Practical personalization: Adobe’s tips for creating meaningful moments with AI and automation

Most marketers know that when it comes to messaging, personalization absolutely matters. A 2018 study from Epsilon found that 80% of consumers are more likely to make a purchase after a personalized experience. But sifting through and organizing data in order to deliver the perfect experience to each buyer can sometimes seem like an insurmountable task.

Recently, ClickZ held a webinar with Adobe group product marketing manager Drew Burns to talk about some of the powerful (and surprising!) ways marketers can use AI and machine learning in order to create personalized experiences through every stage of the buyer journey. 

Content produced in collaboration with Adobe.

Here are some of Burns’s top tips from our webinar:

Personalization: What do we know about an individual at a given point?

Personalization has too often become a catch-all buzzword. But to Burns, personalization boils down to a simple philosophy: “What do we know about an individual at a given point?”

For example, a customer that browses, leaves, and comes back is leaving all sorts of clues about their needs and interests. AI and machine learning tools can unravel these tools by connecting dots as well as eliminating unnecessary data to create an overview of customer behavior. This overview can then be used to create seamless experiences that offer relevant content without being obvious.

“When it’s done well, you shouldn’t notice it,” Burns says. “It’s not, ‘Hey Dave, we know you browsed this’ — that’s a creepy experience.”

AI and machine learning can help create meaningful moments

AI and machine learning can help marketers create personal experiences by discarding the data that’s not helpful and surfacing the data that brings value. It’s the continual delivery of relevant content across devices and interactions that Burns calls a “seamless experience:”

“Let’s say I’m looking at an article on my desktop during lunch, and it’s something that I want to share with my partner that night on my tablet,” Burns says. “New technology like Co-Opt from Adobe allows for someone to be identified across devices. This delivers tremendous potential for meaningful moments.”

Don’t be afraid to go for the low-hanging fruit

Marketers often overlook the places that have the most obvious potential for AI-driven meaningful moments: headlines. Tailoring headlines on websites to specific audience segments can have a huge impact on click-throughs and sign-ups.

“Target those headline offers,” Burns says. “Ask yourself, which segments do I have a specific offer for that I want to surface higher up on a web or mobile site? Where’s my low-hanging fruit? This type of targeting is so impactful, but I’m always surprised by how many companies don’t do this.”

Consider automated personalization

Buyers regularly reveal what they want through keyword searches. Using automation to ensure that they find what they’re looking for is an important way to offer seamless personalization.

“If somebody types “smartphones” into a google search and then clicks through to your site, what should you be showing next?” Burns asks. “You might have a little bit of information on that visitor or you might have a ton of it. This is where automated personalization can come in. An algorithm will look at all the data that you have on that customer at that given point and will be able to score all those attributes, and deliver personalization in real time at that moment. It scales, and it discards data that’s not valuable.”

Using automation from the very beginning at the research stage of the buyer journey is an important way to initiate both new and returning customers into the seamlessly personalized experience.

Personalized navigation is too often overlooked

Personalizing banners and offers is an excellent way to begin using automation for personalization, but another often overlooked place to personalize content is in the navigation bar.

“If I come to a landing page from a campaign, oftentimes navigation is showing me completely different categories,” Burns says. “What about personalized navigation? It’s based on category affinity from click-throughs and time spent browsing. Rather than just showing all the icons for navigation, personalized navigation improves conversions by showing categories that are just right.”  

To hear more of Burns’s best personalization tips, check out ClickZ and Adobe’s webinar, “20 Practical Personalization Ideas for Maximizing Impact.”