Four brands that are raising the bar with personalisation (original) (raw)
Advances in AI, technology and data have pushed the boundaries of what brands can achieve with personalisation. But which brands are using it to best effect?
From a conversational assistant who can roast you over your bad spending habits to insurance messaging tailored to the weather, here are four examples of brands who have gone the extra mile with personalisation to achieve relevance, build trust, and deliver a quality customer experience.
Cleo: putting the ‘personal’ in personal finance
Cleo is an AI-powered personal finance assistant that uses hyper-personalisation to help people stay on top of their spending.
Cleo’s website describes the assistant as one that “thinks, remembers, coaches, and speaks like a person but scales like software”. Drawing (securely) on data about users’ financial habits and transactions, Cleo dispenses advice and insights about their spend and how to manage money. Users can even choose a ‘hype’ or ‘roast’ option to tailor the tone to their preferences.
This use case seems to be getting great traction from consumers who are attracted by the idea of real-time, personal advice about their finances with a conversational, plain English interface.
More recently, the company rolled out Cleo 3.0, which introduces agentic reasoning.
Using OpenAI’s o3 model, Cleo 3.0 features real-time voice conversations, more personal interactions that retain details from previous chats, and deeper insights into its users’ financial habits. A system called the Smart Insights Agent enables this version of Cleo to surface timely insights without prompting.
Cleo’s team have also worked to address the issue of hallucinations, which would likely concern many people, particularly in a sensitive area like finance. The new Cleo uses deterministing tools for mathematical tasks like filtering transactions and performing calculations, while the LLM layer is responsible for interpreting and replying to user requests in a fluid, conversational manner.
If it gains traction, Cleo could set a new bar for the type of experience users expect from financial apps.
Ulta Beauty: mastering first-party data
Ulta Beauty boasts one of the most vaunted loyalty programmes in beauty, consisting of some 44 million members – and linked to approximately 95% of the brand’s sales.
This rich dataset enables Ulta Beauty to understand its customers’ preferences at scale and deliver personalised content across different channels. However, the brand hasn’t always had an easy time interpreting so much data. Alongside its loyalty programme, Ulta Beauty also has first-party data from its in-store credit card programme and email and SMS lists, making joining up the data and activating it across channels a key challenge.
A partnership with SAS enabled Ulta Beauty to join different data sources together in a single customer journey, which gave rise to faster and more agile decision-making as data was no longer separated in silos.
More recently, using an Adobe Customer Data Platform and customer journey tools, Ulta Beauty has enriched its wealth of customer data to deliver real-time personalised insights and recommendations wherever customers are shopping.
For example, they know if a customer is browsing through specific products or adding an item to the cart and can respond to customer needs in real time with targeted promotions and content.
This turned their data into a competitive advantage as they can use it now to support their acquisition and retention by delivering the right experience at the right time.
After all, according to Kelly Mahoney, Ulta Beauty’s CMO, “beauty is deeply personal” – and the brand aspires to deliver an experience that is just as individual.
Direct Assurance: keeping customers informed whatever the weather
Sometimes personalisation can look like a tailored retail experience, and sometimes it can look like insurance communications that tell customers exactly what they need to know.
AXA Direct Assurance understands the importance of safety and planning ahead, and to that end they set out to build a campaign that would keep policyholders informed about severe weather events.
In partnership with Marigold, Direct Assurance launched a triggered campaign that sends e-mail and SMS messages abut floods, hail, thunderstorms, and snow.
The campaign started with proactive pre-event communication one to two days before the event with advice on mitigating any issues. Following the event, the same customers would receive information about how to make an insurance claim, reinforcing the trust relationship between Direct Assurance and its customers. A final reminder to customers reiterated how to file a claim and the various ways to contact the insurer as needed.
All messages were geo-specific and personalised, making them more useful for each recipient. For the brand, it was a great opportunity to build their reputation, proving that they cared about their customers’ wellbeing.
The campaign saw a 31% increase in open rates and an opt-out rate of just 0.03%, confirming that customers found the communications relevant and valuable.
Victoria’s Secret: going beyond “one-size-fits-all” with email
One size by no means fits all in lingerie, and Victoria’s Secret decided that there was no reason its email marketing should follow this rule either.
As Lindsay Massey, VP of Marketing at Victoria’s Secret, told Forbes, the brand “wanted to move beyond a manual, one-size-fits-all … strategy [to] provide a 1:1 personalized experience at scale.”
Thanks to a partnership with Movable Ink, Victoria’s Secret has been able to tailor its emails to individual customers’ preferences, using deep learning insights to understand the best imagery and copy to use, with generative AI writing text based on customers’ past behaviour and preferences.
The more dynamic, tailored approach has enabled the Victoria’s Secret team to go from a single version of an email per day to “thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, of versions, with less setup time,” in Massey’s words. The brand’s email marketing is now based around the customer rather than simply product and brand priorities.
As a result of its email marketing transformation, Victoria’s Secret has seen uplift in click-through rate, conversion rate, and revenue per send, with emails that can effectively support business needs – such as a bra campaign with content that is tailored to the individual customer.
Takeaways
What can brands learn from these examples?
1. Personalisation creates connection
When carried out effectively, personalisation can bring brands and their customers closer together. It’s not a forced attempt to be relevant, but rather an opportunity for brands to show a human side – and that they’ve taken the time to understand their customers.
2. Data transformation enables personalisation
Personalisation is built upon a foundation of solid data. Breaking data free from silos and creating a single customer view or unified customer journey lays the groundwork for improved personalisation that can join up the experience across touchpoints.
3. Right time, right message
Sometimes, personalisation can be as simple as delivering the right message at the right time. Whether it’s a tailored marketing email or a severe weather update, putting thought into what will bring value to the customer and delivering it at the best time will often carry more weight with customers than a high-tech experience.