Path to Personalization
The nine keys to driving stronger relationships—one customer at a time.
Introduction
Any marketer worth their weight in leads knows the benefits of personalization - and yet, a surprisingly large number of companies have not fully embraced this strategic tactic.
Typically, senior marketing professionals see personalization as a double-edged sword. On one hand, there's no doubting that consumers and end-users value personalized experiences and tailored recommendations across channels.
On the other hand, it's assumed that the prospect of building out those unique digital journeys by creating the content required and managing the data to fuel the entire process seems far too complex.
The good news? Industry-leading brands are showing that the opposite is true.
The Path to Personalization for Enterprises at a Glance
Since the turn of the 21st Century, the flame of brand loyalty has wavered in the winds of the internet. According to a Forbes Insight study, only 1 in 4 business leaders believes customers are loyal to brands, while 62% say the concept of loyalty is now close to obsolete. The study, which surveyed companies with at least $1 billion in annual revenue, also revealed that developing a customer-focused environment and delivering personalized marketing has become a strategic imperative.
The reason is simple: customers now value the experience more than they value the brand providing it. If your competitor offers a faster, more convenient, and more personalized customer experience, you can't rely on the aging concept of brand loyalty to rescue you. We as marketers all have to adjust to the new reality that brand loyalty is dead.
Context is Queen
If content is king, then context is certainly queen. Delivering tailored experiences at the right time is the key difference between simple personalization and enterprise personalization at scale - and consumers can tell the difference.
Marketers often personalize emails and web content, but very few deliver a continuous experience across channels by displaying personalized content at the right time in the customer's journey, powered by the contextual information associated with the end-user. For instance, by suggesting sneaker cleaning products after a sneaker purchase, or by altering messaging and product suggestions based on the consumer's device, the weather they're experiencing, or local events.
And no, contextualizing personalized content isn't another luxury. In fact, an Accenture-led study shows that 81% of consumers want brands to understand them better, and they want brands to know when, and when not, to approach them.
Journeys, Not Moments
With contextualized content in place, you can finally begin constructing the customer journey.
Forward-thinking enterprises don't see personalization as a series of disconnected moments for the end-user, but as a continuous lifetime journey. For instance, using the customer's name every so often is useful, but the most it will do is give the customer a few moments of pseudo-personalization.
By combining context marketing with an omnichannel presence, a brand can construct a customer journey map consisting of multiple stages. Typically, industry best practice dictates that you segment the customer journey into the following four key stages:
Need: Every customer starts their journey with a need. For example, they want to purchase a new car.
Research: The customer looks broadly at different brands, models, price ranges, and online reviews along the way. Over a period of days, weeks, or even months, they slowly narrow down their options.
Decision: They make a selection from a short list of possible brands, factoring in past experiences, reviews, and other online information.
Customer: They end their buyer journey by purchasing a car. Then a new chapter in the journey begins, with the onus on the car company to provide a personalized onboarding and customer service experience.
A strong personalization campaign will have personalized content custom-made for each stage of the customer journey, with further tailoring of that content happening in line with the individual customer's persona and past behavior.
It's important to note that the four key stages could happen over a period of months, weeks, days - or minutes. Consumers switch between devices swiftly and without hesitation, and if they have already carried out research in the past, it's possible they could become a customer rapidly; particularly in a B2C environment. Hence, it's vital that your personalization strategy, and the technology that enables it, works in real time and with the required agility to understand and react.
Going Omnichannel
Today's customers are expecting to be able to engage with you on whatever channel they want, whenever they want. If that wasn't difficult enough, they expect you to remember who they are and personalize their buying experience accordingly. And if you don't do it, you can bet your competitors already are or are currently working on it.
This is where omnichannel personalization comes in. Omnichannel personalization is the art of developing a consistent and continuous personalized experience that encompasses all digital channels and touchpoints. This includes website content, mobile content, social media, email, smart speakers, wearable technology, digital signage, and other IoT devices. The goal is not just to enable the end-user to access your brand through various touchpoints, but to empower them to switch between any touchpoint at any stage in their journey without a hiccup - and without a break in personalization.
This strategy has the ability to collect information across the channels, amalgamate this information under a single unique ID that is associated with the user, and then it utilizes this information to deploy the most relevant and contextual experience to the end-user, no matter where the interaction is taking place.
When you consider that 64% of consumers are willing to pay for seamless customer experiences, the value of omnichannel personalization becomes clear.
Step 1: Establish Your Team and Objectives
While personalization isn't a switch you flip on or off, there is a straightforward process you can follow to launch a future-proof personalization program that's data-driven, generates brand loyalty, increases conversion, and is ready for any new device that emerges on the market. This guide offers a comprehensive outline to help you differentiate your digital experience. Depending on your industry, the stage of your customer's journey and potential audiences, some of these steps will be more important than others. All the essential ingredients to help you differentiate from your competition. Now, let's get started!
Ideally a strong personalization strategy is built using the expertise of select teammates. The goal is to leverage their unique skills and establish a framework that enhances the customer experience by serving up the most relevant content. While a broad team is not always possible, the ideal personalization team for enterprises consists of seven team members, who may or may not have a team beneath them:
Executive Sponsor: An overall advocate for resources, leadership commitment, and cross-organizational collaboration
CX Lead: Leads overall management of the personalization program
Digital Strategist: Translates organization's overall strategy into CX strategy and tactics
Content Marketer: Leads journey-aligned content creation, tactics, and experience flows across channels
Marketing Technologist: Oversees implementation tactics and integration with third-party tools and systems
UX Designer: Responsible for overall UX and IA
Digital Analyst: Provides insights and recommendations based on analytical data
First, you'll want to outline a strategic objectives framework. This framework should outline the business and marketing objectives that map to digital goals that represent business value. Those digital goals should drive the personalization strategy they represent - what, why, and for whom you're personalizing content.
Goals and engagement value scales pave the way for personalization. One of the first steps ahead of any personalization should be creating the Engagement Value Scale, which includes digital goals that have relative engagement value based on your strategic objectives.
Step 2: Outline Audience Segments
A segment is a group of visitors to your site who have something in common. Personalizing content toward segments of your audience is a great way to target users with content that's relevant to them. Segments should be identified and prioritized by their ability to drive business value and their size.
A persona (also known as a buyer persona) is one type of segment. A persona is a fictional yet data-driven representation of your ideal customer. A buyer persona includes the customer's demographics, age, location, preferences, behavior patterns, motivations, and goals. A persona is designed to represent a segment of your target audience, and thus, it's wise to build a small range of personas to ensure you capture your entire target audience.
Alongside personas, marketers can also personalize based on historical behavior such as goal conversions, downloads, and form data. Or, they could leverage the user's contextual state, like the campaign source, time of day, or the number of times they've visited the website or application.
Another technique is to personalize content according to the user's referral channel. For instance, if you are targeting a persona that frequents Reddit, you can focus personalization on users who came from Reddit threads. Or if you want to encourage new customers, you can add personalization to target users if they haven't visited your site before.
Segment-based personalization is highly effective when you don't have enough behavioral data about your users. You can use segments based on geolocation, device type, referral source, or even the weather they're experiencing. These segments work particularly well for first-time visitors where you haven't had a chance to collect behavioral information yet.
We can now be pithy and client-focused, showcasing our expertise in a way that responds to specific needs. For instance, a lawyer can follow up with a prospective client: 'Here's our recent Mergers and Acquisition experience, in Africa, for the mining industry.' Out of the wealth of information on the site, the system quickly drills down, through an intuitive interface, to what is relevant to that user.
Step 3: Map the Customer Journey
With your personas in place, it's time to map out the customer journey. That way, you'll know at what stages to deliver your personalized content. Your content should be segmented by persona, but also by customer journey stages.
For instance, you won't want to try and up-sell a customer with sidebar content before they've proceeded to checkout. Nor would you want to present a customer who's at checkout with a brand new and totally unrelated offer. Again, context marketing plays a role, and as you can see, it's hard to align content with context without a customer journey map.
Typically, a customer journey map consists of four stages: Need, Research, Decision, Customer. You may need to adapt or extend your customer journeys to suit your industry or website. For instance, a healthcare company may want to add an 'Advocacy' stage that measures the patient's perception of a hospital brand after they've received treatment.
We recommend mapping out customer journeys for each major channel, and figure out how those journeys overlap, so personalization can continue when the end-user switches from one device or channel to another. It's also wise to note the touchpoints your end-user has with your brand, and document the emotions associated with each touch point.
When mapping out the customer journey, you should also be thinking about the micro-moments that define it. Google has identified four crucial micro-moments that every marketer should leverage: I-want-to-know moments, I-want-to-go moments, I-want-to-do moments, and I-want-to-buy moments. These are intent-rich moments when decisions are made and preferences shaped.
Your customers are turning to their devices for quick answers in their moments of need. Be there, be useful, and be quick. The brands that win are the ones that show up in these micro-moments with relevant, helpful information.
Sitecore accommodated all of the marketing tools we were using - email, personalization, commerce - so we can target and track activity to provide a complete customer journey.
Step 4: Create Workflows, Then Test, Test, and Test Again
You won't get personalization 'right' on the first attempt. And even if you get lucky and do get it right initially, new products, seasons, buyer needs, and changes in consumer taste means this is going to be an iterative process. The aim should always be to test and refine your personas and corresponding content in order to raise conversion rates.
The ideal workflow for launching, maturing, and testing a personalization program follows three phases:
Phase 1 - Launch: Start by identifying, labeling, and organizing goals, campaign structure, keywords and profiled content based on the data available. Then implement your dynamic personalization based on this initial research and planning.
Phase 2 - Learn: Based on new data and learning over time, update your learning and organization. Review analytics, monitor conversion rates, and gather insights from your personalization efforts.
Phase 3 - Optimize: Optimize dynamic personalization based on updated findings. Refine personas, adjust content, and continue the cycle of testing and improvement.
A/B testing and multivariate testing are essential tools in this process. With A/B testing, you can compare two versions of a page or element to see which performs better. Multivariate testing allows you to test multiple variables simultaneously to understand how different combinations affect user behavior.
Machine learning can also accelerate your testing and optimization. Modern personalization platforms can automatically identify patterns in user behavior and suggest optimizations, reducing the manual effort required to improve your personalization strategy.
Remember: personalization is not a set-it-and-forget-it tactic. The most successful programs are constantly evolving based on data, feedback, and changing customer expectations.
Step 5: Empower Marketers to Create, Distribute and Iterate Content
Content is the fuel that powers personalization. If marketers are hindered by technology (or a lack thereof), the engine grinds to a halt. A documented content strategy should be your first step, and it should instruct marketers and content creators on how to craft content for each of your personas. Factors such as the persona's technical knowledge or interests should dictate the tone and language of the content being created.
Marketers will need a hospitable environment to write, collaborate on, and preview content before it goes live. They'll also need the ability to dictate what channels will benefit from which piece of content, and they should also be able to modify how that content is presented across channels.
Additionally, your technology stack should allow marketers to measure and test content, and then iterate published content in line with new data. This closed-loop approach to content creation ensures that your personalization efforts are always improving.
The ideal content management system for personalization should offer:
Intuitive content editing: A user-friendly interface that allows marketers to create and edit content without developer assistance.
Workflow and collaboration: Built-in approval processes and the ability for multiple team members to collaborate on content.
Preview capabilities: The ability to preview personalized content as different personas or segments before publishing.
Analytics integration: Built-in or easily integrated analytics to measure content performance.
Omnichannel publishing: The ability to publish content to multiple channels from a single source.
Sitecore offers a total MarTech package, so we don't have to involve several providers.
Step 6: Leverage Geolocation and Localization
With a geolocation service, you can get information about a customer's country, state, metro area, and city. With such information, you can personalize content based on the consumer's location, which opens up a wide range of possibilities.
For instance, you can recommend local outlets or serve content that's in line with the weather they're currently experiencing. You can even use the name of their town in your messaging to make your content truly localized. Imagine a user seeing 'Welcome, Chicago!' when they land on your homepage - that's a simple but powerful personalization technique.
Geolocation also enables you to serve region-specific promotions, display local inventory, or highlight events happening in the user's area. For global brands, it can automatically serve content in the user's preferred language based on their location.
But geolocation goes beyond just knowing where your users are. It's about understanding the context of their location and using that information to provide more relevant experiences. A user browsing from a mobile device in a shopping mall has different needs than someone on a desktop at home.
Consider combining geolocation with other data points like time of day, device type, and past behavior to create truly contextual experiences. A restaurant chain might show breakfast items to a mobile user near one of their locations at 8am, but switch to lunch specials for the same user at noon.
Personalization is the future, and brands that want to deliver meaningful customer experiences must become skilled in this area.
Step 7: Integrate Data from Internal and External Sources
The more you know about your customer, the more relevant content you can deliver. By integrating data from internal and external sources, you build a more complete picture of each individual user.
A Customer Data Platform (CDP) can help you unify customer data from multiple sources into a single, coherent customer profile. This unified view enables more sophisticated personalization because you're no longer working with fragmented data across different systems.
Consider integrating data from:
CRM systems: Purchase history, customer service interactions, and account information
Marketing automation: Email engagement, campaign responses, and lead scoring
E-commerce platforms: Transaction history, cart abandonment, and product preferences
Social media: Social engagement, sentiment, and demographic data
Third-party data providers: Demographic enrichment, firmographic data, and intent signals
The key is ensuring that all this data flows seamlessly into your personalization engine, where it can be used in real-time to deliver relevant experiences. Modern platforms offer pre-built connectors and APIs that make integration faster and more reliable.
Remember that with great data comes great responsibility. Ensure you're collecting and using customer data in compliance with privacy regulations like GDPR and CCPA, and always be transparent with customers about how their data is being used.
Step 8: Leverage Machine Learning and AI
Machine learning and artificial intelligence are transforming personalization from rule-based systems to predictive, adaptive experiences. Instead of manually creating rules for every scenario, AI can analyze vast amounts of data to identify patterns and make recommendations in real-time.
AI-powered personalization can:
Predict customer behavior: By analyzing historical data, AI can predict what a customer is likely to do next and serve content accordingly. This means you can anticipate needs before customers even express them.
Automate content selection: Rather than manually choosing which content to show to which segment, AI can automatically select the most relevant content for each individual user based on their unique profile and behavior.
Optimize in real-time: Machine learning algorithms can continuously learn from user interactions and automatically optimize personalization strategies without human intervention.
Scale personalization: AI makes it possible to deliver truly individualized experiences at scale, something that would be impossible to achieve manually.
The key to successful AI implementation is starting with clean, well-organized data. AI is only as good as the data it learns from. Begin with simpler use cases and gradually increase complexity as you learn what works for your audience.
Don't forget the human element. While AI can automate many aspects of personalization, human oversight remains essential for ensuring brand consistency, ethical use of data, and handling edge cases that algorithms might miss.
Step 9: Go Omnichannel
The final step in your personalization journey is to go omnichannel. This means delivering a consistent, personalized experience across every touchpoint where your customers interact with your brand.
True omnichannel personalization requires:
A unified customer view: All channels must share the same customer data so that interactions on one channel inform experiences on others.
Consistent messaging: While content may be adapted for different channels, the core message and personalization should remain consistent.
Seamless transitions: Customers should be able to start an interaction on one channel and continue on another without losing context or having to repeat themselves.
Real-time synchronization: Data must flow between channels in real-time so that personalization reflects the customer's most recent interactions.
This includes traditional channels like email, web, and mobile, but also emerging touchpoints like smart speakers, wearables, digital signage, and IoT devices. The brands that excel at omnichannel personalization are the ones that can deliver relevant experiences no matter where or how customers choose to engage.
Start by identifying your most important channels and ensuring personalization works seamlessly between them. Then gradually expand to additional touchpoints as your capabilities mature.
Brands that create personalized experiences by integrating advanced digital technologies and proprietary data are seeing revenue increase by 6% to 10%.
Next Steps
Personalization is no longer a nice-to-have - it's a competitive necessity. Customers expect brands to understand them, anticipate their needs, and deliver relevant experiences at every touchpoint. The brands that master personalization will build stronger customer relationships, drive higher conversion rates, and create lasting loyalty.
The nine steps outlined in this guide provide a proven framework for building an enterprise personalization program that delivers results:
1. Establish your team and objectives
2. Outline audience segments
3. Map the customer journey
4. Create workflows, then test, test, and test again
5. Empower marketers to create, distribute and iterate content
6. Leverage geolocation and localization
7. Integrate data from internal and external sources
8. Leverage machine learning and AI
9. Go omnichannel
Start where you are. You don't need to implement all nine steps at once. Begin with the steps that address your most pressing needs and build from there. The key is to start, learn, and iterate.
Ready to take the next step on your path to personalization? AgencyQ can help you assess your current capabilities, identify opportunities for improvement, and build a personalization strategy that drives real business results.
Take it with you.
Download the full PDF version of this whitepaper for offline reading.
Industry Leading Insights
Our latest thinking on personalization, digital transformation and experience design
