Personalization in marketing means taking customer segmentation to the next level. It requires tailoring your marketing tactics to deliver the most relevant product, service or experience to the right customer segment at the right time, based on your knowledge of that customer and his or her preferences.

That’s a tall order today, because customer touchpoints span across multiple channels including web, social, mobile, and physical locations. So while that makes it tough on the front-end to deliver customized content across all those channels, on the backend it means customers are providing companies with a good deal of information about their preferences and intent. Yet getting at the data from the multiple systems it sits on may be the biggest challenge of all.

The Business Case for Personalization

It’s worth it though. According to new research by Harvard Business Review Analytic Services sponsored by Mastercard, business performance improves with personalization. The Age of Personalization: Crafting a Finer Edge Report found that 25 percent of businesses experienced revenue gains that ranged from 1 to 9 percent while utilizing personalization tactics. Top-line gains of 10 to 25 percent were experienced by 13 percent of respondents, and gains over 25 percent were reported by 6 percent of companies.

Additionally, creating personalized customer experiences in particular helped increase almost half of organizations’ top lines over the past two years, according to respondents.

That’s the power of personalization — its ability to help companies improve both short-term and long-term business goals. The Report further makes this point by sharing feedback from multi-industry executives, which found 80 percent of them believe personalization is important to their organization’s strategy, about 55 percent feel it’s currently an important driver of their revenue, and 81 percent felt moving forward it will significantly influence their financial performance in 2020.

Achieve Personalization through Planning

So your company would be well served to look into personalization. Developing a plan to implement a personalization strategy that reflects your businesses’ specific size, goals and objectives will even better deliver to your bottom line. For every company that may require a different approach. If a company is looking to personalize their customers’ online experience, one approach an ecommerce site might consider is for personalization to increase conversion rates, whereas a non-transactional site may want to increase engagement through time spent on the site.

Takeaway: Use Agile Marketing Principles to provide a manageable initial scope.

You’ll also need to determine what type of personalization your company should implement based on what data you have available. You’re looking for user data that explains who your audiences are, what they’re doing on your site and on social media platforms, what preferences they have, and any other information along those lines.

Also, consider how you want to apply the personalization. Think website page content, promotional offers, product recommendations, email campaigns, enewsletters, etc. These are the easiest starting points or gateways into personalization, which has boundless applications.

Takeaway: Determine the type of tailored communications best suited to engage your customers.

Determine the right tools to help deliver on your personalization efforts. Many companies will be constrained by their budgets and systems during this aspect of the process. If you have a CRM system that’s a great place to start along with what you can pull from your Google analytics. If your budget allows, you may even consider using third-party data to supplement your current data.

Takeaway: It all starts with the right data and the right tools.

Make measurement part of your strategy. Personalization requires a commitment to technology, and that needle is always moving. Tools and systems make end-user personalization a reality; they also have the potential to enable personalization at scale. So put in place KPIs and track your conversion success with every tactic you use.

Takeaway: Measure and benchmark your progress to gain continued resources toward your personalization goals.

With 90% of companies indicating that they expect organizations to know their interests and anticipate their needs, please give personalization a try before the year ends. Modern Marketing Partners has the expertise to get you started on the road to delivering personalized messaging that boosts qualified sales leads.