Periscope By McKinsey makes public latest research on personalised marketing

The report Retail Gets Personal: Accelerating the Journey to Personalisation that accompanies this research found that regarding personalisation, 95% of WRC retailers surveyed stated it is a strategic priority for their business – 64% consider it a top 3 priority. Yet only 15% admit to being fully implemented, with 43% saying personalisation efforts and initiatives are on the roadmap for 2017/18.

This suggests that whilst many retailers are at the start of their journey towards personalisation, and recognise its strategic importance, their efforts towards implementing it are lagging behind what their customers have been demanding for some time.

To support this viewpoint, when asked about the top reasons for implementing personalised marketing, 46% of the retailers surveyed stated they see it as a way to provide a more customer centric approach, with 36% saying it is a necessity to keep up with changing consumer expectations and demands. 10% believe it will play a key role in helping them use their marketing budget more efficiently.

Another highly compelling factor for personalisation revealed by the research is the opportunities it offers to generate additional revenue streams. When asked how they would rate the impact of ‘personalised’ versus mass promotion in creating the potential for additional revenue streams, 15% of retailers said that they saw a 100-300% increase, especially with regards to new customer conversions. 41% of respondents stated that they experienced a high impact (50-100%) to their revenue streams, especially in cross-sell conversions.

80% of respondents felt that switching to personalised promotions was having a direct impact on the volume of customer visits they were receiving compared to the previous year. 59% said they saw a 25-50% increase, with the remaining 21% seeing customer visits as high as double.

The channels most used or planned by retailers for the delivery of personalised promotions were Social Media and email (each 74%), followed by App push messaging (51%) and Direct Mail, with 30% saying this was the third key component in the delivery of personalised promotional activities.

Only 17% of respondents currently have consolidated and simplified their technology to a single personalisation software suite, and this became clear when they talked about the challenges of delivering personalised promotions. 67% said gathering, integrating, and synthesising data was their greatest challenge, with the same volume admitting they did not have the correct tools to execute personalised offers and marketing. 41% stated that finding the right solutions partner was creating a challenge for their business in continuing their journey to deliver personalised marketing.

When it comes to the automated delivery of personalised marketing campaigns, two thirds of respondents (67%) said their content management system was the most important piece of technology they relied on to manage creative assets and copy. This was followed by automated campaign management systems (56%) to trigger re-targeting, e-mail campaigns, targeted promotions and ‘next best action’ analysis. 53% placed their distribution platform in third place – responsible for pushing out notifications, emails and other communications.