Beginning 2016, marketing gurus, evangelists, and experts predicted personalization to become a common goal among marketers.
Let’s focus on some recent statistics:
- 74% of marketers say targeted personalization increases customer engagement.
- 53% of marketers say ongoing, personalized communication with existing customers results in “moderate” to “significant” revenue impact.
- 50% of companies feel they can increase interaction within email by increasing personalization
- 760% increase in marketing revenue from segmented campaigns.
58% marketers believe a strong data collection method united with analytical skills is one the key criteria to craft personalized multi-channel campaigns.
Content, real-time Database, and collection of the data for the database remains a concern for most. Personalization demands 360-degree view of customers. The more you know customers the better tailored campaigns you can drive.
Spray and Pray: Not the Ideal Personalization Factor Anymore!
Gone are those days when marketers would spray the same content to the same audience and then pray for results. The aim now is to enhance customer experience to the next level.
Inbound Marketing teams depend heavily on the internal database which is not enough to feed your hungry sales team. Personalized campaigns require more than just your traditional databases. It’s more about knowing consumer’s behavior and preferences leveraging analytics and digital media.
Now the question is how inbound marketers can get access to such databases? The answer is pretty simple. Either they hire experts internally, outsource the work, or just buy the database.
Personalization benefits may be on the top of the mind for executives but its challenges — typically those related to high costs – are also there.
Big sharks are shelling their bucks on personalisation. But it is not driving results! Small and Medium enterprises are also gaining up in the race. SMEs are leveraging digital media and analytics to design focused and personalized multi-channel campaigns.
The recently released Publish or Perish analysis of 380 CMOs by Forbes found that marketers delivering personalized web experiences are getting double-digit returns in marketing performance and response.
While segmentation is a proven effective tactic in marketing, delivering true personalization is much different. Both approaches are employed by sophisticated marketers to maximize revenue potential.
So what new fields you need other than the normal traditional fields – Name, email, Phone Address etc. for personalization?
Customer Data that Makes Your Personalization Effective
Collecting customer-supplied data via digital media has become pivotal. This data allows you to track every move and act even before they reach a decision. E-commerce websites are the best examples of personalisation. This database mainly includes fields like – customer social media details – from Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter etc. ‘Purchase History’, ‘Most Visited Sites Online’, ‘Customer Subscriber Communities’, and so on…
The requirement of each data field vary in nature, size and industry of the business.
To be more precise, here’s how it looks:
Personalization should be an exercise of 1:1 communication — not segments — with content, offers, and volume served based on a unique data-set from an individual customer profile. Also it is important for business to refine its knowledge of the customer time to time.
While consumer expectations are pushing marketers for more real time database, still many rely on basic segmentation. Customer data is spread across multiple silos, because each application has its own identity management system.
The key lies in this scattered data. The aim is to dig the key – collecting the right data about prospects. Ultimately leveraging the same in tailored multi-channel campaigns.
So far so good! Marketers look quite organised towards their approach to personalization. Yet challenges ahead are abundant. It would be interesting to see how marketers would heave optimization of personalization in the coming quarters.
So, what kind of database personalization do you think will benefit businesses? Drop in your suggestions. Share your marketing challenges with Span Global Services.
Author - Sujith Kumar
Chief Sales Officer, is a highly skilled orator with a keen interest in campaign management, survey development, business intelligence and social media management. Sujit has a special interest in personal branding and strongly believes that the key to success is to keep trying. 
