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How to prepare when nobody’s prepared

Welcome to the age of personalization: A time where customers are simultaneously expecting you to know everything about them before they land on your site, while still being extremely cautious about how their data is being collected and stored.

Marketers have been walking this tight rope for nearly two decades at this point, but we’ve finally reached an inflection point; companies who don’t provide a personalized experience will fall behind those that do.

With over 75% of consumers more likely to consider buying products from brands that personalize (and an equal number of consumers who admit to becoming frustrated when they’re not greeted with a personalized experience), personalization strategies have never been more prescient.

And yet top senior executives across marketing, ecommerce, IT are struggling to rev their personalization engines, never mind scaling their personalization strategies. In a recent survey, 64% of executives said their teams have only just begun implementing real-time personalization strategies.

So, what’s holding them back? Well…

44% say complicated or fragmented data is a top challenge. 

43% say a lack of effective analytics holds them up.

40% say they have difficulty scaling their program.

39% say they struggle to implement the program in real-time.

36% say disjointed workflows are holding them back.

The current state of personalization

Implementing a personalization strategy and building a personalization engine that operates on all cylinders is much easier said than done. Modern consumers are interacting with your brand with the expectation that the experience will be tailored to their individual preferences and characteristics before the landing page is done loading or the app is done opening.

It’s no wonder 86% of executives reported they’re in need of more advanced personalization than what they’re currently capable of delivering. It’s also no surprise that 62% of executives increased their personalization budgets in 2024 from 2023, a clear indication of how dire the situation is for organizations.

Personalization can’t really be that difficult, can it?

It can.

In fact, just 26% of executives report having a unified definition of personalization throughout their organization.

If you’re asking yourself, “how can an organization provide a personalized web experience if they don’t even know what personalization means to them,” it’s because they can’t.

Of the executives that do have a personalization strategy, they’re looking to three key categories to measure their ROI: 

Sales per customer (49%)

Time spent on site/page engagement (45%)

Customer retention (44%)

What’s telling is that not a single metric breaks the 50% mark, which speaks to the general uncertainty of how to track success.

The truth is that many companies are flying blind when it comes to personalization, with 43% of respondents expressing concerns that ineffective personalization campaigns will result in reduced budgets in the future.

Making personalization easier

Personalization requires careful coordination. Organizations typically rely on cross-functional teams spanning marketing, product, engineering and sales to build a personalization infrastructure, which also relies on data systems and martech tools.

What could go wrong? Well…

Disparate systems of software haplessly strewn together, overcomplicating personalization and adding unnecessary layers of complexity.

Messy data management systems (and, let’s face it, this probably applies to you), will make it impossible to create personalized experiences.

Mountains of data that will require more resources to organize than you could possibly hope to recoup from utilizing that data to its fullest potential.

Poor workflows resulting in nobody really knowing what they should be doing and when they should do it.

You never figured out how to measure success or what ROI looks like.

If any of these scenarios sound familiar, you’re in good company; only 9 percent of executives noted that their personalization strategy is fully operational.

Here are some ways to ease the burden of getting started with personalization so you can minimize friction:

Perform an audit of your personalization tools for strong audience management capabilities

Having an abundance of tools at your disposal might make you feel powerful, but the reality is that it’s likely slowing you down, resulting in fragmented systems and disjointed workflows. Unless your tools are intelligently weaved together, the data flow will become isolated and unreliable.

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