Blog
10 Aug 2021

How we make personalisation happen

Pixl8’s Jonathan McLellan presents a feature-filled session on how to make personalisation happen. An eclectic mix of advice and insights, from strategy and planning frameworks to tactics on implementing quick wins.

Given the significant amount of data that the membership sector is required to capture as part of applications, they have an added advantage over others. With the steer provided by their members comes the opportunity to make use of explicit personalisation.

 We know that many membership organisations are ambitious with their personalisation aims but often practical challenges stand in the way of delivery. Here some tips on how to ease the process and also make use of integrated solutions such as our own Preside platform. 

Personalisation: The benefits

Creating a successful membership requires building and maintaining valuable relationships. One of the most effective ways to do so, is by providing a more personal, and relevant experience so that people feel valued as individuals. 

If you can demonstrate that you ‘get’ your members and what they need, this will open doors to better retention rates and a loyal membership base. 

Some examples of these benefits include:

Enhanced engagement

Offering content and services that are relevant to your target users is likely to keep them on your site for longer. As you continue to build a rapport, you’ll increase the chances of them becoming a member and/or advocate of your organisation.

Increased conversions

Personalisation can be used to boost cross-selling efforts. This is possible through techniques like carefully considering past activity, to help gently nudge members into purchasing more services or products, related to their tastes.

Improved retention and loyalty

By offering personalised experiences based on peoples details and interests, retaining your existing members becomes easier. This is because they’ll find it harder to leave, having built up a valued relationship with you.

Focused marketing

With personalisation, marketing can become predictive rather than reactive. This means you can give members what they want before even requesting it; allowing you to provide the right information to the right people at the right time.

Aligning all the pieces of the personalisation puzzle

As with all strategies, it’s important to consider any dependencies that could come into play now or in the future. Organisational objectives need to be aligned with target users’ needs, data security requirements and available tools.

A common challenge we see are information silos. While we find that organisations normally hold a lot of information about their members, that doesn’t mean they are able to use it. To access information when and where you need it and to deliver powerful personalised experiences, it is vital to consider systems integration.

Getting personalisation right

There are many sides to personalisation, which means some of them will be more successful than others. However, incremental approaches and testing along the way can help to get it right.

Know my name

Take for example the simple effort of addressing your member by their first name in your weekly e-newsletter. Done right, and it can help to get their attention and encourage them to read on.

If you are missing the data to do this though, you might run into problems when emails are being sent with incorrect names or no names at all.

Not too much

Another thing to watch out for is implementing more personalisation than needed. Small changes can make all the difference and they give your members time to get used to it.

Just because somebody read an article related to a given topic, doesn’t necessarily mean that’s their key interest - think about how frustrating Amazon’s relentless recommendations can sometimes be!

Let us make it happen for you

We’d love to hear about what your personalisation ambitions are or to explore the topic a bit further. We have both the strategy, delivery and platform to make personalisation deliver a better experience for you and your members.

Get in touch

Watch the video on this topic

Webinar: How we make personalisation happen

Related topics

Personalisation Data & CRM
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