Personalization Done Right

Despite investing heavily in technology that could make personalization easier, faster, and smarter, most companies struggle to achieve Spotify’s degree of personalization.  A BCG survey of more than 1,400 global C-suite executives found that 85% of business leaders plan to increase spending on AI in 2024. But most of that is earmarked for cost-saving initiatives rather than personalization – which is a mistake.

True personalization requires creating experiences at scale, which get fine-tuned with each successive interaction and empower customers to get what they want—faster, cheaper, or more easily. Doing so requires delivering on five implicit promises that shape customers’ expectations:

To complete a self-assessment, companies must answer dozens of questions related to their personalization efforts. The following is a small sample of questions marketers should ask to determine the maturity of their personalization efforts.

1. Empower me:  Do we personalize experiences at each step of engagement throughout the customer journey?  Do we provide cross-channel personalization capabilities?  Is every communication channel used for personalization?  Use mystery shopping activities and customer surveys to assess the level and quality of personalization that companies are delivering.
2. Know me:  Does customer data live in a single repository?  Is customer data integrated throughout our other marketing systems?  Do we have high-quality identity resolution in place?  Look at the number and depth of digital relationships a company has with customers and its ability to retain them
3. Reach me:  Do we conduct A/B testing on our personalization efforts?  Have we deployed a next-best-action deci-sioning or product recommendation engine?  Do we automate customer segmentation?  Use AI to identify triggers to reach out, such as when a customer browses online or makes an inquiry.
4. Show me:  Do we offer tailored experiences on a 1:1 basis for every customer? 10:1? 100:1?  Are we able to conduct personalized experiences or campaigns quickly from ideation to launch?  Do we use gen Al to automate the production of marketing collateral?  Looked at how sophisticated their content creation and management capabilities were and how well they personalized text, images, and videos for individual customers.
5. Delight me:  Do organizational or technological impediments keep us from measuring progress on personalization?  Do we run weekly tests related to personalization?  Do we implement improvements on a weekly or more frequent basis?   Measure the speed and scale of the company’s test-and-learn process, the sophistication and automation of its measurement, and how the organization is set up for personalization.

Several high-level takeaways from the authors’ research into personalization that can help businesses move forward are:  personalization leaders can be found in every industry, Advanced personalization generates lots of revenue, Better Personalization Leads to Faster Growth, Personalization leaders deliver superior value creation

Personalization leaders follow a playbook to deliver on each of the five promises of personalization, starting with how to empower the customer. Three areas of focus that make the difference between success and failure:  rethink leadership roles and set a clear vision; secure the personalization foundation; and personalization depends on the speed and scale of learning.