Personalisation: why it falls short

Before we dive into the Personalisation topic, I think it’s important to reflect on how marketing has evolved over the last fifty years in order to understand why today’s consumers prioritise personalisation when dealing with brands.

The 1960’s and 1970’s was the Mad Men era; marketing was very much driven by brands and there was very little consideration of the customer. If you wanted to succeed you had to be top of your category and that meant spending large sums of money on brand advertising. There were very few channels in which to engage with customers, so it was very much spray and pray.

Moving into the 1980’s we started to see customer segmentation becoming popular, now brands were trying to identify target audiences in order to make their advertising and marketing budgets more effective.

As we moved into the 1990’s and early 2000’s the processing power available to the average business exploded and this allowed marketers to collect much more data – too much in some instances. The number of channels also increased with the introduction of digital marketing.

Now in the 2010’s we have the processing power to harness the data, but we have a tighter regulatory framework in which we have to operate, like Uncle Ben says in Spider-Man “with great power comes great responsibility”. Today’s marketers must work within the framework of GDPR or they will face enormous fines and worse, loss of trust from their customers.

If we accept that there is a proliferation of data out there and data is the key to unlocking Personalisation, why does it often fall short? There are four key blockers to unlocking the power of personalisation and these are not uncommon.

Too Much Data?

First, it’s hard to find the right people; how do you find the nuggets amongst all the noise? The proliferation of data can leave marketers unsure how to dive in to find the right customers to target. Additionally, because of the regulatory framework, collecting data has just got tougher, harder yes, but not impossible. When I am looking at data collection with my clients, I always talk about the value exchange; customers will give up their data if they get something in return, and that doesn’t have to be discounts, it can be content they wouldn’t otherwise have access to.

Marketing Technology is overly complicated

Despite being hailed as the great messiah for the time-poor marketer, the Marketing Technology can also get in the way; it can be over complicated, overly technical and built for the IT department and not designed with marketing in mind at all, making it hard to get those multi-layered personalised journeys live.

Actionable data vs volume of data

The third reason why Personalisation efforts often fail is because once the data has been captured it can be hard to organise it into something that is actionable, actionable data rather than huge volumes. The right data will be the key to turn marketing effectiveness around. Added to this, marketers have to have the ability to convey the necessity and importance of quality actionable data to the rest of the business, in particular the senior team, otherwise they will not receive the required future investment.

Consistent Marketing Communications

As many organisations have built their marketing technology stack iteratively, these different systems don’t “talk” to each other, meaning that data about the customer doesn’t flow around the organization and therefore marketers struggle to produce consistent marketing communications. This is further exacerbated when different teams “own” different parts to the customer journey, or data or technology. And this is a fundamental issue; unless organisations remove those data and target silos, then there will always be a push and pull on who’s targets take priority.

So, if companies can find ways to solve the data and the technology mix then they are definitely moving in the right direction. By simplifying the tech stack by unifying the data that flows around the system then the marketer suddenly has the ability to understand the customer as one entity. It will lead to the ability to optimise the customer understanding and therefore segment and target the marketing communications better.

But what does “good” look like?

There are four stages to an effective technology stack. First look at the customer data, how can this be brought together from all the different touch points into one central location? Creating a cohesive data governance layer will help with this if the technology stack is built of lots of different tools. A data governance layer can provide a unified set of data fields and standards which the whole organisation can then utilise.

Next, building or buying a unifying layer like a Customer Data Platform (CDP) will allow marketers to bring all the different entry points into one place. By unifying the data from all the different input channels (websites, apps, social media, email etc), in one centralised location gives marketers the ability to create a Single Customer View or Universal Profile by unifying and consolidating the data.

The CDP also allows marketers to cleanse and dedupe the data which will decrease marketing spend and also enhance the customer relationship with the ability to stop sending multiple communications to the same individual.

This unified data layer then enables the marketer to analyse and segment the data, giving them the ability to understand their customers across the different touchpoints and interactions with a brand. It enables deeper analysis in terms of segmentation, profitability and lifetime value of those segments. In time this can lead to the ability to build predictive analytics and aggregations on the data or even AI or machine learning. None of which would be possible if the data wasn’t in a unified place; there simply wouldn’t be enough data points to build these more advanced layers of understanding.

And finally, if the data, analysis and channels are all coming together on the way into the single customer view, then campaign execution on the other will also benefit from this unified view of the data, meaning that marketing teams can build personalised multi-layered journeys for their customers.

Personalisation therefore is the utilisation of these four pillars (Data collection, unifying data layer, analysis and segmentation and delivery) to be able to maximise every moment.

But why is getting it right so important? A recent survey undertaken by Selligent across their customers’ accounts showed the following interesting facts:

Marketers know it’s hard to find the right people, but what’s harder is to utilise any data available effectively. Customers today expect to have personalised messages, that’s a given. But the time-pressured marketer needs to think creatively about how to unify their data and the technology stack they have available. Otherwise not only will they be spending too much on their marketing initiatives but the lack of personalisation will drive their customers to a brand that is doing it better. Can you really afford not to invest in this area in 2020?

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