Merchants beating around the bush with personalisation, harming customer purchase experience

Moreover, while 66% of marketers rate their efforts at personalisation as “very good” or “excellent,” just 31% of consumers report companies are consistently delivering personalised, cross-channel experiences, according to “The Contextual Marketing Imperative: the evolution of personalization from push messaging to one-to-one personal customer experiences.” report issued by Forrester Consulting research compnay and commissiond by the SAP company hybris.

Additionally, the survey, focusing on markets like the US, EMEA and APAC and comprising 1,200 consumers and 200 advertising and marketing professionals at organisations with 500 or more employees, reveals that 40% of consumers say most promotions don’t deliver anything of interest.

Likewise, 44% of consumers say they receive too many offers and promotions and 37% of consumers say they delete most email offers and promotions without reading them. 40% of consumers have unsubscribed or opted-out because they feel overwhelmed and, among those consumers reporting less-than-satisfactory personalised experiences, 61% said they were somewhat or much less likely to take advantage of future offers.

Because consumers are sharing so much personal data with brands, they expect value in return – in the form of transactional perks and improved customer experience. While most marketers seek to improve personalised customer experiences from this customer data, their strategies are immature and their marketing efforts are falling short in this regard.

Many still rely on segmentation methods that target certain demographics, such as a specific age group, which is not nearly enough to engage customers. 70% of consumers surveyed said they are aware that companies use personal information to send them targeted offers and 74% of consumers are “somewhat” or “very comfortable” with companies using data about them to provide personalized experiences.

While 66% of marketers use demographics to create targeted content offers and 44% say they use demographic categories to create at least some level of personalisation for unidentified prospective customers, just half are using more sophisticated methods, such as leveraging data extracted from loyalty programs (52%) or behavior-based data (48%). In fact, 91% of marketers surveyed are prioritising improving customer experience through personalization over the next year

Despite the challenges marketers face in delivering contextual experiences, some are beginning to see signs of success. The key has been in centralising customer data to capture real-time customer intent. The following study findings support this approach:

• While only 16% of marketers surveyed currently have the capability to capture customer intent and deliver real-time, behavior-based marketing across all channels, an emerging set of more sophisticated marketers are starting to get it right when it comes to contextualised marketing efforts
• Of the 22% of marketers surveyed who each have a single customer database, 70% reported the data they collected was “very useful” in creating a single view of the customer, compared with just 52% of those without a unified database