Brands Losing Customers Due To Failed Personalization Efforts

While most marketing leaders continue to strive for one-to-one personalization, achieving this type of tailored messaging falls short, causing most personalization efforts to fail, according to Gartner, Inc. The price of getting personalization wrong is steep. In a survey of more than 2,500 customers, more than half report they will unsubscribe from a company’s communications and 38 percent will stop doing business with a company if they find personalization efforts to be “creepy.”

“Creating personalized messages and experiences requires intimate knowledge of customer journeys, relevant content that drives action, and technology that helps deliver and measure experiences,” said Martha Mathers, managing vice president at Gartner. “Brands need to be extremely thoughtful in how they personalize their content today. Instead of utilizing every piece of customer data available, brands should focus on showing customers you can help them first, then layering in the right balance of data to boost message relevance, without making things too personal.”

Gartner research shows that the concept of providing “tailored help” to consumers offers a significant opportunity for brands to deliver tangible customer value in the forms and functionalities consumers seek.

“We define ‘tailored help’ as a message or messages designed to provide valuable assistance or support while using as few data dimensions as possible to thread the very tough needle between too inaccurate on one hand and too creepy on the other,” said Brent Adamson, distinguished vice president at Gartner.

The opportunity for improvement here is tremendous — 88 percent of surveyed consumers reported not receiving “tailored help.” And using “tailored help” messaging increases the predicted impact of the commercial benefit index (e.g., brand intent, purchase, repurchase and increased cart size) by 20 percent.

To overcome barriers to effective personalization, Gartner’s 2018 State of Personalization Report encourages marketing leaders to consider the following when creating “tailored help” content:

Develop personalization skills: Staffing challenges are a major impediment to personalization efforts. In fact, 74 percent of marketing leaders report they struggle to scale their personalization efforts.