Personalisation

What it means

Personalisation means tailoring website content, emails or offers to an individual customer based on their behaviour, purchase history or interests. A visitor to an online shop sees recommendations related to what they browsed, and an email features products they are likely to want.

The aim is relevance: customers find what they need faster, and the company lifts its conversion rate and order value. Personalisation draws on data from the website, tills, CRM and the loyalty programme, often brought together by a customer data platform.

It ranges from simply addressing someone by name to dynamically assembled pages and prices. The deeper it goes, the closer it comes to profiling under the GDPR, and the stricter the rules on transparency and consent become.

How it works in practice

It pays to start with simple scenarios that clearly add value: suggested add-ons in the basket, a reminder to reorder consumables after the usual interval, or emails segmented by the category a customer buys. Results are measured against a control group without personalisation.

Personalisation based on cookies and behavioural tracking requires valid consent. Emails need consent to processing or another lawful basis, and the privacy information must explain clearly which data are used for tailoring.

Data quality matters. Duplicate contacts, stale purchases or a missing link between the online shop and the physical store lead to nonsensical recommendations. A few scenarios on clean data beat dozens of rules that mostly annoy the customer.

What to watch out for

Overly precise personalisation can feel creepy when customers do not know how the company knows so much about them. Recommendations based on sensitive topics such as health or finances are also risky from the standpoint of special categories of data.

Personalised prices are especially sensitive. Consumer protection rules require disclosure when a price has been personalised by automated decision-making, and different prices for different customers can damage trust more than they earn.