How to get started with personalization

Personalization can be an intimidating prospect for marketers. Your audience craves memorable, tailored interactions at every touchpoint, but getting reliable customer data is hard enough, let alone putting it to use and developing compelling omnichannel experiences.

You are, however, in good company. About 33% of the global marketing leaders we asked in our recent survey — carried out in association with the Society of Digital Agencies (SoDA) — rate their organization as beginners or novices on the subject.

While some marketers are timid, others are on the other end of the spectrum. Nearly 70% of global organizations consider themselves experts in personalization, but less than 40% are currently using even the most basic data to support their personalization programs.

The aim here isn’t to point fingers. It’s to point out that the vast majority of us are still learning. Whether you consider yourself a beginner or you’re just realizing you don’t know as much about personalization as you thought, this article can help you reach the next level. We’ll explain how you can achieve a higher level of personalization using a framework for quick wins that demonstrates business value, which will help justify further investment in your personalization program. 

Assemble a team of cross-functional self-starters that are able to get the quick wins necessary to build your business case — as well as scale your efforts over time. As your program builds momentum, you’ll likely attract others in the organization who may be able to contribute, even if their actual role isn’t an exact match.

Your team could consist of the following roles:

By building a Strategic Objectives Framework, you can visualize how the digital goals of your personalization initiative drive marketing objectives, and how marketing objectives impact corporate strategic objectives.

For example, if you can serve relevant content at just the right time to inspire more people to sign up for your newsletter (your digital “goal” or objective), you will ultimately increase customer acquisition (marketing objective), which in turn will increase revenue (corporate objective).

The process of building a Strategic Objectives Framework begins with two or three high-level people defining the strategic theme(s) of your organization. Most businesses have one or two. If your company has more than three, you’re likely wasting resources and diluting your brand.

This same small team should identify the single most important objective that marketing can achieve to contribute toward the strategic theme. Of course, marketing can impact more than one strategic objective, but you want to identify one objective where the digital experience you’re offering can have the most measurable and irrefutable impact. With that strategic objective on the wall (literally), get your cross-functional team of 8–12 experts to brainstorm which digital goals drive your most important strategic objective. 

Creating an Engagement Value Scale enables you to determine the impact of specific digital goals on your strategic objectives by assigning Engagement Value Points to each digital goal. The higher the value of the action — i.e., the closer they likely are to purchasing — the higher number of points assigned.

For example:

• Requesting a sales call = 100 Engagement Value Points
• Viewing product pricing on its detail page = 75 Value Points
• Searching for a product = 50 Value Points
• Adding a product to the shopping cart = 95 Value Points
• Registering for a newsletter = 5 Value Points

As individual customers complete actions, such as registering for an email campaign, or requesting a quote via a form on a landing page, they accumulate Engagement Value Points.

Visitors whose behavior helps achieve your strategic objective accrue higher Engagement Value. As they travel through channels, respond to campaigns, or download assets, you can use their behavioral data to track which messaging and marketing efforts attract the highest aggregated Engagement Value from all visitors. (If you have Sitecore Experience Platform, this aggregation is done for you.)

The Engagement Value is a KPI that is unavailable through traditional web analytics. It is a true measure of customer behavior and is a proxy for return on marketing investment (ROMI). This allows you to easily identify the marketing tactics, such as campaigns, that have the greatest impact on marketing objectives (and therefore the greatest impact on your strategic objectives). 

It’s easy to be overwhelmed by choice when you begin personalizing customer experiences. So, focus on identifying key customer segments that can get you a quick win. The key to really understanding segments is to understand the journeys your customers take.

Here are some attributes that can be helpful for audience segmentation:
(ordered in terms of ease of implementation — from more basic to advanced)

• Geographic location of visitor
• Whether they are a new, repeat, or loyal visitor
• The marketing campaign(s) visitors respond to
• What product or service did they view the most?
• Whether they did a product search
• Whether they viewed the product details or looked for variants (size, color, configuration, etc.)
• Intent, motivation, behavior 
• Psychographics, demographics of your target personas
• Where they are on the customer journey

Once you understand your key visitor segments, you can start to map their journeys. And by analyzing their journeys, you can create a Digital Relevancy Map for each segment. To map the journeys of your key visitor segments, begin by identifying the most important touchpoints, such as:

• Entry point
• High-volume visit points
• Decision points where visitors split or change directions
• Conversion points
• Customer pain points, or points of disconnect where experiences fail

Even just personalizing the homepage banner or storefront can create a significant impact, so this might be a great place to start. From here, you can map the content at each touchpoint to customer intent and experience objectives for each persona. The content you deliver in real time at each stage should promote customer engagement — persuading them to complete the digital task  — nurturing them through the journey and helping you achieve your overall business objectives. 

When it comes to demonstrating the success of your first personalization project, you’ve got a couple of options:

• Benchmark key metrics and compare results before and after the personalized customer experience
• Conduct A/B testing with personalized and non-personalized content to prove the impact of your initiative

Your positive results will demonstrate to your executive team in a data-driven way the added business value derived from effective personalization, which should help justify evolving the quick wins project into an ongoing personalization program. Use anything that didn’t work quite so well as a learned lesson ahead of your next personalization campaign —  tweak, refine, and optimize as you progress through your personalization journey toward a high-quality customer experience that drives not just customer satisfaction but inspires long-term customer loyalty and retention.