Top tips is a weekly column where we highlight what’s trending in the tech world and list ways to explore these trends. This week, we’re looking at three ways to make sure your hyper-personalization strategy does not come across as creepy or intrusive.
Gone are the days of lifeless, cold, and generic interactions with services over the internet. We now find ourselves in the age of personalization, where a lot of the content we see online is tailored to our preferences. Personalization is a great way to establish a connection between an organization and a customer, adding a human element to these interactions.
While it might seem like a meaningless gesture, even an action as simple as referring to you by your name on the home page of a website can make you feel valued. Combine this with the convenience afforded by such personalization and the content/product recommendation it brings, and you can see why it has been embraced by organizations the world over.
Traditional personalization involves using basic demographic information and browsing data to provide you with recommendations. Hyper-personalization, on the other hand, takes this a step further. Hyper-personalization is an ongoing approach to personalization that uses AI and ML to analyze data in real time to provide you with dynamic and reactive content recommendations. This data can come from a wide range of sources, from social and behavioral data to location and other contextual information. Hyper-personalization is a broad term that can include both advertising and how a website or service dynamically changes based on your activity. It also involves the use of predictive analytics to recommend items you might need in the future based, once again, on large volumes of data. For example, you might receive advertisements for umbrellas and raincoats due to weather patterns in your location. What’s more, the styling on these items might vary depending on your purchasing history and preferences.
Despite its many benefits, hyper-personalization can move into intrusive territory if you don’t play your cards right. Too many bad moves, and you could end up seeing yourself on the wrong side of a razor-thin line between helpful and unsettling. Here are three ways to make sure your hyper-personalization strategy stays firmly on the helpful side.
1. Collect only relevant data
With hyper-personalization, improving UX and providing increased convenience for your customers should be your only goal. Only collect data that is relevant to the services you provide, and make sure you limit your data collection to first-party sources. This way, you’re ensuring that you have all the data you need to help feed your personalization models while not overstepping the mark in any way.
2. Avoid third-party tracking
Collecting customer data from a wide range of sources outside of your own service using third-party tracking is a surefire way to make them feel like you know too much about them. Third-party cookies are generally viewed as a privacy threat, and until recently, all major web browsers were planning to phase them out entirely. While this hasn’t happened yet, the privacy implications of third-party tracking and the general discomfort most people have at the idea of their wider web activity being used for recommendations on completely different platforms and websites underscore the fact that this kind of data collection leans more towards the “creepy” and invasive side. Privacy laws like the GDPR and CCPA also regulate the use of third-party tracking, requiring organizations to allow users to opt-out. With so many steps being taken to restrict the use of third-party tracking, you don’t need us to tell you that it’s unpopular and you would be better off avoiding it entirely.
3. Transparency is key
Keep all your customers informed about exactly what kind of data is collected, how it is collected, and where it is used. A transparent privacy policy that includes all this information, while also being concise, is a great tool to earn customer trust. Allowing customers to opt out of your hyper-personalized marketing even though you’re collecting data ethically can go a long way towards convincing your customer base that you take their privacy seriously.
Make sure you’re not going too far
In an era of increased data privacy awareness, building a reputation as a privacy-first organization should be top priority. How you handle content personalization can greatly influence how you are viewed by your customers and the public at large. Making sure you’re being wholly transparent about how data is being collected and used, complying with data regulations, even those that don’t necessarily apply to you, and allowing customers to opt out of personalization entirely can go a long way towards keeping your hyper-personalization from feeling invasive. It’s a delicate balance, but following these steps can help you create a hyper-personalization strategy that is both effective and non-intrusive.
