NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Monetate, the worldwide leader in personalization, today announced the availability of the 2017 Personalization Development Study, its first annual study that benchmarks the state of personalization by analyzing the real-world practices of more than 130 senior marketers. The study found that for those who put in the effort, personalization is not only attainable, but leads to a number of benefits that positively impact the bottom line.
Personalization has been proven to increase loyalty, drive higher conversion rates and grow revenue, but many organizations find that creating personalized experiences is challenging and instead revert to less effective segmentation strategies. Personalization, as defined by this study and in practice at select innovative organizations, goes beyond segmentation and testing to provide marketers with the ability to interact with each individual, at any moment, across all touch points, based on everything known about them.
Monetate compared and contrasted the practices of organizations that reported exceeding revenue expectations against those that merely met or altogether missed their revenue goals. Most notably, the data showed that those that succeeded in personalization saw improvement in profitability: 95 percent of those that got 3x (or more) return on investment from their personalization efforts increased profitability last year (compared to 77 percent and 63 percent of those that got 2x and 1x, respectively).
The analysis also found that successful organizations have a number of shared qualities, including:
- A documented strategy: 79 percent of organizations that exceeded revenue goals have a documented personalization strategy, compared to 31 percent of those that met revenue goals and 8 percent of those that missed revenue goals.
- A dedicated—and growing—budget: those that exceeded revenue goals have a dedicated budget for personalization 83 percent of the time. Moreover, 88 percent of that group plan to increase budget for personalization in 2017, compared to 21 and 33 percent of those that met or missed revenue goals, respectively.
- An integrated approach: with only about half (48 percent) of organizations that exceeded revenue having a dedicated person responsible for personalization, the study suggests that the most successful organizations have made personalization an integrated part of their operations and charter for all staff, not a siloed project managed by a single person.
- Tools to measure success: 88 percent of those that exceeded revenue goals have a measurement system in place, compared to approximately 45 percent of those that met or missed goals.
- Application of triggered actions: those that exceeded revenue goals use personalization and its outputs to fuel triggered emails 78 percent of the time, for ad retargeting 79 percent of the time and for branded mobile apps 65 percent of the time.
While the study revealed these important key findings, it also underscored many of the challenges that marketers still face in deploying successful personalization in their organizations. Organizational constraints that make it difficult to hold people accountable for personalization goals and the ability to automate decisions at scale were the top two challenges cited by respondents. Monetate’s analysis also uncovered that a continued, heavy reliance on A/B/N testing is also an issue, with almost 90 percent of organizations that missed revenue goals still using the practice, in lieu of other personalization approaches.
“It’s no secret that personalization pays off and that it can be challenging. Organizations that are great at testing and segmentation need to learn to think differently and build new skills,” said Lucinda Duncalfe, CEO of Monetate. “This study shows that and provides a proven roadmap for success. It is invaluable for everyone developing personalization programs. At Monetate, we’ve been working on this shift for years, so we are excited to help our clients usher in the new era in truly relationship-driven customer interaction that will enhance business results.”
The complete 2017 Personalization Development Study and its methodology is available for download on Monetate’s website.
About Monetate
Monetate,
the global leader in personalization software for consumer-facing
brands, enables marketers to create truly individual experiences that
surprise and delight every customer, increasing engagement and improving
performance.
Monetate’s approach to personalization starts with the understanding that each individual is unique, and instantly chooses the best interaction for each one. Unlike testing, which identifies the best choice for everyone, or segmentation, which defines the best choice for a group of people, Monetate’s 1-to-1 personalization engine reflects the full diversity of human beings and creates an experience for each one, in each moment.
In order to deliver true 1-to-1 experiences, Monetate’s platform is:
- Independent, so you can use any best of breed solution in your marketing stack and not be tied to one vendor’s offerings;
- Open, so marketers can use all of their data wherever it sits, push a decision to any touchpoint and pull the results back into their data/analytics infrastructure;
- Real-time, to enable interactions based on a customer’s in-session behavioral and event data that get their attention in increasingly narrow buying windows; and
- Bionic, giving the creative marketer the power to manage a machine learning engine and operate at 1-to-1 scale, for real.
Founded in 2008, with offices across the U.S. and Europe, Monetate is used by leading brands around the world and influences billions of dollars in revenue every year for The North Face, QVC, J.Crew Group, and hundreds of other market leaders.
