The Personal Touch Matters: How Marketing Leaders Are Maintaining Loyalty, Winning New Customers, and Driving Growth

Personalization matters more than ever, with the pandemic-driven tsunami of e-commerce adoption raising consumer expectations to previously unseen heights. Customers demand experiences that are intuitive, connected, and personalized.

Failing to deliver can mean the difference between winning or losing their increasingly elusive loyalty. 71 percent of consumers expect companies to deliver personalized interactions and 76 percent get frustrated when this doesn’t happen. The current environment has only heightened this sense of urgency. An astonishing 75 percent of consumers tried new brands, stores, or shopping methods in the past 18 months—and more than 80 percent of them aren’t going back.

Personalization now presents an exciting opportunity for growth leaders, as the closer organizations get to the consumer, the bigger the gains. Companies that excel at personalization generate 40 percent more revenue than those that don’t. And across US industries, shifting to top-quartile performance in personalization would generate over $1 trillion in value.

These growth leaders achieve success by customizing offerings to the right consumer at the right time with the right experience. Here are five things marketers can do to accelerate personalization and create value:

Lean into opportunity identification using data and analytics 

Look across the customer life cycle to identify granular pockets of opportunity worth pursuing. Focus personalization efforts on a small subset of these pockets, which can later be expanded. Opportunities typically lie at the intersection of behavioral and demographic customer segments, life stages, products, and geographies.

Success depends on the use of bespoke analytics to determine the growth opportunity at the intersection of those dimensions, which often requires incorporating third-party data. Regularly refresh your market view based on the changing landscape.

Combine this opportunity sizing with management business judgment to determine which two or three dimensions will matter most to drive business growth.

Invest in rapid activation and optimization at scale

Develop capabilities to respond to customer signals and adapt marketing campaigns (based on their performance) in real-time. Leverage predictive analytics and establish measurement processes that track the impact of customer interventions, helping teams deliver the right content via the right channels at the right moment.

Start by creating a data lake to ingest data in real-time and build a model library to process customer information from all touchpoints. Provide teams with analytical horsepower and translator capabilities – the intersection of analytics and business problem-solving is a critical skill to drive personalization.

Success depends on advanced data science capabilities to identify and target granular subsets customers. A robust model library, including product propensity, channel propensity, customer lifetime value, and customer lifecycle models, is essential.

Harness the power of martech and data enablement

Personalization is most successful when it targets a specific set of customer opportunities. An integrated technology stack linked to business needs across data, design, decisioning, distribution, and measurement is essential, and the data marketing technology (martech) roadmap must be closely tied to the specific customer opportunities the organization is going after.

Align organizational resources around these use cases and work back from the desired outcomes to build a roadmap. Identify the enablers and investments needed to deliver results. Ensure the phasing of the marketing technology roadmap matches the prioritization of personalization use cases that the business will deploy.

Commit to an agile operating model 

Successfully scaling personalization requires small, autonomous, cross-functional teams that cut across marketing, products, analytics, and technology.

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Start by aligning senior leadership around the personalization goal and allowing teams to work autonomously. These teams are usually linked to a central function that prioritizes personalization use cases and allocates the specialized resources to solve next-level problems.

Success depends on these teams focusing solely on critical use cases, applying their functional knowledge to drive value end-to-end. These teams operate faster than others because they already possess every skill necessary to solve these problems.

Make capability building an organizational muscle 

Emphasize skills needed to support personalization at scale, and map these capabilities against the current talent base, using the results to inform hiring, training, and upskilling.

Start by assessing capabilities, prioritize ones that allow teams to quickly focus on upskilling, and build a long-term program to upskill talent across marketing teams.

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Success depends on creating lasting capabilities and anchoring on these core personalization proficiencies:

• Growth marketing: Understanding personalization, design thinking, and the harnessing of data to define customer-oriented growth marketing.
• Analytics: Identifying customer opportunities through measurement, advanced analytics, and analytics “translator” toolkits to effectively communicate.
• Martech: Recognizing the latest tools to drive marketing impact through technology.
• Agile: Adopting agile ways of working, scaling teams, and operating in a multi-pod ecosystem.

At its best, personalization is a force multiplier, and a critical capability to meet consumer demands. It’s time to build personalized experiences at scale in order to achieve superior retention, drive doubt-digit growth, and create a long-term value exchange between brands and customers.

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[To share your insights with us, please write to sghosh@martechseries.com]