As organizations channelize all their resources for marketing and customer communication strategies, personalization tops the list when it comes to delivering improved customer experiences. However, a personalization strategy is only as good as the technology powering it. Whether an organization has an innovative approach to personalization or is just starting to explore its capabilities, they need the right technology and appropriate platform to implement an effective personalization program.
Today, offers, marketing messages, and advertisements are sent from every possible channel—social media, website, call center—bombarding consumers with an intent to impact their lives profoundly. The key is to target customers with the most relevant and customized messages, which is only possible with the right data. A personalization solution must act as a customer data platform at its core. Storing all the vital customer data in a single place with a unified profile for every consumer will help marketers to determine the most relevant strategy to target customers. While the adoption of personalization technology is in full swing, obstacles abound in implementing the technology, which includes challenges in gathering crucial structured data and predicting the business outcomes.
Organizations are leveraging analytics, which focuses on simple data collection, information management, and cross-channel coordination to make informed decisions and deliver personalized customer experiences. Businesses are using analytics, data mining, and data management techniques to transform raw data into powerful insights.
According to a market research, about three-quarters of digital marketers already use or have plans to use artificial intelligence to personalize offers in their online advertising strategies. The move toward AI is related to significant improvements in algorithms, higher computing power, more available data to feed the algorithms, and customer expectation for highly personalized experiences. Marketers are also leveraging machine learning algorithms to provide relevant product, content, and brand recommendations to customers. Companies that leverage AI/ML to understand customer behavior for personalization are predicted to witness an increase in profits.
Voice is undoubtedly becoming an important channel for customer engagement. Many companies are focusing on providing engaging experiences to consumers, making it easier to research and buy via voice assistants and smart speakers.
Alongside, marketers are using a wide range of online testing approaches that comprise A/B testing and various methods within multivariate testing (MVT). When coupled with experimental design and a commitment to iterative testing and redesign, A/B testing can help make tremendous improvements to an organization’s website or mobile app, delivering an improved personalized experience to customers.
With several personalization solutions available in the market, how can marketers determine the ones that are worth investing in? To highlight the best of personalization solutions, we bring this edition of CIO Applications’ “Top 10 Personalization Solution Providers - 2019.”
