In our first blog on Top 10 personalization Trends to Watch Out in 2020 series, we discussed the top 5 trends that brands will follow to deliver relevant and contextual communication for superior customer experience. We had enlisted how personalization is becoming a top priority for brands, and how - the move towards omnichannel personalization, an obvious increase in personalization budgets, higher focus on mobile-first approach and website personalization will-become trendier. In this part of the 2-blog series, we will now discuss the next top 5 personalization trends to watch out in 2020.

1. Leveraging AI and Machine Learning

The precondition, to provide superior customer experience is to identify your audiences before initiating a conversation or delivering your offerings. Thankfully, the recent development around artificial intelligence and new algorithms, has simplified the process of identifying prospects by tapping their footprints across different channels, studying their purchasing behaviour, their journey and overall browsing patterns among others.

With AI, brands can align their personalization efforts- to determine the exact journey of their customers with precise anticipation of the next steps that they will take along the journey. With machine learning, marketers can easily process huge amounts of data to make quick decisions and offer relevant experience to every visitor - executing personalization at scale.

According to a survey by e-Consultancy, almost 75% of digital marketers plan to use AI in their personalization efforts for an expectation of staggering 81% - for audience targeting. The growing trend to use AI & ML for providing personalized experiences is the proof that-in 2020, AI coupled with ML is certain to transform the entire marketing scenario altogether.

2. Incorporation of Big Data in Personalization

As explained earlier in the blog, personalization will be impossible without the availability of data to support informed decisions. Major advances in big data have really made it easier for marketers, to run targeted campaigns and reach a larger number of prospective customers with relevant offerings much faster than their competitors.

Customer experience transformation depends heavily on the ability of a company to collect, sort, co-relate and analyse data from customer footprints across all platforms. Big data along with additional backing from ML has been supporting marketers immensely to make highly precise and relevant interactions with the customers, however, the next challenge for brands will be to ensure the right management of the big data & translating them into result-driven insights.

3. Customer Experience to Be the Main Driver

The main goal of personalization has always been to provide seamless, connected and consistent experience to customers. The personalization trends in 2020 will certainly be directed towards improving the customer experience. According to Frost & Sullivan, by the dawn of 2020, companies can no longer depend on price and product as their primary competitive differentiator and would need to compete on the basis of superior and improvised customer experience.

Both personalization and customer experience go hand in hand with one complementing the other. Delivery of content that engages and echoes the sentiments of customers throughout their journey will be the key differentiator in times to come as- Customer loyalty, engagement, and trust are inextricably linked to the delivery of superior customer experiences and that, can be achieved only through a robust personalization strategy

4. Voice to gain priority for buying and researching.

According to Adobe Analytics Report 2018, around 50% of US consumers will own a smart speaker and 71% among them will be using them to search about products and research further. In 2020, voice will emerge as a strong proposition to engage customers and meet their rising expectations.

As discussed in part 1 of this blog, brands will focus primarily on the mobile-first approach due to the increasing proliferation of mobile devices across the world. The need to integrate voice assistants and support will become essential for brands to provide engaging interactions and personalized customer experience during the research and ultimate purchase process. Brands will also need to pay attention to the expectation of today’s customers for authenticated and human-like voice interactions in contrast to automated computer-generated voice.

5. Hyper-Personalization to Gather Momentum

Data when clubbed with analytics offer near real-time personalization which goes beyond incorporating personal information about customers like name, title, etc. It is Hyper-Personalization that takes personalized marketing a step further to deliver highly contextual & relevant communication to your user base by utilizing behavioural and real-time data towards a fruitful customer journey. To remain competitive, brands, in 2020, will move towards providing hyper-personalized experiences and will focus on offering a smooth, streamlined and pleasant experience to their customers.

Wrap Up

2020 is expected to herald a new epoch powered by AI and ML and brands will scale up digitally to meet the needs of the millennial customer. An effective approach to personalization can give you an edge over competitors by providing a truly superior customer experience. At a time when organizations are growing extremely competitive, staying ahead of the curve depends on how effectively you respond to customer demands and expectations. Brands like never-before need to forge a customer experience (CX) strategy to remain relevant in the race.

In this scenario, brands that have lagged, need to identify these top personalization trends and catch up with their competition by leveraging the right technologies and platforms, to offer an awe-inspiring customer experience. The new technologies discussed here, have been creating a buzz for a while, but their execution is still in question? However, despite all odds, it is certain that their overwhelming capability to drive personalization strategies will foster the trend towards their implementation by companies in 2020 and years to come.

Espire's Digital Experience Platform (DXP) solutions are empowering businesses and marketers with the ability to engage with the hyper-connected, on-the-go customers of today in a more meaningful, highly personalized and contextual manner seamlessly across all brand touchpoints - globally and locally. We provide an agile, collaborative and connected framework that leverages your technology ecosystem to intelligently arrange and orchestrate fragmented engagement systems and existing silos. Get in touch with us at marketing@espire.com for any query, free demo and assistance.