2019 is officially a wrap. To get 2020 off to a good start, we wanted to highlight some of the best personalization campaigns we’ve seen over the past few years. Some are oldies but goodies, others hot off the press. From the travel to media industries and more, here are some great ideas to help you bring even more relevant experiences to your customers.
SaaS: Spotify Still at the Top
Spotify has gotten a reputation – like Netflix and Amazon – for being at the top of the personalization game, and with good reason. Their personalized lists of music, not to mention their hilarious ads, are savvy uses of consumer preferences and data.
In 2019, they didn’t disappoint. A nicely curated ‘Your Top Songs 2019’ list appeared at the end of the year on the app, to help ring in the New Year with just the right tunes.
Travel: EasyJet Tells Personalized Client Stories
2015 was a big year for the airline easyJet, as it marked their 20th anniversary. If you’d flown with the company, you may have received an email like the one below. It outlined all of the destinations easyJet had taken you to, and suggested some for the future, like a visual scrapbook:
We like this kind of personalization approach – it tells a pleasant story, reminds you of all the good times you had with the brand, and is very social media friendly.
Recently, easyJet announced more personalization plans for their new package holiday plan to be rolled out in 2020.
Digital director for easyJet and easyJet Holidays, James Hardy, told Marketing Week, “We will also be launching a raft of new features over the next six months, with the aim to be the most personalised booking site in travel.” We can’t wait to see what they’ll be offering!
Media: The New York Times Perfects its Personalization
This past spring, according to Nieman Lab, the NYTimes went a step further than ever before in the name of personalizing the experience of their readership. The creation of their ‘For You’ section – at launch, only available on iOS – aimed to make it simple for readers to access more of the content they’re interested in. The benefits of this kind of personalization range from creating more engaged readers (which equals more subscriptions and sales), as well as potentially exposing them to a wider range of journalism. In other words, “consider For You one effort to widen the reader’s awareness of stories that would otherwise seem hidden…”
What we like about this campaign is its conscious effort to avoid ‘filter-bubbles’, and the fact that it’s based on active personalization. The judgment of journalists is still taken into account, and the preferences of readers, used to determine the content shown in ‘For You’, is based for the most part on what they purposely choose:
Fashion: UNTUCKit Knows how to Customize
More of a product customization approach than a standard personalization campaign, the fashion brand UNTUCKit lets you build your own shirt on their site. With their simple sizing approach and online customer profile, the store already makes it easy to find exactly the right match for you. But if you want to go a step further and build a shirt to your particular specifications – from fabric to styling to pockets – they make this easy, too.
Want to make that purchase extra special? The company even offered free (limited time) monogramming. We like the simple, no-frills approach to customization from a brand that’s all about helping customers get the right look and feel for them.
Social Media: Facebook Year in Review
Like the easyJet example above, Facebook has for a while now offered a nice overview of users’ top moments showcased on the platform, called the Year in Review.
You can access a nice video of the highlights of the year that you can share on your wall if you like. With many people using Facebook and other social media sites as personal scrapbooks, this is a simple, feel-good way to round of the year that we can get into.
Takeaway
Personalization doesn’t have to be overly complex or ridiculously data heavy. Even simple ideas can go a long way in increasing brand awareness, loyalty, engagement and sales. It can also just be pure fun. Whatever your business, we’re sure you can find some inspiration in these examples and get your personalization strategy flowing in 2020.
