Give your self a pat on the again! You’ve mastered the primary two ranges of personalization, and also you’re nearly on the finish of your personalization journey. But don’t get too excited simply but as a result of there’s a 3rd and final information sort on the block—metadata.
Chances are, you’ve in all probability heard and used the expression, “That’s so meta,” to explain one thing that’s self-referential. In the context of superior cross-channel personalization, your product metadata can be utilized to take your advertising and marketing messages to unprecedented heights and switch your clients into model evangelists.
But earlier than we reveal additional, let’s do a closing evaluate of the personalization mannequin.
Final Recap: The Three Levels of Personalization
Take a closing have a look at the personalization maturity mannequin.
Level 1: Reactive personalization
Reactive personalization is derived from person attributes and occasion information. It’s a one-to-many method and is relevant to giant viewers segments. These are the best ways to implement utilizing buyer attributes like first identify, occasion milestones (e.g. birthdays), or system occasions like abandonment.
Level 2: Proactive personalization
Proactive personalization combines person and occasion information with externally managed information. It’s a one-to-some method and is relevant to smaller, focused segments. This incorporates buyer behaviors and third-party information and is extra resemblant of individually focused messaging (e.g. geo-specific companies of private curiosity).
Level 3: Individualization
Individualization is fashioned from dynamic relationships between person attributes and detailed product information. It’s a one-to-one method that appeals particularly to every particular person. This takes under consideration varied profile, behavioral, lifecycle information factors to create user-specific dynamic content material experiences which might be distinctive to every person.
How to Level Up
On Level 3, it’s all about forming a 1:1 reference to every buyer by honing in on the main points that actually matter to them. To illustrate how individualization works, we’ll use a friendship analogy.
Let’s say you meet somebody who shares your love of espresso, so that you counsel grabbing lattes at a close-by cafe to get to know them higher. There, you study that they not too long ago found pour-over espresso after years of brewing in a normal espresso maker.
Based on this newly acquired information, you counsel going to the highest three cafes in your space focusing on this technique of brewing espresso, one in every of which turns into yours and their favourite.
Over time, not solely does your friendship deepen however your understanding of your good friend’s tastes and preferences additionally turns into extra nuanced and refined. This finally means you could present extremely customized choices—from cafes and forms of beans to the gear they use at dwelling—that attraction probably the most to your good friend.
With this analogy in thoughts, try a snippet of our closing information under!
Personalization Maturity, Level 3: Metadata
In the ultimate information of this three-part collection, you’ll get higher acquainted with metadata and learn to harness it in your cross-channel advertising and marketing campaigns.
To provide you with a head begin, we’ll share the distinction between information feeds and metadata.
- Data feeds are mechanisms to obtain real-time info from externally managed web sites and apps.
- On the opposite hand, metadata is descriptive details about your model’s services or products choices.
Both can be utilized to personalize advertising and marketing campaigns in the mean time of ship.
Of course, we’ll present a number of examples of metadata in motion so you possibly can see how they create individualized messages within the following campaigns:
- Cart abandonment
- Review requests
- Transactional confirmations
- Back-in-stock alerts
- Recommendations
For occasion, check out Jack Wills’ cart abandonment email marketing campaign.

Source: Really Good Emails
This British style and way of life model does an incredible job of addressing FOMO and incorporating product metadata to re-engage Luke, one in every of its clients.
For starters, the email headline and message reassure Luke (by identify!) that he can return to the web site at any time to finish his buy. The merchandise particulars (pictures, names, colours, sizes and costs) assist jog his reminiscence of what he had beforehand checked out. What’s extra, the action-oriented CTA and the free supply are highly effective incentives for Luke to finish the transaction.
Overall, this message is pleasant, useful, and under no circumstances pushy. By doing the identical, along with your product particulars clearly laid out, you convey your clients one step nearer to clicking the ‘checkout’ button in your model’s web site.
We’ve received many extra examples to borrow inspiration from, so be sure you obtain the ultimate information.
The Challenges of Advanced Personalization—And A Solution
Despite your greatest efforts, organizational and technological challenges could stop you from reaching your advertising and marketing objectives, leaving you to query the worth of personalization fully.
As you’re nicely conscious, abandoning these efforts places you at an obstacle amongst your rivals, and also you definitely don’t wish to see your exhausting work go down the drain.
The excellent news? Iterable affords Catalog, an individualization answer that lets you ship highly effective and related messages at scale with ease.
To study extra, watch Nick Allen, Solutions Consultant at Iterable, display find out how to construct dynamic content material with Catalog within the video under.
Download Part 3 of our cross-channel personalization collection to learn the way you should utilize metadata to supply 1:1 experiences to your clients.