Macy’s Bets on People-First Relationships for AI-Centered Personalization Strategy
As retailers continue on their quests to integrate artificial intelligence into their day-to-day systems and customer experiences, many have turned to hyper-personalization.
And, as they do so, the topic of one-to-one personalization has surfaced. Marketers have begun to revere the concept as the ultimate end all, be all in making connections with returning and potential customers.
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But at The Lead Summit in New York City this week, Bennett Fox-Glassman, vice president of customer journey at Macy’s, said that focusing on one-to-one personalization may actually be unnecessary in the immediate near term.
Without a true justification or purpose for one-to-one communication, he said, brands and retailers might be better off keeping customers in segmented buckets and communicating with them in small groups.
“It’s not that [one-to-one personalization] is not maybe a good aspiration, but why? Why do you need one-to-one personalization? So I would think about, what am I trying to do for the customer? How am I trying to be relevant? And in many cases, we will find that requires segmentation, or maybe more granular segmentation, but it doesn’t really have to be one to one,” he said.
At the moment, Fox-Glassman said one of the major barriers to one-to-one personalization—or even personalization in smaller clusters than usual—has been a lack of resources to develop creative assets for so many different email campaigns.
That is one area where Macy’s has started testing generative AI. Instead of having humans write and rewrite subject lines for each individual cohort the company wants to send emails to, employees can now use generative AI as a starting point.
However, those experiments still require certain rules, he said. Without some structure around powerful technology tools in place, it becomes easy to lose track of a brand’s style and years’ worth of effort to cultivate a certain voice with customers.
“We know this is our future. We also know this is a rapidly evolving area of technology, and we care about protecting our brands and protecting the customer experience, and so we have certain guardrails around it so that it doesn’t get outside of our brand standards and that we feel good about the message we’re delivering,” Fox-Glassman said.
As with any new technology, implementation and operationalization often results from a test-and-learn strategy, especially when brands and retailers want to leverage the advantages technologies can provide on a faster-than-normal basis. While that can be beneficial and churn quick results, it can also breed mishaps, either internally or with customers.
Fox-Glassman said the main goal at Macy’s is fostering customer relationships, whether in store or online. The retailer continues to strive to use technology to contextualize every conversation it has with a customer, so it can provide the best possible communication at each touchpoint. That, the company hopes, will capture consumer loyalty.
And with that loyalty can come forgiveness, he said—especially when the communication feels like it’s coming from a person, not just a marketing machine.
“It’s okay to sometimes miss, because you can actually come back and say you missed, and [that] is powerful. If you send an email that doesn’t resonate, and then you send another one that says, ‘Hey, sorry, we actually goofed.’ Customers recognize that, [and it feels like], oh, this isn’t [just a] marketing initiative, this is an authentic conversation,” he said.
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