You’re Biased, So You Need Automated Personalization — Yes, You!

We all know the sweeping perks of automated personalization (AP). From where I sit, having a powerhouse machine sidekick enables marketers across all backgrounds, skillsets, and verticals to turn over the real-time personalization activities so they can focus their efforts and energies on moving mountains — or more specifically, creating sky-high, best-in-class customer experiences. Sounds like a win/win to me.

More than just a high-value integration, automated personalization is becoming increasingly critical in today’s always-on, customer-centric universe — a universe in which your consumers are demanding bigger, better, and more relevant experiences every single day. If you don’t deliver, they’ll ditch — that’s the last millisecond at play.

But, even with the clear-cut wins that come with automated personalization — and the heightened consumer demand for better, more personalized experiences — companies continue to dodge the AP bullet, holding themselves back from tapping a machine sidekick, and therefore, overcomplicating their experience-delivery processes. My advice? Just. Stop. Stop overcomplicating things. Stop talking yourself out of it. Stop. Stop. Stop. Getting started with automated personalization should be the easiest marketing decision you ever make.

Ever.

Are You the Personalization Powerhouse You Think You Are?
Automated personalization is cool, plain and simple. It removes human bias — and that, in and of itself, is incredible! When you talk about rules-based personalization or a personalization strategy that’s been crafted and carefully curated, you’re talking about tons of data that’s been culled from a number of sources and taps into a number of marketers, data scientists, and analysts — all of whom are personally invested in the process. You decide you want to show these people these types of things — and maybe it works. Maybe you see a 10-percent increase in conversion rates or average order value. You high five your colleagues and announce that you’re a personalization powerhouse before moving on to the next thing. Mission accomplished.

But, is it? Toss automation into the mix, and you have a hardworking algorithm in place that doesn’t have feelings — and as a result, doesn’t have feelings that can be hurt. The machine doesn’t care whether its ideas are good. There are no politics or BS. An automated-personalization system just keeps plugging away until it gets a win. Despite your best human-marketer intentions, we all have dozens of cognitive biases — from psychological and behavioral to social and decision making. These systematic deviations can cloud our judgments and rationalities without us even realizing it, impacting our abilities to see what’s happening all around us — and specifically, the pieces affecting our personalization efforts.

Even the very best manual personalization will undoubtedly be bested by a machine sidekick — a machine sidekick that turns over every rock and searches every possible combination until it finds what works. It might not be the most carefully curated or fanciest combo — it might even be something you pushed aside because it seemed too basic (such as time of day paired with geography). People in the south like this after work — simple stuff. You ignored it, the machine found it, and now you can capitalize on it. It’s powerful, and it’s meaningful.

Don’t be afraid to integrate automated personalization into your marketing processes. Don’t fall into the “it’s too difficult,” or “it’s too complicated,” — or worse, “I’m doing fine by myself” — traps. Take a breath and say hello to your (incredibly cool, always-on, unbiased, total powerhouse) machine-marketing sidekick.

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from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/personalization/youre-biased-need-automated-personalization-yes/