How to get it right

And not scare people off

How to do personalization the right way

Three principles to put into practice

Personalization (if poorly done) can feel a lot like a creepy guy stalking you in a club. You look at a toaster online for a few seconds and every ad on every website you visit for the next week is selling you toasters. Everywhere you turn, there it is. Coincidental? Absolutely not. And you’re not the only one who thinks so. According to InMoment 2018’s CX trends report, a whopping 75% of consumers said they find personalized ads and branding at least somewhat creepy.

Marketers need to remember when clicking the send button on their personalized campaigns that behind the data they’re using are living breathing humans, with emotions, opinions, and voices. We need to consider the context in which our messages and tactics are experienced.

Effective personalization offers audiences at least one of two things:

A sense of personal importance and value
The removal of friction in the achievement of a goal

These two features neatly tie into what we humans psychologically want and need from our experiences and relationships – including those we have with brands and businesses. According to self-determination theory, human beings have three underlying psychological needs that are important to their well-being.

1. A sense of belonging

The first is relatedness. We’re social animals and crave to feel significant to and understood by others. Our interpersonal relationships are strengthened by a sense of common ground and shared understanding.

Content that relates to our sense of self and how we experience the world stimulates our sense of belonging. It's positively received, so long as it's perceived as authentic.

EasyJet’s 20th birthday personalized content campaign is an example of getting this right. They used 28 points of customer data to create personalized stories about each person’s travels with the airline – their shared journey over the years. Customers loved it.

Content that relates to our sense of self and how we experience the world stimulates our sense of belonging

2. Freedom to choose

Our second psychological need is autonomy. We want to feel like our opinions and emotions matter – that we have the freedom to act according to our minds, rather than the minds of others. Personalization that appears manipulative, stalkerish, or insensitive jars with this need and quickly lands a brand in the creepy category.

3. Mastery of tasks

The third psychological need is competence. This is where removing friction comes in. We want and need to feel both challenged and accomplished, which is why most of us continually set ourselves goals.

Personalized marketing or communications that help a customer achieve a particular goal tap into this need. If a COO downloads a report about anti-bribery and we later send them our practical guide to establishing a culture of compliance, chances are we’ll get their attention. If we send them our report about AI ethics, maybe less so.

In B2B, when it comes to approaching personalization from the perspective of benefit to the audience, rather than business, then removing specific sources of friction and nurturing competence in a way that’s meaningful to the individual is a clear winner.