Dream beyond retail
While personalization has become a cornerstone in retail and digital marketing, nearly every sector should be exploring its potential.
"While personalization has become a cornerstone in retail and digital marketing, nearly every sector should be exploring its potential," explains Mona Champaneri, Senior Vice President of Experience and Product at Kin + Carta. “We are likely to see its expansion in industries where it’s not yet standard, such as healthcare, education, and legal services.”
In education, personalized learning paths could significantly enhance student engagement and outcomes by adapting to individual learning styles and paces. Imagine a classroom where each student receives assignments and resources tailored to their progress and preferences. This approach makes learning more engaging and equitable, allowing instructors to continuously refine their methods based on real-time feedback and student progress.
In healthcare, personalization can mean AI analyzes patient data to recommend specific treatments, monitor health trends, and even predict health issues before they become critical. The key lies in making decisions based on a patient's medical history and ongoing health data, not just generalized recommendations based on high-level demographics. Healthcare professionals can spend less time reacting to unexpected health issues and more time focusing on prevention and early intervention—leading to better outcomes and patient satisfaction.
The key will be for business leaders to understand why they’re adding personalization, says Ewan Nicolson, Director of Data & AI at Kin + Carta. “Are we recommending for discoverability? Are we recommending for a better experience?” he says. “That's the sort of thing that I'd love to be doing more of in the industry and not just slapping personalization on because you can.”
Zooming in on your ‘best customer’
In the future, loyalty programs won’t just be about discounts and rewards; they will be about understanding and meeting customers' real-time needs.
Understanding your "best customer" is an approach in which you target the group or individuals who best represent your target consumer. By modeling how to move customers along the “best customer path,” you can zero in on the actions most likely to trigger and deepen interactions.
At Kin + Carta, we worked with a leading international coffee chain retailer to tap propensity modeling—a statistical approach that uses data to predict behavior—to analyze and optimize its rewards program. This approach helps the business better understand and segment existing customers and consider different scenarios, such as whether the program incentivizes cross-selling in different categories without losing recurring sales.
As businesses continue to evolve their personalization strategies, the focus will become increasingly granular and precise. You’ll need to know which customers to target and how to customize your content and communication methods based on detailed customer profiles and sophisticated analysis.
“Customization in the future doesn't mean everyone's going to get an email or everyone's going to get an update, it's going to be targeted and it's going to be personalized,”
says Richard Bownes, Principal - Data & AI at Kin + Carta. “There's going to be a lot more tailoring of which customers are activated to receive content, what that content is, and how the body of customer communications or the presentation of the experience can be fine-tuned for them.”
Instead of generic messages to your entire audience, personalization is evolving into making sure each customer receives only information that's highly relevant to their needs and interests.
