Defining personalization for you and your organization

What is personalization?

That’s a great question.  

In fact, in a recent Optimizely study that surveyed marketing, ecommerce, and IT executives worldwide, only 26% of executives reported having a unified definition of personalization throughout their organization. 

Personalization can be defined as the process of creating a tailored digital experience that is individually curated and optimized for each user or subset of users based on existing customer data and real-time behavior. 

Specifically for websites and apps, it’s a digital optimization process for creating customized experiences for visitors or users.  

Only 26% of executives reported having a unified definition of personalization throughout their organization. 

Our approach: Tackling the personalization pyramid

Let's visualize personalization as a pyramid. 

At the bottom of the pyramid, most customers are being treated to the same identical experience, with only broad segmentation occurring. As you proceed up the pyramid, you get into more advanced segmentation that observes real-time behavior. Once you’re near the top, your algorithms are so advanced that they’re able to accurately predict customer behavior to surface relevant content or product recommendations. 

Breaking down different types of personalization

From a structural perspective, there are three primary types of personalization and you can use one or all to create a dynamic experience. Your ability to effectively communicate these types of personalization will make it easier for you to build a plan that works. 

Atomic personalization

(We know, we know, you didn't sign up for a physics lesson... but trust us.)

When creating your personalization strategy, consider:

• Atoms: what bits of data are you collecting?
• Molecules: how you do you organize these bits of data into customer segments?
• Organisms: how are you arranging and rearranging molecules to dynamically shape the customer experience on a personalized level?

Rule based personalization

This works by customizing user experiences with predefined rules to display specific content or features based on user characteristics or behavior.  

You can almost think of this type of personalization as a flow chart, relying on “if/then” logic (e.g. if a user performs action x, show them content y). 

Algorithmic (AI) personalization

This type of personalization leverages AI to fuel content and product recommendation engines. With algorithmic personalization, you can present tailored content or products using algorithms that predict a user’s preferences based on previous behaviors and interactions.  

Some examples are: 

• Product recommendations
• Content recommendation
• Email recommendations 

Common challenges marketing teams face when building a personalization strategy

When Optimizely conducted a survey of top executives in the marketing industry worldwide, here’s where the respondents noted the biggest challenge areas were:  

• 44% say complicated or fragmented data is a top challenge
• 43% say a lack of effective analytics holds them up
• 40% say they have difficulty scaling their program
• 39% say they struggle to implement the program in real-time
• 36% say disjointed workflows are holding them back

So, it kind of sounds like many companies are struggling with adopting a proper personalization infrastructure, right?

Not to mention, the impact of doing away with third-party cookies, which 97% of executives admit they’re not ready for (but, shout out to the 3% that are).

44% of top executives in the marketing industry say complicated or fragmented data is a top challenge

Challenge 1: How to define personalization for your brand

Not to get all meta, but as it turns out, just defining personalization is also matter of personalization. Who knew?  

This is why it’s so challenging for so many companies to even get started on their personalization strategy; they don’t even know where to start or what it means for them. 

Here's an example of how vastly different the personalization experience can be for competing airlines:

Challenge 2: Scaling content creation

It’s tough to create an optimized customer experience with a limited library of content. There’s really no point in trying to personalize if you’re going to surface the same 5 blog posts to every customer on your site.  

Scaling content creation is easier than you think. With the right content marketing platform, you can facilitate workflows that drastically reduce the amount of time it takes to create content, easily collaborate on ideation and strategy, publish with ease, and even leverage AI for content creation.  

Challenge 3: Data management and privacy

You need to be super transparent about how and what data you’re collecting from your customers can be ensured of data privacy. Even though 78% of consumers cite they are likely to engage with a personalized offer tailored to their interests, 77% of consumers also cited that data privacy policies are important to maintaining brand loyalty. It’s important to strike a delicate balance that respects boundaries.

Be sure to offer them ways to opt out of data capture, not only for the sake of customer loyalty, but also so you don’t get walloped with massive fines.  

Challenge 4: How to test and optimize personalization

One of the biggest challenges with personalization is ensuring you have a system for testing and iteration.  

A/B testing and experimentation are common ways of overcoming personalization challenges when you can’t quite figure out exactly what your audience wants, or if what they want isn’t abundantly clear.  

Now, it just so happens that Optimizely provides a solution for all these challenges in one unified platform, but you probably already guessed that being the astute B2B marketer you are. 

Challenge 5: Managing audiences

92% of people say their favorite brands provide a consistent experience, regardless of where they interact with them.

Ensuring a consistent experience across all platforms, devices, and channels is a major pain for organizations, especially when governance of these channels is split among teams.  

In fact, in a recent survey, 92% of respondents noted that their favorite brands provide a consistent experience, regardless of where they interact with them.  

Providing a symmetric experience for customers can be solved with a unified customer data platform (CDP) that allows you to easily create segments and integrates seamlessly with your martech stack.  

Planning your personalization strategy

Remember when we stated that 36% of executives are being held back by disjointed workflows? And remember when we said that personalization is a team sport?  

That’s because personalization often includes collaboration between different departments across an organization.  

Before you do anything, you’ll need to ensure you have a shared workspace that allows for cross-functional planning and collaboration.  

Here’s what your marketing planning software should do and some questions you should ask to ensure it’s the right fit:  

1. Collaboration

   How are you and the rest of your organization with a stake in personalization communicating with one another? How are you planning out your strategy?

2. Visualize

   Does the tool you use allow you to orchestrate your entire program from a flexible board with multiple views and ways of filtering? Does it integrate seamlessly with your entire martech stack?

3. Ideation

   Providing a unique customer experience is an iterative process, no matter how much data you have. That’s because the customer’s wants and needs are fluid. How are you and your team brainstorming new ideas?  

4. Approvals

   What kinds of system do you have in place to receive approvals from team leaders and campaign managers?

5. Visibility

   Is your strategy buried in a spreadsheet on a drive that no one outside of your team has access to? Are you just winging it?  

By adopting a unified platform for the planning phase of personalization, you’ll be able to strategize, develop, and approve personalization campaigns from one single workspace.  

Start with your personas

You likely have already built out your ideal customer profile (ICP) prior to making the leap into broader personalization. You should start by ideating campaigns against those personas to give yourself as much runway as possible before you’ve even begun ideating or collecting data. 

Understand your broadest audiences

Again, you already probably have a sense of who your customers are. You likely have a solid understanding of the segments they belong to such as:   

• Prospects vs. customers
• First-time buyers vs. repeat buyers
• Desktop vs. mobile
• User locations
• Typical age group

As you gather more data and insights, you can refine your approach and create more granular personalization strategies.  

Identify opportunities

Once you’ve identified your personas and audiences, you’ll need to map out the associated opportunities within those segments and focus on the ones that are most likely to succeed. You might already have this through customer feedback and surveys you’ve done in the past.