‘Personalisation is the key for any brand to succeed with customers’

The seventh edition of EngageMint, Webengage’s marathon conference was held in Mumbai on Friday and saw a huge turnout. 

This year’s edition, the largest ever, was attended by over 50 speakers, delivering impactful and well-attended sessions across five halls to audiences that featured leading figures and workplace warriors from across media and diverse other fields, and included CXOs from Adani Digital Labs, Bajaj Auto, South Indian Bank, Marico, Crompton, Baggit, Hotstar, Purplle, Candere, HDFC Bank, Tata Capital, Clovia and Unacademy, among others.

This flagship initiative is their attempt to bring the industry’s attention to retention and customer engagement and conversations around them into the mainstream. The objective was to make retention the centre of the conversation and accelerate the growth of the business ecosystem through deep, actionable insights from popular thought leaders.

Among a slew of sessions, covering myriad aspects of advertising and marketing, Harleen Bhatti, Head Retention, The Good Glam Company spoke on ‘Analytics To Actionables: Turning Data Stories Into Marketing Strategies’, while Ronak Sahewal, Chief Growth Officer, Candere By Kalyan Jewellers covered a session titled ‘The Art of Stalking…Your Customers: How To Create A Personalization Strategy That’s Just Right.’

Taking a cue from the conversations dominating the market today, these sessions covered: how to read, understand, and derive insights from cohorts, funnels, and more; leveraging the power of AI-ML to uncover valuable insights; and tools, techniques and pitfalls to avoid getting lost in a sea of data.

Addressing the needs and benefits of data-driven marketing, Bhatti observed that, “As marketers, our core function, or KPI, is ROI. And to get a return on the money we've invested, we need to ensure a great personalised experience for our customers, so that they come to us and return to us. In order to provide that experience, we need to have as much data on them as possible.”

This data, she continued, was derived from a number of sources, whether from customers clicking on campaign banners, or while checking out a purchase, and a myriad others, with each source helping to form a profile of the customer, based on the reactions, behaviour, and other identifiers, all of it coming together to help brands know how to best approach him or her.

 Bhatti said that all this data and the insights advertisers gained from them helped to drive the best possible recommendations across an active users’ funnel journey from search/click to check out. “You can make each stage of the funnel feel very personalised for the consumer and make them feel that this entire purchase journey was created especially for them.”

Addressing the hall later along a similar vein, Sahewal noted, “Personalisation is the key for any brand to succeed with customers. We at Candere by Kalyan Jewellers were able to see a 30% upliftment in campaign performance with the help of personalisation.

For Sahewal, the framework of personalisation comprised three Cs: Customers; Content; and Channel. Individually, these referred to the types of customers coming to your website/app (whether a new user or return purchaser); the type of content the customer is looking for (products, occasions, etc); and the channel on which this intersection of customers and content was mapped.

It was these frameworks which helped brands design the master plan for their advertising and marketing endeavours, with all that data coming together to create the best possible personalised campaign for every individual consumer, concluded Sahewal.