Personalization has come a long way in the last 15 years. We’ve evolved way past greeting someone by their first name and patting ourselves on the back, but there’s still a lot of room for brands to improve. The biggest challenge? Orchestrating and scaling personalization so that customers are getting a tailored experience without marketers creating each one individually.
At Think Summit 2022, the Movable Ink product team delivered a keynote where they explored how brands can make sure they’re harnessing the power of personalization. To help guide marketers through the steps of this process, they introduced the DICE framework, which is organized around four main areas: Data, Intelligence, Content, and Experience.
Data
Challenges: Overcoming Silos and Avoiding Overreach
Most companies today are investing in customer data, but there are two main stumbling blocks preventing them from using it effectively: data siloing and privacy.
Let’s get into siloing first. For many companies, reaching a true 360-degree customer view can feel almost mythical. The reason it feels that way is because, well, it essentially is mythical. And that’s because how and where we store data has some very real limits, like opt-outs, data silos, and regulatory constraints, to name a few. Instead of spending precious time chasing the unattainable 360-degree view, marketers’ time is better spent on figuring out how to effectively integrate and activate the right data at the right time.
As for the privacy issue, marketers need to carefully thread the needle so that personalization feels helpful, not unsettling. While today’s consumers have grown to expect a certain level of personalization, we’ve all gotten an email that makes us wonder, “Wait, how do you even know that about me?” It can be a fine line between a light, personal touch and an eerie one, so it’s important to make sure you’re striking the right note.
Solution: Connecting Directly to the Source
Movable Ink has always been focused on helping marketers get the most out of their data, ensuring that content is relevant and timely at the moment of open. Our most recent focus has been on building tools that allow marketers to unlock first- and third-party data by connecting to different data sources. With the ability to tap into an API and map it, our platform uses data to automatically generate creative. Additionally, our Stories product can capture behavioral data and create profiles, allowing marketers to retarget individual customers based on their recent interactions with brands.
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Intelligence
Challenges: Going Beyond Segments
When a customer reads a message, they should feel like the brand is talking to them specifically, not just people like them. In other words, AI needs to go beyond the segment level and work on an individual one.
But it’s not enough to just tell customers what they already know about themselves. Rather, AI should help them make new discoveries. Because sure, while someone may love t-shirts, they probably want to buy something else at some point. If a brand can anticipate their needs and help them discover new products and services they might love, it’ll be a much more powerful customer experience.
However sophisticated AI has become, there’s always going to be a need for a creative, human touch in marketing, whether it’s marketers’ ability to predict future trends or their knowledge of brand rules. We’ve done the black box approach before, and we don’t wanna go back. For AI to be successful, teams need transparency into what is and isn’t working and maintain some degree of control over it.
Solution: Understanding Individual Behavior
That’s exactly why Movable Ink developed our AI-powered personalization engine, Da Vinci, which will make its officially launch soon.
Da Vinci is rooted in understanding the many dimensions of your customer and how their behavior maps onto products that they might be interested in. However, true intelligence requires more than just this understanding — it needs to be able to easily act on it, which is why Da Vinci continuously tests and learns what’s resonating with each individual. We’ve seen this not only boost revenue significantly, but also client health.
Content
Challenge: Maximizing content, minimizing lift
Today’s content operations processes favor a bespoke creation process. But when you scale personalization, manually crafting each piece of content is incredibly cumbersome and inefficient. It can take weeks between handing off a brief and receiving the final assets, often requiring much back-and-forth along the way. And sadly, its impact is limited to one or two uses, usually on the same channel.
Solution: Modulating creative
With Movable Ink, brands can get so much more mileage out of their marketing assets. Instead of starting over from scratch every time you need new content, image personalization, and business logic allow teams to create personalized messaging at scale. In addition to pulling product and customer data, it can personalize content on an aesthetic level, automatically generating the imagery, color, and text that’ll best speak to each individual customer.
Not only does this free up time and resources, it allows every customer, millions even, to have a truly tailored experience. With the ability to leverage this across different channels — from email to mobile apps to SMS and beyond — the possibilities of automated modular content are truly endless.
Experience
Challenge: Creating cohesion across channels
As we’ve discussed, one-off campaigns on a single-channel are table stakes these days. The key to success lies in creating a cohesive customer experience across channels. No matter which touchpoint a customer may be interacting with, it should feel personal, timely, and relevant to them.
Solution: Centralizing content
Movable Ink started with email personalization, then expanded to mobile in 2020, and now we’re bringing that capability to SMS. With all of these exciting new developments, our goal is to be the central brain for content across channels, crafting a seamless, individualized experience for consumers.
Conclusion
In order to create a truly personalized customer customer journey, brands need to leverage data using tools that can act on it across all channels. Hopefully the DICE framework gives you a useful roadmap on your own journey to scalable personalization.
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