Superhero Tips for Your Personalization Strategy

Simply put, personalization is presenting the right content to the right person at the right time. Sounds easy enough, right? But when you get down to it, personalization actually means many things to many people all with varying degrees of complexity. One retailer may look at personalization as presenting all the shirts on a category page in a color that a shopper has previously purchased while another retailer might think of personalization as sending an email to a shopper who just purchased pants with a discount for a relevant cross-sell, a shirt for example, with retargeted ads across multiple sites, and an onsite banner referring the shopper to the advertised shirt. A third retailer might look at personalization as curating content presented in all cross-channel ads to imagery that is relevant to that particular customer based on third party data sources for instance, showing images of mother & baby to a female shopper who recently had a child. But the pathways don’t just diverge there. Perspectives on personalization also differ by industry. Personalization in industries like finance and insurance might have a strong relationship to life events while personalization in tech may be more highly correlated to other types of events like intent.

It seems the only true constant is that personalization is reliant on data. All personalization requires some data – first, second, or third-party data – in order to identify an individual and determine what their preferences might be. But then the question becomes how do you use that data? Some think of personalization as manually identifying content based on specific audiences and presenting it in a rules-based manner. Others look to employ machine learning tools to develop algorithms and automate the process. Still others think of personalization as utilizing AI to process data, formulate recommendations, and orchestrate the changes to content in near real time. And the differences continue on.

This blog series will explore some of these differences by gaining perspectives from a diverse set of Merkle Super Hero’s by both function and industry perceptions. We’ll also offer some advice on how tools and services available to today’s marketers can help surmount some of the obstacles presented in these different perspectives.

Happy personalizing!

Our first superhero discussion is with Margie Chiu, SVP, Business Transformation at Merkle

Margie's areas of expertise include omni-channel marketing strategy, digital transformation, marketing technology planning, marketing program design and customer strategy.

1.    What challenges do you see organizations facing with their overall marketing strategy as it relates to delivering personalized experiences?

The clients I work with have challenges in three main areas:

Regulatory: This differs by client and industry but not knowing what they can and are allowed do with data becomes a challenge.

Technology: Data is siloed and people do not know who has data or what data they can use.

Program: The overall complexity of personalization adds cost and complexity to an organization and many end up feeling their hands are tied.

2.    How does organizational readiness including creative, data and a good customer strategy enable organizations to deliver on personalized experiences?

Organizations need a good customer strategy and personalization roadmap but at the same time there are quick wins they can act on today.

3.    What are some key questions organizations should ask vendors and partners?

Most clients leverage multiple vendors and most of the vendors operate at a product/channel level. Clients need to design an infrastructure with their vendors where there is a lead agency and all the vendors are collaborating against the vision of personalization.

4.    What questions should organizations ask themselves about their strategy?

Clients who want to be customer centric need to ask themselves why they are not. Organizations need to ask themselves if incentives and business KPI’s are tied to product/channel or the customer experience. Not doing so causes an internal priority conflict. If teams are evaluated on product/channel performance and not customer centric KPI’s they are not aligned to deliver personalized experiences.

5.    What trends do you see for Personalization?

Organizations taking a deeper look at their data (Strategic Data Audits). Also, decisioning based on solid data will be big.

Authors:

Jennifer Wolf

Senior Manager, Testing, Optimization & Personalization, Merkle, Inc.

As senior manager of Testing & Optimization at Merkle, Jenn uses her passion for testing to help clients build and evolve successful optimization programs. With over 10 years of digital experience, she brings both strategic and tactical expertise to help drive impactful, data-driven testing programs with measurable results. She is an optimization evangelist at heart and has a broad background spanning across a variety of industries including eTail, financial services, insurance, and pharma.

Patricia Kendall

Director, Testing, Optimization & Personalization, Merkle, Inc

Patricia has over 18 years of digital analytics, marketing, testing, optimization and personalization experience. She specializes in improving clients’ marketing effectiveness and return on investment utilizing testing and experience analytics to plan, develop and implement digital marketing campaigns. In addition, she excels at examining industry trends and organizational dynamics for clients that result in meaningful analysis and plans that leverage strategy that translate into actionable and measurable tactics that impact results.