Personalized marketing and advertising programs deliver improved results in digital media, studies show. As a result, highly personalized targeting is gaining a larger share of marketing budgets. To better implement personalization, marketers are also shifting how they measure the online customer experience.
Studies show that irrelevant content greatly annoys most consumers. For instance, a Harris Interactive poll found that 74% of online customers become frustrated when presented online content unrelated to their interests.
“Regardless of industry, company size or even geography, personalization has become a universal mandate,” states a new report Making Personalization Possible by the CMO Council and Microsoft. “Simply put, demonstrating a deep understanding of an individual customer and delivering a digital experience that is highly relevant, timely and tailored for a single user is universally critical.”
Faith in Personalization
Marketers have faith in personalization: 26% of marketers surveyed said they are “totally confident” in the strategy and 49% are hopefully optimistic. Yet only 14% of marketers can personalize engagements across the entire customer journey; 36% can personalize in select channels but struggle to accomplish the feat on a consistent and meaningful level.
Personalization is indeed an increasingly popular and often successful marketing technique, says digital marketing expert Rohan Ayyar in a Glean.info blog post. There are innumerable ways to customize the customer experience, including personalized emails, product recommendation engines and retargeting programs.
Personalization requires an in-depth, though not exhaustive, understanding of your target audience’s location, online behavior and cultural preferences. “So unless you’re sure you’ve got their tastes right, be warned – there are cases where personalization has gone horribly wrong,” Ayyar warns.
Besides seeking to personalize customer experiences, marketers are embracing different metrics they use to define success, according to the CMO research. Marketers are placing less emphasis on viewership and engagement metrics and more weight on metrics tied to real business outcomes, reveals the report.
Favorite Marketing Metrics
Engagement metrics such as clicks, views and open rates (tracked by 59% of respondents surveyed) have given way to measures around acquisition rate improvements (62%) and retention rate improvements (69%).
Also among preferred metrics are revenue per transaction increases (49%), customer lifetime value (53%) and upsell and cross-sell engagements (53%). Marketing has not completely abandoned traditional measurement techniques as customer satisfaction surveys still rank high on the list (52%) that marketers use.
Defining Value
“For such a long time, every time we asked marketers ‘How are you measuring the impact and value of your marketing campaigns?” clicks and views were the No. 1 answer,” Liz Miller, senior VP-marketing at the CMO Council, told Ad Age. “This is the first time we are seeing real business metrics top the list of how marketers are defining value in personalization and campaigns that are being driven by that.”
Marketers favor more business-focus metrics: 40% believe that new business-focused metrics are improving the impact of their investments; 34% feel they are doing well; 10% say they are doing extremely well.
Bottom Line: Personalization is now viewed as an essential marketing strategy and more marketers are seeking to personalize the customer experience in order to better engage customers and to improve business results. However, the strategy can misfire if marketers lack an in-depth understanding of their audience’s preferences.
William J. Comcowich founded and served as CEO of CyberAlert LLC, the predecessor of Glean.info. He is currently serving as Interim CEO and member of the Board of Directors. Glean.info provides customized media monitoring, media measurement and analytics solutions across all types of traditional and social media.
Hey William
Thanks for the informative article! Customers want an experience. They want the experience of buying to be the simplest possible requiring the least effort. Personalization is one of the key traits a successful business possesses because customers like being recognized and known about as long as they don’t get the feeling they are being spied upon or their privacy is being infringed. The key purpose here is not to accumulate data but to guess what your customers want before they ask. This is the fine line that separates personalization and privacy infringement.
Sophia Briggs