How to Increase Marketing Personalization Proficiency and ROI

As a marketer, you understand the power of personalization in theory — but how is your practice?

You know personalization is essential today. But you’re stuck on how to make it work better, or maybe at all for your business.

This article is designed to help you kick-start, or restart your personalization journey to move from paralysis to proficiency. Gain valuable insight into how other businesses are approaching personalization, and discover how to:

• Begin or improve your personalization efforts
• Demonstrate personalization ROI
• Turn personalization into a competitive advantage
• Make your data reliable, and more

Table of contents

Get moving
Diagnosis
You agree that personalization is important
But you feel like you don’t have the necessary tools
And creating personalized content for all your customers seems impossible
Prescription

Get moving

You probably already know how vital personalization is to the future of your company. In our recent survey — carried out in association with the Society of Digital Agencies (SoDA) — 84% of the marketers we asked told us that it was either a “competitive advantage” or “an important part of their marketing.” But that doesn’t mean everyone’s mastered it. Only 50% have a clear roadmap for enhancing their personalization in the future — and who can blame the remaining half?

With thousands of customers, at least 5 touchpoints to manage, and a range of devices to bear in mind, creating personalized journeys that drive real ROI can feel daunting. We call this feeling personalization paralysis. You know what you need to do — but you feel like you’re so far behind, it’s almost an impossible task.

We’re here to tell you what’s wrong. You can go from paralysis to proficiency in just a few months — even if you don’t have the data yet. Read on to find out how.

Diagnosis

Before we help you to beat personalization paralysis, we need to find out whether you have it or not. Take a look at these key symptoms relating to the condition — and ask yourself whether you recognize them in your own organization.

You agree that personalization is important

• 85% of marketing leaders and C-level executives say that digital experience personalization is “an important facet of their marketing ecosystem.”
• 35% say they see personalization as a “major competitive advantage” for their business.
• 83% have increased their investments in personalization in 2019.
• 32% say there has been a “significant budget increase.”

But you feel like you don’t have the necessary tools

• 40% said their budget was hampering their efforts to personalize.
• 37% said their martech platform wasn’t capable of supporting effective personalization.
• 35% said they didn’t have access to the data they needed to personalize.
• 34% said their C-Suite is not actively investing in or encouraging personalization.

And creating personalized content for all your customers seems impossible

• 55% of leaders said that producing and publishing personalized content faster was a major priority for their business.
• Another 47% said that doing so more cost-effectively was a major priority.
• 44% said speed was their biggest pain point when it comes to producing and publishing more digital content, while budget (39%) and automation (39%) were the other top pain-points.

Prescription

There’s only one way to beat personalization paralysis – and that’s to stop worrying about it, and start getting things done. Here’s a step-by-step guide to improving your personalization.

Step 1: Begin with your mindset. Personalization can seem daunting, but you can start small and use the early benefits to drive support. It’s possible — just get started.

Step 2: If, like many of our respondents, you don’t have faith in your data as a whole, choose an aspect of it that you know is reliable and use that. If you have no data at all, it’s time to run a data capture campaign: offer discounts or special offers to customers who answer short surveys, or start sending a newsletter that people can access in exchange for their personal information.

Step 3: Once you have a small set of reliable data, it’s time to start personalizing. Choose two channels that you’re familiar with and target users with a small, action-based campaign. You won’t get everything right at the beginning, but personalization that’s “good enough” can still help you prove value to your C-Suite.

Step 4: If the results from your first foray into personalization are poor, don’t worry — failure is a success. Use the responses from your campaign to add to your data set, and you’ll be in a better position to personalize next time. For instance, if you targeted users with a special offer on swimwear and they didn’t respond, chances are they won’t respond to it in the future either. The more data you collect, the more accurate your customer segments will become.

Step 5: When you start to see clear results, share them. Once you can demonstrate ROI to your peers and C-Suite, they’ll be more open to supporting you in future campaigns. Repeat steps 3 and 4 until you’ve got a solid case for a budget increase — giving you the tools to personalize more effectively, on a bigger scale.

Step 6: Up until this point, you may have been using a variety of tools — and that’s fine. But to personalize with the precision you need to create and manage content, capture and connect data, and deliver cross-channel and holistic experiences. To scale this all effectively and efficiently, you’ll need a martech platform specifically designed to help you create, deliver, and fine-tune memorable experiences for your customers.

Step 7: You have support from your C-Suite, a platform that can handle every aspect of personalization, and a data set that’s improving every day.

Source: Sitecore