“Hello Sir or Madam,”

Wait. What? Really 2022?

For years, consumer patience has been wearing thin when a brand requires entering a first name, last name, email address, etc. over and over and over.

Or worse, a brand fails to call someone by his or her name after personal information has been handed over!

Not that a study is required to back up this obvious fact, but the Baymard Institute, a thinktank that measures how consumers react to user experiences, reports that anywhere from 60%-80% of would-be customers simply drop off when they are required to repeatedly enter the same data.

(Psst…water is wet, and the sun will rise in the east tomorrow.)

Building a cohesive consumer profile, which is at the core of personalization, isn’t always top of mind for live and virtual event marketers. Instead, the focus tends to be on the engagement/experience itself, which is important, but if the data personalization strategy is causing consumers to abort, it doesn’t really matter if the event experience is “cool.”

Here are some general practices we help our clients deploy to make sure they are personalizing the engagement with those very valuable consumers:

Good: Use a Single Consumer Profile For All Experiential Engagement – make sure whatever database you’re using is synced up to all live and virtual events, and that data is entered and updated in real-time. (This is easily facilitated by even the most basic marketing stack.)

Better: Link Engagement Technologies with an API – Syncing consumers’ engagement data within a single platform is an elegant way to expand the breadth of consumer profiles. The convenience factor for the consumer is a one-stop, personalized experience, while the brand is able to better understand consumers and target them with focused offers.

Best: Build Logic to Customize a Real-Time Experience – Combining the “good” and “better” approaches, this practice effectively operationalizes the consumer profile in the moment. When a model determines that a consumer absolutely loves purple widgets, well then, you had better show them where the other purple widgets are located in your live or virtual experience!

There are more sophisticated approaches to personalization, and they will only become more robust and specific. But these good, better, and best strategies can be implemented with most of the tools many event marketers are already using.

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