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How Subscription Businesses Can Deliver Hyper-Personalized Experiences at Scale

Subharun Mukherjee 18+ years of experience leading product strategy, Go-To-Market (GTM), new market entry, value-based sales, analyst relations, and customer experience programs. Expertise in Financial Services, eCommerce, on-demand services, and the SaaS industry.
How Subscription Businesses Can Deliver Hyper-Personalized Experiences at Scale

Today’s digital customers are inundated with countless options and offers. Getting your subscription app to stand out becomes incredibly challenging in this landscape. As does building meaningful relationships with subscribers so they stick around for the long run. 

This is where the power of hyper-personalization comes into play.

Hyper-personalization involves tailoring each experience to meet the unique needs and preferences of individual customers. When done well, you create interactions that resonate more  deeply with each subscriber and make them feel understood and valued, throughout their subscription journey

Think about it. Every subscriber expects you to have some idea of their preferences, especially if you’re going to send them recommendations or offers. Eli Stein, a McKinsey Partner we talked with recently shares: “76% of customers we surveyed say they feel frustrated when companies don’t personalize or demonstrate that they know them.”

And hyper-personalization can have a significant impact on customer retention. By analyzing a customer’s past behaviors, purchase history, and preferences, you can identify patterns and trends that will allow you to predict customer churn and take proactive measures to prevent it. 

But It’s Not Without Challenges

However, delivering personalized experiences at scale is no small feat for subscription businesses. As the customer base grows and diversifies, maintaining a high level of personalization becomes increasingly challenging. 

  • Data volume: One of the primary hurdles is the sheer volume of data that you must analyze and interpret — you have numerous touchpoints and interactions occurring across different channels, each interaction creating a data point. Making sense of this data can be overwhelming.
  • Segmentation capability: To deliver truly hyper-personalized experiences, you need to segment your customers into smaller, more specific groups. Group them by their preferences, behaviors, engagement patterns, and purchase history. This level of segmentation requires advanced analytics and the ability to derive actionable insight from data.
  • Omnichannel readiness: Another challenge is reaching customers through their preferred channels, whether it’s through push notifications, email, in-app messaging, or social media. Delivering consistent, personalized experiences across all touchpoints and coordinating and managing campaigns across multiple channels can be complex and resource-intensive.

To address and solve these challenges, you need the right customer engagement platform that addresses these complexities and empowers your subscription businesses to deliver hyper-personalization at scale.

Why Scalable Hyper-Personalization Requires an All-in-One Platform

When it comes to achieving hyper-personalization at scale, subscription businesses need a robust and comprehensive solution. An all-in-one solution eliminates the need for any third-party tools and the related costs both in terms of manpower and funding. Let’s explore what you should be looking for in such a platform.

Campaigns

Campaign management tools provide you with the ability to create targeted, personalized campaigns across various channels. Whether it’s push notifications, in-app messages, email, or SMS, you need to engage with subscribers at every touchpoint. Your platform should allow for sophisticated targeting, scheduling, and A/B testing to optimize campaign performance and drive desired outcomes.

Journeys

A journey builder enables you to design and automate customer journeys that are tailored to individual user behavior. By mapping out the entire user journey, you can deliver personalized messages and experiences at crucial moments, nurturing subscribers through different stages of their lifecycle.

Segmentation

Segmentation is a fundamental aspect of hyper-personalization. With an advanced segmentation engine, you can divide subscribers into granular segments based on the characteristics or behaviors that are most meaningful. This allows for targeted messaging or personalized recommendations specific to each segment.

Personalization

You also need to deliver contextually relevant experiences to your subscribers, which requires access to real-time data to understand user preferences, behaviors, and intent at that moment. This requires robust data analysis on a user’s recent activities, past interactions, and entire purchase history. 

You should also have the ability to personalize messages based on factors such as the user’s location, language preferences, subscription plan, or content preferences. 

Not all mobile marketing platforms can do this. But if yours does, you can deliver personalized and contextual recommendations, offers, and messaging immediately, when the user is most likely to be responsive.

Analytics

Making decisions based on data is key to successful hyper-personalization. To beat your competition, you absolutely must have a comprehensive analytics suite that will provide your subscription business with valuable insights into how users behave, how your campaigns are performing, and how well you’re engaging subscribers overall. 

Only when you fully understand the impact of your personalization efforts, can you identify trends and optimize your strategies to continually improve the customer experience.

How ZEE5 Used ‘Best Time’ for 60% Uplift in Campaign CTRs

ZEE5 is the world’s largest streaming platform for South Asian content, offering content in 12 regional Indian languages and six international languages. To achieve such success required sophisticated segmentation based on properties such as language but also many different user behaviors and preferences. 

Recognizing the importance of testing, they performed over 200 A/B tests for their campaigns over a 90-day period. One test was to determine the best time to send for every user feature, which was especially critical since their users are spread out across the globe with unique app usage patterns. Doing this manually was obviously unfeasible. 

Using CleverTap’s best send times which combines data science with machine learning, ZEE5 was able to connect with users at their preferred time. The result: a 60% boost in CTRs when compared to not using the feature.

Read the rest of the case study to learn more about how CleverTap enabled ZEE5’s growth.

Nurturing an Ongoing Relationship

Hyper-personalization has become a critical strategy for subscription businesses that are dependent upon an ongoing relationship for their revenue. Subscribers expect tailored experiences that cater to their unique preferences and needs in response to their loyalty. 

By leveraging an all-in-one customer engagement platform, you can unlock the full potential of hyper-personalization and create exceptional experiences that resonate with your subscribers.

Explore CleverTap’s all-in-one platform and robust features for data-driven insights, sophisticated segmentation, and multichannel engagement. CleverTap might just be the competitive advantage you need to differentiate your subscription business from the rest of your competition. 

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Last updated on October 1, 2024