Why You Need a Good Personalization Strategy

Personalization is a top priority for most marketers, today. Yet most attempts don’t reach the potential of driving behavioral change, goodwill, and business results. Pivoting to a good personalization strategy is a hard, but necessary, shift in today’s competitive environment. It requires an organizational mindset change from communication relevancy to customer first communication. And, a strategy that maps the customer’s journey and identifies addressable pain points to improve customers’ experiences. All of which requires cross functional collaboration, customer, research, and data analysis. 

Each Customer is Distinct

Many marketers think they are delivering a personalized experience to their customers. But many customers think otherwise. Customers are exposed to new, contextually relevant experiences, every day, and this raises their expectations and demands for this level of engagement from every brand they interact with. Companies that are succeeding in personalization, at scale, have made the mind-set shift from seeing customers as data records to seeing individual people with needs, interests, and distinct behavioral patterns. They recognize that customers not brands determine if an experience is personalized. Their mind-set shift has allowed them to create a good personalization strategy based on the specific expectations of their brand’s customers and scale from there – allowing them to avoid under or over investing in technology.

A Good Personalization Strategy Can’t Be Piecemeal

A good personalization strategy needs to cover all channels and devices, and each interaction. Customers don’t distinguish between channels and don’t expect the brands to do so either. A recent Forrester whitepaper stated that while 75% of digital pros are personalizing their content on their site, only 55% personalize promotions, 49% personalize product recommendations, and even fewer still personalize reminders and alerts, mobile app content, or screen layout. And Forrester goes on to say that, “Missing from this picture entirely is how personalization happens in the store and across other touchpoints.”

Rethinking Your Personalization Strategy

It is becoming very clear that rethinking your organization’s personalization strategy is the single most important thing you can do if you are to successfully attract and retain customers, at scale.   What makes a good personalization strategy?  Here are 5 things to consider:

1.  Pivot from a product first to a customer first mind-set.

2.  Align your personalization efforts to business objectives and outcomes.

3.  Determine the technology your company needs to get to scale.

4.  Identify the level of personalization required -- mapping to what your customers expect. 

5.  Unify your channels for a seamless customer experience. 

For more information on how to build and execute a good personalization strategy, download our eBook, How to Implement Personalization Across all Customer Touchpoints.

About VeraCentra:Marketers everywhere want to use data to implement more modern customer engagement strategies. But there can be many obstacles standing in the way of success. That’s where we come in. VeraCentra provides easy-access Customer Data Hubs. We represent best of breed Cross Channel Engagement Platforms (so marketers get the right fit) and offer the Marketing and Data Services that guarantee speed to value and quick win ROI from technology investments. We deliver these solutions with an unmatched wholehearted approach bringing personalized support, care, and service to every client. That’s why many of our client relationships span more than a decade.