HPCJ’s, better experiences for your audience

We’ve heard about personalization a lot. For a long time, too.

I remember being at the Digital Marketer Traffic & Conversion Summit back in 2015 or 2016 and hearing the buzzword “personalization” for email; the possibilities seemed too good to be true! Well, essentially, they were - personalization so often shows itself as a customer’s first name in an email or SMS followed by high fives around the marketing team - stock photo style.

It's time to do it right. Let’s dig into “hyper-personalized customer journeys” (HPCJ) and discover how to bring true personalization to your audience. They signed up for your list; now you owe them a better experience.

Let’s dig in.

How to be a better listener

THINK FAST! What’s the first goal of your welcome series?

Is it to generate revenue? Is it to give your new subscribers the coveted 10% off code you promised? Is it to tell your new sub your life story and why you now sell hand soap “handcrafted using only the finest urban-foraged ingredients”?

What if you could do all of that, plus use it as an opportunity to learn even more from your audience? Believe it or not, there are sub-avatars within every audience, and they all probably want a slightly different version of what you’re offering.

This is good news. The righteous path is simple. Use the tools available to you, and LISTEN!!

What ad or traffic source did the user come from? Did they look at a specific product page on your site or browse a certain product collection? Maybe they read a particular blog article: What do these actions tell you about this user? How can this information shape their next experience with your brand?

When building hyper-personalized customer journeys, the answer is always some combination of the above - with a massive emphasis on using every tool available to listen to your audience and log the results for future (and immediate in the case of SMS) use. 

Every single subscriber click is motivated by SOMETHING! It’s your job to collect the data creatively, put it all together, look at the big picture, and decide, “What does this specific type of customer (sub-avatar) need from me in the next message I’m planning to send to them?”

So maybe in our imaginary urban-foraged hand soap e-com startup, we take this advice by adding a 2-way message to our welcome series. Any allergies? When you dumpster dive for your hand soap ingredients, product recommendations might rely heavily on a data point like this. Let’s go ahead and give our new subscribers a chance to tell us.

Connect the dots

Now that we hear the audience, it’s time to deliver goods! The goods, of course, are personalized customer experiences, baby.

Gathering data from your audience is a never-ending process; your SMS and email journeys are the framework that keeps iteration almost automatic based on a feedback loop fueled by your subscribers' interactions. They are not to be taken lightly.

Back to our hand soap startup, let’s settle on the name Junk to Joy Lather. We’ve learned, based on our implementation of that 2-way message, that a significant % of our audience is allergic to nuts! Aw nuts!

What a handy bit of information to have before creating content or recommending products to the audience!

It’s also helpful in a holistic marketing sense. Now you know that a large chunk of the audience that came through this funnel shares this allergy - maybe this can impact your media buying strategy. Maybe this data affects product development, and there’s an emphasis on nut-free options. Thank you, welcome series!

Let’s take it a step further. 

Now that we’ve set up unique experiences for our nut-allergy folks. What else can we learn about them? Is it worthwhile to create HPCJs for sub-avatars with a nut allergy that hates the smell of pine? Maybe! There’s only one way to find out! 

That’s the beauty of hyper-personalized customer messages. It’s a never-ending process of learning, remembering, providing value, learning more, remembering, and so on forever. 

Data is everywhere, and you owe it to your current + future subscribers to use it. I can’t wait to hear what you learn about your audience!