Personalization at scale leads to superior customer experiences and measurable business gains—and here are the four capabilities your organization must have to achieve it.
Marketers should care about personalization because their customers care about it. In addition, personalization is central to customer experience, which means it is essential for brand differentiation, customer satisfaction, even business survival.
Personalization matters to both customers and businesses. Research shows that customers increasingly expect content and experiences to be tailored to who they are and they want at this moment. And businesses are seeing measurable returns from their personalization efforts—from increased conversion to greater customer loyalty. Some leading B2C brands are realizing advanced and sometimes even cutting-edge personalization at scale. But based on an Adobe assessment, this level of personalization still isn’t common. And arguably no organization is achieving perfection in omnichannel personalization at scale. The vision of at-scale personalized experiences is compelling, but the big challenge is how to make it real.
Based on our research, best-in-class personalization at scale requires capabilities across four key dimensions:
- Data and analytics. Personalization is only as effective as the underlying data driving it. Robust personalization requires companies to deeply understand customers and effectively manage data.
- Creative and content management. A big hurdle to at-scale personalization is meeting its massive content demands. So brands must evolve their approach and use technology to automatically and dynamically assemble content.
- Optimization and decisioning. Also key is a centralized decisioning engine, powered by predictive models and algorithms, that can automatically arbitrate which experiences to present to individual customers.
- Organization and operating model. Personalization at scale takes more than new technologies. It requires transformation—an organization and operating model structured to support seamless personalization across channels.