don’t have time to push forward with this innovative branch of digital marketing.

And it’s unfortunate because personalisation is known to increase sales and engagement, delivering a better ROI. And who doesn’t want that?

What is personalisation?

Personalisation can refer to many different things. Most people first come into contact with marketing personalisation in their inbox. If you’re ever received an email with your name in the subject line or the content, this is using personalisation. Studies have shown that emails with personalisation enjoy an average open rate of 29.95% and a click-through rate of 5.03%.

Some great examples of personalisation in action might come from your favourite supermarket. If you are signed up to their loyalty card, they will have a good idea what products you buy the most. So the next time you log on to their online shopping facility, they have your frequently purchased items ready to go. 

Okay, so what is hyper-personalisation?

Hyper-personalisation is just taking this to the next level. It goes beyond your email marketing and looks at the entire multi-platform user experience. With the vast quantity of data available to us, we can look at the user journey and make predictions based on what the user has done in the past. Where personalisation makes assumptions, hyper-personalisation take this one step further, pairing customer data with real time analytics to deliver a completely unique experience.

Websites are built the way they are because this is how HTML and HTML5 works. The structure is always the same, with a home page, menu, sub pages and a hierarchical structure. The customer journey has always been defined by how we build websites. But what if the customer’s expectations shaped the content of the website? What if the parts of the site that aren’t relevant to them slipped into the background? What if the information they need was always front and centre?

This is where hyper-personalisation is heading, and it could dramatically transform the way we build websites. In the future, we could be taking a fully customer-first approach that completely eschews the traditional website construction in favour of a content-first approach.

Top ways you can use hyper-personalisation today

A common response when people hear about the possibilities of hyper-personalisation is this. 

“That sounds great, but how can I actually use it?” 

You don’t have to have a huge budget and dedicated team to make the most of opportunities to hyper-personalise your content. Here are just a few ideas to spark your curiosity.

Reconsider your pop up strategy

Most websites have one or two popups pushing different services. Perhaps you have an ebook you want people to download or a free consultation offer that you’d like to promote. However, not all of your website visitors will respond to this type of generic pop up. Wouldn’t it be better if you could serve pop ups designed with groups of visitors, or even individuals visitors in mind?

For example, imagine you run a bouncy castle rental company. Your customers land on your site for different reasons. Some are looking for children’s party hire. Others are looking for wedding hire. A few might be looking for corporate hire for big branded events. They’re all looking for bouncy castle hire and yet they have different priorities and motivations. It doesn’t make sense to serve them all the same generic pop up.

Instead, you should segment your audience and deliver pop ups based on behaviour. For example, if a visitor spends a lot of time on your website and visits the “wedding hire” and “about” pages, you could serve them a pop up offering a free quote on their wedding package.

Use location based information to connect

Pop ups could also serve information about the location of the visitor. Imagine you run a construction company. A customer from Manchester lands on your website and you serve them a pop up showcasing other work you’ve done in Manchester. They recognise one of your projects and get in touch right away. 

Without this level of personalisation, your customer would take a very different journey. They will have to navigate to your projects page and scroll through everything before they see a project that they recognise. Like social proof, we feel more kinship with a company if we think they are active in our local area.

This kind of hyper-personalisation allows you to act as both a local, national and even international company without losing favour with customers.

Up your email marketing game

If you’re only using personalisation in the subject line or the greeting, you should consider what information you are collecting and how it can be used to create a better user experience. Segmenting your email list based on behaviour is a great place to start. One of the best and easiest ways you can achieve this is to send emails to individuals based on their past email behaviour. If a customer opens your last email and clicks on a link related to one aspect of your business, take the opportunity to serve them more content related to that area.

Get personal with retargeting

Most people set up their retargeting to simply serve ads to all of their website visitors, regardless of what pages they have landed on. If your website is product based, you can let them know about similar or complementary products they may have been looking at. If your site is more service-based, you can use retargeting to remind customers why they landed on your site. For example, you could serve them ads that highlight positive reviews from people who are similar to them. 

These are just some of the ways you could use hyper-personalisation today. We’d love to hear if you’ve had success with personalisation or even hyper-personalisation!