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Let’s face it: If you’re not offering personalised experiences, you’re probably losing valuable customers. However, even with countless resources available to improve personalisation, marketers still face many challenges when executing their strategy. If you’re just starting this journey (or thinking of improving your marketing strategy), we’ve outlined some personalisation challenges and opportunities to help you build lasting customer relationships.
In our State of Connected Customer report, we found that 73% of global customers expect companies to understand their unique needs and expectations and 56% expect offers to always be personalised. Still, in our State of Marketing report, one of marketers top challenges is balancing personalisation with customer comfort levels. So what are the challenges of personalised marketing and how can marketers overcome them?
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Often, the biggest factor that leads to personalisation strategies failing is a breakdown of coordination across departments and teams.
“If you’re not aligned, the result is that customers get a very siloed experience,” said Leigh Price, a Senior Director of Product Marketing at Salesforce.
Our State of Connected Consumer report reveals that 66% of customers often have to repeat or re-explain information to different representatives, and 60% say it generally feels like they’re communicating with separate departments, not one company.
But when that customer journey is uniform across departments, people can tell. In the report 83%, of customers say they’re more loyal to companies that provide consistency across departments.
The solution is to identify stakeholders for the three main functional areas of personalisation: strategy, channel execution, and product management. Then build your strategy and program and collaborate.
Not sure where to start? Here are the stakeholders you need working in harmony and how they align with the three functional areas:
You’ll need an executive sponsor to help you strategise, own the overall program and provide support. This may be your VP, Marketing, CMO, or even Chief Customer Officer.
After you develop a strategy and appoint an executive sponsor, you’ll need several stakeholders to help you implement and manage your overall personalisation program. Some of these roles include:
Program Manager: This person will oversee the personalisation program by managing and maintaining schedules, coordinating groups across departments, and providing resources.
Product Manager: Working in alignment with the program manager, the product manager will oversee the day-to-day management of the program and will act as an expert for your personalisation product.
Tech Lead: Although marketers can run many aspects of personalisation campaigns independently, it’s still essential to appoint a tech lead or establish a relationship with IT. They will set up the initial integration and be available as a resource when technical issues arise.
Analytics Lead: An analytics lead can synthesise data and owns all program insights. From the beginning, you will need this key stakeholder to stay on target, meet your goals, and innovate new approaches to personalisation.
You’ll also need a channel execution team to help you coordinate and execute campaigns. They may start with one channel and then extend your personalisation across channels little by little.
Once you’ve got the departments aligned, you have to make sure they’re working with relevant data. In our Marketing Intelligence report, 98% of marketers emphasise the importance of having a complete, centralised view of all cross-channel marketing data. Yet 71% of marketers evaluate the performance of their cross-channel marketing in silos.
Organisations often have a wealth of data available to them, but marketers don’t always have access to that data.
When departments don’t have the same information, it leads to disconnected customer experiences. Here are two ways you can overcome this:
Break down your data’s barriers: Invest in technology that will house your customer data in one place, such as a customer data platform. This allows departments to work from the same set of data, giving them a 360-degree view of the customer journey.
Start Small: You may not know where to start when you have a lot of data at your fingertips. Rather than looking at all your data, focus on simple use cases to get started.
“People think, ‘I can do one hundred things with personalisation,’” said Price. “But just focus on your website and simple use cases, focus on your email program, and you can iterate and grow from there.”
With data in one single place, marketers will be able to create experiences that wow their customers and grow lasting relationships.
With coordination and access to proper data in place, now it’s time to ensure your department has the proper technical skills to build a personalisation strategy. Personalisation requires a team of people with both technical and creative skills. Some marketers don’t have the technical skills to deliver end-to-end personalisation, while others lack the creativity to provide relevant and engaging content.
Embracing technology like artificial intelligence (AI) can help take some of the more routine tasks off your department’s plate, letting them tackle big issues.
Learning about AI can help marketers advance customers toward a purchase, sending messages that are relevant and timely to them. For example, you can use triggered messages, emails that are automatically sent when a customer takes a certain action — like placing an item in the cart, but not making a purchase.
There is only one solution when it comes to this obstacle: investing in the education of technologies that can do the heavy lifting. Companies should empower their talent by expanding their understanding about personalisation, giving them the knowledge they need to succeed.
Personalisation is a work in progress. Tech tools are evolving, and so are our processes and skills (not to mention customer expectations). Now that you’ve identified the three top challenges to personalisation, take stock of your own organisation and build a path to success — both for yourself and for your customers.
