Understanding Consumers at a Molecular Tier

Personalization is a critical aspect of your brand’s digital marketing plan in 2022. Marketers across the industry are discussing personalization at scale, how to achieve it in a time when customer identification is getting more difficult, and how to future-proof and optimize their strategies moving forward.

Despite the known importance of personalization, not all brands are executing yet. 74% of marketers say personalizing the online experience based on behavioral data has a high impact on engagement, but only 19% currently have it enabled in their campaigns, according to Econsultancy.

Those 81% of marketers who haven’t yet enabled personalization are missing out. According to Adobe, the 48% of marketers that have implemented personalization on their website and apps achieve double digit lift in revenue and 80% of customers say they would be more likely to do business with a company that offered personalized experiences. Whether you haven’t started personalizing your customer experience yet or simply feel there is room to improve, these five easy steps will get you started on the path to delivering increased business impact.

The first step to meaningful, personalized marketing is building a complete personalization strategy. Over 60% of customers say it is appealing when the shopping experience is personalized, according to Capgemini, but a personalized user journey requires much more planning than a welcome back message or allowing autofill on checkout.

You must first develop your user journey and identify every moment you want to (and are able to) personalize. Maximize your opportunities to make the conversion easier and demonstrate a connection to the customer without going overboard. Too much personalization can come across as unnerving, so look to find your brand’s sweet spot.

The goal is being able to identify what stage a customer is in and delivering the content they receive based on this stage. Make the experience feel like it is hand-picked for the customer – but is actually generated through the Adobe technology tools that will automate this process. According to Infosys, 78% of customers are more likely to be a repeat customer if you provide targeted and personalized offers.

GET PLANNING

Once you have developed your personalization strategy, it’s time to create a detailed plan on how you will make it all happen. Create a working document that considers your overall strategy and media mix. You’ll need to identify the signals your system uses to trigger personalized experiences. For example, three visits in a single week to a particular service page could trigger a personalized marketing campaign around that service.

Of course, it takes more than triggers to build out an automated, personalized marketing system. A complete plan should include:

•Identity capture and resolution solutions
•Choosing the appropriate ID/key
for tracking

•Data organization and taxonomy
•Audience insights
•First-party behavioral attributes

•Second and third-party data discovery

•Users/audience segmentation

•Activation timeline and resources

•Reporting and optimization

When planning around identity capture, data organization, and audience segments, you’ll need some additional resources to ensure you’re extracting the maximum ROI on your personalization strategy. Leveraging iCrossing Data Studio powered by Hearst will give your business access to one of the world’s largest first-party customer data sets (12th largest publisher worldwide, 160 million UUs). This can be combined with your own customer data to supercharge the level of actionable customer insights available. Additionally, consider using Adobe Audience Manager to unify and monitor customer data to deliver your strategy with real-time metrics.

With a complete plan in hand, you’re ready to activate and elevate your marketing. When bringing your plan to life, leverage Adobe solutions to serve the new experience across all addressable channels. Bringing the many aspects of a personalized marketing campaign together under one suite of solutions will enable a smooth workflow, reporting, and optimization as you continue to improve your plan. You will save countless hours through increased efficiencies when compared to assembling a MarTech stack from a selection of unconnected providers.

Personalization is a critical component of your digital marketing plan that should be a top priority. Developing a complete personalization strategy that allows you to deliver the greatest business impact for your brand requires complex strategy, an exhaustive execution plan, robust marketing platforms to enable activation, meaningful personalization moments for customers, and actionable customer insights and analysis that enable constant optimization. When properly executed, these five steps create a connection with the customer that translates to higher conversions and greater lifetime value—true business impact.

If you are looking to build your first scalable personalization strategy or think you have opportunity to unlock further business impact from the strategy you currently have in place, reach out to us today at hello@spellbrandt.com.