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By Dan Duke - If none of the 5,000 new Oreo flavors are exactly your speed, you can build your own Oreos to celebrate your next special occasion. Don’t like running? Take a quick quiz to discover the perfect fitness routine for you. And if your daughter’s been dying for an American Girl doll, why not get your money's worth and design a one-of-a-kind doll that looks just like her? Hyper-personalization is the name of the game, especially for large household brands.

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The trend is gaining momentum as more sophisticated algorithms, ready-made platforms, and AI technology make it possible for start-ups and boutique brands to get in on the action, too.

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Fifty years ago, a content strategist would likely tell you the entire purpose of branding was to ensure the customer could recognize your company. That still matters, but now it’s just as important to show your customers that you recognize them. That’s where hyper-personalization comes in.

What is hyper-personalization?

Hyper-personalization is the practice of tailoring marketing messages, products, services, and experiences to individual consumers based on their preferences, behaviors, and demographics. It goes beyond traditional personalization by leveraging real-time advanced data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms to create customized and relevant interactions with customers. Businesses use this marketing strategy to deliver curated content, customized products, and tailor-made product recommendations and services. They also can use it for targeted customer support through an AI chatbot. Think high-touch high tech.

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This type of marketing aims for higher conversion rates and greater customer engagement, loyalty, and satisfaction. Consumers want hyper-personalization throughout the customer journey, and they’re usually willing to give up some data and personal information to get it. But are companies are actually using hyper-personalization correctly to get the best results? An Ascend2 survey of top-level marketing executives reveals that only 9% of marketers have completed a hyper-personalization strategy for their company. Sometimes, with the increased pace of both technology and advertising, we see how hyper-personalization can backfire if users feel their privacy has been violated or if ads are overly-personalized but not presented to a target who's ready or able to buy.

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Clearly, there’s still a gap between the expectations of the target audience and business marketing strategy — and in that gap there’s a lot of opportunity.

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Personalization vs. hyper-personalization

Hyper-personalization is often described as an extreme version of personalization, but there’s more to it than that. They differ in degree, but there are important differences between the two, as marketing strategies, in scale, speed, and results.

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Scale: Segments vs. individuals

While personalized marketing tends to focus on profiles within market segments or “persona-based marketing,” hyper-personalization thinks in terms of individuals. Gone are the days of generic push notifications or segmented email campaigns. Hyper-personalization gives us a way to offer unique experiences to every website visitor and tailor suggestions just for them.

Speed: Follow-ups vs. real time

In a personalized marketing campaign, marketers are generally limited to follow-up emails, text messages, and phone calls based on aggregated data. Hyper-personalization also uses follow-up advertising tactics. (We’re all familiar with those product recommendations that follow us around social media after we’ve abandoned our cart!)However, it is also capable of using big data, AI, and machine learning to deliver unique user experiences in the moment. This makes potential customers feel like their needs are being anticipated and their satisfaction is increased.

Results: Good vs. great

Personalized marketing campaigns have been around forever, from the legendary Staff Picks at Blockbuster to restaurants offering free appetizers on your birthday. These tried-and-true strategies work, but they don’t go far enough. Customers, especially in the context of digital marketing, now expect more.

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When it comes to the difference in results between the two strategies, the numbers speak for themselves. According to the 2023 State of Personalization Report produced by Segment, over half of consumers (56%) say they will become repeat buyers after a hyper-personalized experience, a 7% increase from 2022. Hyper-personalization provides a better ROI than regular personalization.

The limitations and frustrations of hyper-personalization

Of course, nothing as revolutionary as hyper-personalization comes without headaches and frustrations. Typically, companies that are trying to hyper-personalize face challenges in three core areas:

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• Data collection, analysis and management. How will you collect customer data and who will manage and analyze that data for you? This question tends to be the biggest hurdle most businesses face when starting this marketing strategy. Big companies like Amazon, Spotify, and Netflix have the resources to implement sophisticated hyper-personalization at scale, but what about smaller companies? Developing a plan for data collection and analysis is the first step. You can’t customize a user experience if you don’t know anything about your potential customer.
• Privacy concerns. Even though millennials, Gen Z, (and yes, even Gen Alpha) consumers are usually more than willing to swap their data for personalized experiences, you still have a responsibility to keep that data secure and private. Fortunately, many turnkey web platforms offer excellent data security with built-in algorithms for hyper-personalization.
• Silos in the workplace. Implementing this type of marketing plan makes it even more imperative that company departments learn to work together, specifically the marketing, sales, IT, and customer service departments. Many CEOs find it simpler and more efficient to hire an outside marketing and data firm to manage their hyper-personalization campaigns and serve as a single point of contact for all involved departments.

An example of hyper-personalization in action

Let’s look at personalized vitamin packs as just one example. Companies like Persona Vitamins took a common problem, applied hyper-personalization to it, and turned personalized nutrition and medicine into nearly a $600 billion industry.

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What was the problem? Every adult knows they should be taking vitamins, but it’s such a pain. Does this sound familiar? "Did I take them today? How do I know what to take? Why are there so many bottles to open and close every day? Do I take this in the morning or the evening?

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"Instead, a hyper-personalized vitamin service asks users to take a simple assessment and then ships easy-to-open, easy-to-remember, custom-designed vitamin packs on a monthly schedule.

3 factors driving consumer demand for hyper-personalization

Even with data and privacy concerns, most consumers are still willing (and eager) to engage with companies that use hyper-personalization. After all, it saves users time, delivers more relevant results, and creates a better overall use experience.

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Three other factors are boosting demand for hyper-personalization.

Time spent online is increasing

Our online lives have been steadily increasing over the past decade. More importantly, our time on mobile devices has quintupled since 2011, far outpacing time spent on desktops or laptops. Younger generations are particularly prone to spending more time online. It's factored into their education, leisure, and social obligations. Young people expect algorithmic technology to provide ad personalization, because it takes the guesswork out of searching for a product that they'd like. According to Salesforce, 74% of Gen Zers are interested in personalized products compared to 67% of Millennials, 61% of Gen Xers and 57% of Baby Boomers. We want our favorite companies to put relevant results at our fingertips.

Online shopping is here to stay — but it's changing

The convenience of online shopping is unbeatable, and like working from home, it seems it is here to stay. However, there has been a proliferation of drop-shipping pop-up shops and low-quality products using hyper-personalization to net unwitting consumers.

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Another challenge: Consumers are getting good (and will get even better) at filtering out online ads that are overtly promotional or blatantly targeted. One of the ways hyper-personalization can help circumvent this trend is by tailoring long-form content to answer questions your target customers are asking. This still uses hyper-personalization, but just in a more effective and long-term strategy while avoiding the pitfalls of rapidly-changing consumer habits.

Customers are busy

Everyone is so busy these days. Or, at least we feel really busy. Choice fatigue is part of the problem, and hyper-personalization can help solve it. Delivering the right offer to the right target at just the right moment prevents them from spending hours scrolling, searching, comparison shopping, and deciding. And they’ll love you for it.

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Since hyper-personalization is essentially one-to-one marketing, there are thousands of examples of it at work. It is so powerful precisely because of its versatility and ability to address a wide range of specific concerns.

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Are too many customers returning purchases? Use hyper-personalization to deliver more relevant product recommendations. Losing customers to a new competitor? Personalize an experience to increase brand loyalty. Missing out on an entire market segment because of a language barrier? Try a multilingual chatbot plug-in.

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Perhaps the best way to make hyper-personalization work for you is to dig down into your company’s primary pain points and figure out if there’s an automated, AI-driven solution that has the added benefit of approaching your customers like individuals.

AI has changed everything

Artificial intelligence has provided a unique way for hyper-personalization to become even more commonplace. One unique aspect of artificial intelligence is its ability to adapt and scale along with consumer expectations. This capability of blending AI with hyper-personalization efforts makes it a contender for adapting to future trends in marketing, whether that's augmented/virtual reality, voice-based chatbots, or something entirely new!

Make hyper-personalization work for your brand with a Relliverse™

At Rellify, we've done a lot of testing, re-testing, and fine-tuning to learn how artificial intelligence and natural language processing models can improve long-form content creation. We've found that when it comes to boosting organic SEO, the content you produce should reflect the user profile of someone who's in need of your product. This is where a customized Relliverse™ comes in. By crawling large volumes of data from websites and industries that are similar to yours (and ranking well), a custom Relliverse™ is able to tell you exactly what topics and keywords your company needs to focus on in order to blow your competition out of the water. It's a type of hyper-personalization, but instead of simply collecting user data, it's putting context to statistics surrounding search engines and the content that they rank well.

Know Your Audience. Know Your Competition. Get Results.

The increased demand for hyper-personalization reflects consumers’ interest in receiving results that are relevant to their unique interests. The groundbreaking Relliverse™ provides individual solutions to clients by using company-specific research to craft content that is relevant to potential leads — the ones who are most likely to become customers. Contact a Rellify expert today to see how it can help your business extend its reach and relevance.