Dig deeper: What is a digital experience platform or DXP and is it the future of content management?

What is MACH?

MACH (microservices, API-first, cloud-native and headless) is a modern approach to digital experience management that allows for greater flexibility, scalability and speed. MACH-based DXPs offer several benefits to marketing organizations looking to work more effectively and efficiently.

Misalignment in MACH-based products

This may shock you, but not all products marketed as MACH DXPs are created equal. MACH has become a highly sought-after concept in the industry. Some vendors may see the label as a way to differentiate themselves and attract customers looking for solutions that embody the principles of MACH. (The same goes for SaaS, but that’s a topic for another article.)

Not all products marketed as MACH are fully compatible with the architecture or even aligned with its principles. This misalignment creates customer confusion and mistrust and can ultimately harm the vendor’s reputation and credibility.

Dig deeper: Digital experience platforms: 4 building blocks to success

Benefits of MACH-based DXPs

One of the key advantages of MACH-based DXPs is the ability to break down complex systems into smaller, independent components that can be managed and updated separately. This allows for faster and more efficient development, testing and deployment of new features and functionality.

Another key advantage is the API-first approach, which enables marketers to easily access and use data from various sources to deliver personalized experiences. This helps organizations keep pace with constantly evolving consumer expectations.

Cloud-native technology, built specifically for deployment — wait for it — in the cloud, provides the scalability and reliability required to support complex digital experiences at scale. The headless approach allows for greater flexibility and independence in the front-end development process, enabling marketing teams to move faster and deliver new experiences to the market more quickly.

Overall, MACH-based DXPs help marketing organizations achieve faster time to value and time to market, enabling them to keep pace with a consumer who moves faster than the brand. This approach to digital experience delivery helps organizations stay ahead of the curve, deliver better experiences and achieve better business results.

Dig deeper: Reinventing the digital experience platform

Reducing risk and increasing success

To reduce risk, avoid misleading marketing claims and improve your chances of success in adopting a MACH-based DXP, here are key considerations:

• Thoroughly research and assess potential vendors to ensure their offering aligns with the organization’s specific needs and the principles of MACH architecture.
• Look for vendors that clearly understand the MACH architecture and its benefits and a solid track record of successful MACH-based DXP implementations.
• Consider the vendor’s expertise, commitment to supporting the MACH architecture and experience working with other organizations in similar industries or marketing challenges.
• Ask for references and case studies from organizations that have successfully adopted a MACH-based DXP to better understand the vendor’s capabilities and track record.
• Pay close attention to the vendor’s support and training offerings to ensure they have the resources to help your organization adopt a MACH-based DXP.

Separating marketing hype from reality

MACH architecture is a modern approach to digital experience management that offers benefits like flexibility, scalability and speed. Not all products marketed as MACH DXPs are aligned with the principles of MACH, leading to confusion and mistrust among customers. 

To ensure success and reduce risk, it is essential to thoroughly research potential vendors and assess their alignment with the organization’s needs and the principles of MACH architecture. Look for a vendor with a solid track record, expertise and commitment to supporting the MACH architecture and consider their support and training offerings.

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First partner and first party. This is the first time Best Buy has partnered with a TV streaming platform. The deal has the company’s advertising business, Best Buy Ads, providing Roku with data it can use to target its marketing. 

Dig deeper: 2023 Predictions: Retail media networks

“We’re bringing together our entire business to build the future of entertainment and advertising — making the TV experience simpler, offering the right marketing, data, tech, and scale to drive real results, and helping win the entire streamer’s journey together with Best Buy,” Julian Mintz, co-head of U.S. brand sales for Roku Media, said in a statement.

Last year Roku formed a partnership deal with Walmart to test out shoppable streaming ads. Walmart ads on Roku let viewers purchase the product being shown by pressing a button on their remote. 

Roku City at SXSW. The two-day, in-person event puts people in a 3D version of Roku’s screensaver, Roku City, featuring Best Buy Home Theater Experience. It showcases the latest Roku devices available at Best Buy and upcoming original content on The Roku Channel.

Why we care. It will be interesting to see if this partnership can help two brands in a tough economic time. Roku must deal with tighter ad budgets and last month reported flat earnings for the fourth quarter 2022. Best Buy reported a 10% drop in revenue for that quarter and recently said it might close up to 30 stores this year.

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“Copilot brings the power of next-generation AI capabilities and natural language processing to Dynamics 365, working alongside business professionals to help them create ideas and content faster, complete time-consuming tasks, and get insights and next best actions — just by describing what’s needed,” Emily He, corporate vice president for business applications marketing, wrote in a blog post.

CRM. In Dynamics 365 Customer Insights and Dynamics 365 Marketing marketers can use natural language to ask questions to explore, analyze and understand customer segment sizes and preferences.

Dig deeper: ChatGPT: A marketer’s guide

“For example, a marketer might want to identify customers that reside in San Francisco, California, with a high customer lifetime value, who have also made a purchase in the last 90 days,” He wrote. “With a few clicks, Copilot produces the results, along with information such as the customers’ average age, product preferences, or average purchase price. These insights can then be configured into a segment to support a campaign. With Copilot, marketers can now get a deeper understanding of their customers in near real-time.”

Sales. Copilot adds capabilities to the AI enhancements announced last month for Dynamics 365 Sales and Viva Sales. Those included generating content suggestions based on customer emails with data specifically relevant to the recipient, such as pricing, promotions, and deadlines. 

New capabilities include putting email replies into general availability and integrations for customizable emails. For example, it can generate an email proposing a meeting time based on availability on the seller’s Outlook calendar. There’s also a feedback mechanism that allows sellers to rate the AI-generated content with a thumbs up or thumbs down, refining and improving future replies. 

The copilot also provides AI-generated meeting and call summaries of key topics, issues and concerns. It can then draft a recap of the discussion with action items and follow-up dates, based on CRM and meeting data. “Summaries can be generated for a range of meeting types in Teams, including multi-participant and internal calls, helping sellers stay organized and on top of critical, content-heavy sales meetings,” according to the company’s blog.

The copilot is included in Viva Sales and can be purchased separately for other CRM systems, including Salesforce.

Customer service. In Dynamics 365 Customer Service, the copilot has access to the case history of a customer and is able to help support personnel with customer inquiries.

“With Copilot, agents can quickly craft a draft email or chat response to customers with a single click. Copilot understands the context based on the current live conversation; identifies relevant information from trusted websites and internal documents, including knowledgebase articles and previously resolved cases; and crafts a response that the agent can review and send to the customer.”

It can also help diagnose more complex customer issues, discover resolutions and summarize draft responses across all communication channels.

Other products with AI. 

• Copilot in Microsoft Supply Chain Center can flag issues like weather, financials and geography that might impact supply chain processes. Planners can then choose to have Copilot automatically draft an email to alert any impacted partners.
• Copilot in Dynamics 365 Business Central will now be able to help organizations rapidly create product listings.

Why we care. All of these copilots look to make life easier for marketers, salesfolk and customer support people. That’s a good thing. They automate tedious, repetitious tasks and enhance them with data and integrations with other Microsoft products. Never mind the hype about what AI may do in the future. In the here and now it is already providing tangible benefits to businesses and workers.

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The data on data isn’t all bad. Some 49% of marketers agreed “somewhat” they had enough data for personalization efforts. However, 26% disagreed to some extent, according to the survey of 355 marketers. 

Why we care. It’s surprising at this late date to see how much of marketing’s digital transformation is still a work in progress. The problems are familiar and aren’t all technological. It doesn’t matter how good your CRM is if you can’t get the data for it. Business units may balk at sharing information because they don’t understand why it’s needed and because controlling it can be used as leverage within an organization.

The tech side may be “suffering” from too much innovation. There were, at last count, nearly 10,000 martech solutions on the market. On the plus side, with that many it’s almost certain one of them does what you need. However, the more you use the more likely you are to encounter integration and/or interoperability issues. 

Dig deeper: How bad data can spoil good personalization

Tech is good, could be better. It’s reassuring that 60% of those surveyed agreed somewhat when asked if their marketing technology allows their organization to execute effective personalized experiences. While 21% disagreed with the statement, only 5% did so strongly.

Budget continues to be top of the list as the biggest challenge to executing a successful personalization strategy. Some 43% of marketers cited it, up five percentage points from 2022. Although managing customer expectations is second on the list at 37%, that’s down from 39% last year. Rounding out the top five are: creating/delivering relevant content, 32% in 2023 versus 31% in 2022; tracking customers through the entire journey, 31% / 28%; and having the technology needed to execute, 26% / 21%.

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The core capability of the digital experience platform is managing and delivering the digital user experience — primarily web pages, but also mobile apps and other types of content — a need that has long been served by content management systems.

While the growth of content management systems (CMSs) has allowed marketers to wrest control of websites from the IT department, which was largely in charge of the early web, marketers’ needs have grown beyond CMSs’ abilities to meet them in recent years. 

Digital transformation drives tool adoption

Over time, businesses have undergone digital transformations to drive efficiencies, remain competitive in the marketplace and respond to changes in customer behavior. To perform everything expected of a modern marketing operation, marketers adopted adjacent technologies to enhance what their CMS was able to do.

• Web analytics helped marketers gather data about user behavior and the conversion funnel, with more sophisticated optimization systems allowing for A/B and multivariate testing. 
• Customer journey analytics (CJA) gave marketers a more sophisticated sense of the path users take on the route to purchase. 
• For many businesses, ecommerce capabilities became essential to their digital operations.
• Connecting all the data in these systems to the right customer or prospect and keeping track of it all required a customer relationship management (CRM) tool or even a customer data platform (CDP).

Though each of these technologies provides a way to improve the user experience and helps modern marketers meet the demands now placed on them, this hodgepodge of systems has increasingly become a liability. In some cases, marketers are weighed down by the costs of licensing all of these disparate systems. 

Enter the DXP

These challenges, along with developments like the increased digitization of business brought about by the COVID pandemic and ever-heightened customer expectations, are some of the factors that have led to the rise of the digital experience platform (DXP).

Customers increasingly expect marketers to deliver consistent, personalized experiences to all of their devices, and they often use multiple devices to interact with brands and complete transactions.

Just delivering appropriate content to all of these channels and devices is a challenge in itself, because each of them requires its own interface and mix of content to perform ideally. More importantly, though, both consumers and business buyers expect to be known and understood in digital contexts, and delivering that personalization requires data and a means to act on those insights. 

Speed and modularity

Another significant aspect of the modern user experience is that it is fast. Besides the desire to please users, marketers focus on speeding content delivery because Google penalizes websites with poor landing page experiences — which includes slow loading — by ranking them lower in its search results.

At the same time, many front-end web developers have been chafing at the limitations of programming in PHP, seeking to take advantage of more modern methods and craft the slicker and more flexible user experiences they’re able to deliver with those technologies. 

Both of these developments have led businesses to seek alternatives to traditional content management approaches. Examples include headless or hybrid CMSs, often within DXPs. In these types of deployments, the CMS disconnects the underlying content from the means and manner of displaying it. Because of this, developers can employ modern frameworks to create the user experience, and it’s easier to leverage the same database of content assets across multiple platforms, devices and formats. 

Also, the pandemic and recent worldwide volatility have taught marketers an important lesson about being responsive and agile. Businesses that were quickly able to identify and adjust to shifting societal conditions and consumer sentiments have been the most successful at riding out the storm. One approach that’s gaining currency in this environment is the “composable DXP.”

A composable or modular DXP approach lets marketers pick and choose the modules that meet their business needs — or even connect modules from other providers — rather than being stuck with an all-in-one solution.

Core capabilities

A DXP enables the creation, management, delivery and optimization of digital experiences in a variety of channels and contexts. It serves as the hub that brings together capabilities from multiple applications or modules to deliver a seamless digital experience. Marketers considering the adoption of a DXP should understand that the way these platforms have come together — through acquisitions and integrations, for the most part — means that native capabilities differ from one offering to another. 

Additionally, the modularity of these offerings is a point of differentiation — some vendors offer more composable configurations than others. However, all should feature either native functionality or connections that enable the full range of capabilities explored here. The core capabilities of DXPs, provided either natively within the platform or via an integration include:

• Content management, which may include digital asset management and/or product information management (PIM).
• Support for multiple platforms and types of experiences.
• Delivery, presentation and orchestration of content and experiences.
• Personalization.
• Analytics and optimization.
• Search and navigation.
• Customer data management. 
• Strong functionality for integration and extensibility.

A number of additional capabilities may be included in some specific DXP offerings.

Today, strong functionality for integration and extensibility is probably the most important capability offered by DXPs, because it is fundamental to their role of bringing together all of the technologies that contribute to a customer-centric experience.

Is your marketing team ready for the future of content and experience management? Explore top digital experience management platforms in the first edition of this MarTech Intelligence Report.

Click here to download!

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Here are some of the ways a DAM can aid an organization:

• Better communication between in-house and freelance/contract workers.
• Improved distribution of assets to clients, partners or other outsiders.
• More efficient utilization of existing resources. 
• Increased efficiency in the workflow for internal approvals. 
• Faster conversion of assets into different sizes, aspect ratios and file types for different marketing applications.
• Higher efficiency on the front end, in the creation of brand assets, and on the back end, in the distribution of those assets to various martech and adtech systems.
• Easier compliance with changing brand standards and licensing terms. 
• Improved branding consistency to the customer with an eye toward loyalty and retention.
• Ability to quantify the usage of each individual digital asset, and therefore track ROI on the cost of creation and distribution. 

While these are all highly desirable capabilities, your organization may not need all of them. Determining if a DAM is right for your organization requires assessing your current asset management system. Here’s a list of questions to help you and your team get started:

Explore DAM solutions from vendors like Acquia, Widen, Cloudinary, MediaValet and more in the full MarTech Intelligence Report on digital asset management platforms.

Click here to download!

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Today’s customers have two, sometimes opposing needs. They want to receive highly personalized content, offers and experiences while maintaining a high level of data privacy. Enhancing the customer experience and acting as good stewards of customers’ private information is a win-win for brands.

My latest book, “House of the Customer,” outlines four North Star goals that every brand should strive for, no matter how aspirational they may seem. In the previous article in this series, I discussed the first of these goals — providing a truly one-to-one, omnichannel personalized customer experience. 

In this second article in a four-part series, I will discuss having a truly first-party customer view that protects customers’ data while allowing the brand to incorporate accurate insights to provide great experiences.

Why is first-party data so important?

For those less familiar with this topic, you might be wondering what the fuss is all about. After all, you have a CRM in place and obtained permissions and opt-ins for your email marketing. So, let’s discuss a few reasons why first-party data is so important. 

The industry is changing

I’ll discuss government regulation next, but the marketing technology industry itself is making big changes — in some cases amounting to self-regulation. Some of these changes include:

• The deprecation of third-party cookies — with Apple and Microsoft taking the first steps and Google to follow in the months ahead.
• Less invasive mobile device tracking. 

Additionally, the traditional use of third-party cookies to target advertisements is getting disrupted by privacy-focused data clean rooms, which trusted parties only share.

With this approach, publishers build their own advertising networks (or partner to build value in their networks) and other solutions. This gives marketers and advertisers greater confidence in their ability to reach their audiences in a way that is mindful of consumers’ growing desire for data privacy. 

Dig deeper: Why we care about data clean rooms

Regulatory and compliance needs

More changes are coming in the industry, some of which are driven by regulations. The world is shifting toward greater transparency and oversight of consumer data privacy.

The European Union’s GDPR leads the way, followed by others in California, other states in the United States and other countries worldwide. 

This shift requires that companies of all types and sizes:

• Secure customer data. 
• Understand how their customer data is sourced and used.
• Responsibly utilize it to provide personalized experiences to stay competitive. 

Dig deeper: Why we care about compliance in marketing

Personalization 

First-party data is important because better, more relevant and accurate data are needed to provide highly personalized experiences. 

By now, you have surely read the statistics on how greater relevance helps create more customers, loyalty and word-of-mouth referrals. Even though some claims on personalization driving revenue are overstated, plenty of evidence supports the claim. 

Clearly, the time for brands to adopt first-party data strategies is now. While the above reasons are all compelling, so is the fact that your competitors are likely focusing and investing in these areas as well. This is even more reason to move quickly. 

Dig deeper: What is personalized marketing and how is it used today?

What are the components of a first-party data strategy?

Now that we understand the importance of a first-party data strategy, let’s talk about what goes into creating one. To do this, we will explore the three major components. 

1. Unified customer views

The first component involves creating a single view of the customer across all channels and platforms where you might be storing information about them. 

Tying marketing, advertising, CRM, customer service and other data together into a single cohesive view provides us visibility across our business and the customers’ journey before, during and after the sale. 

2. Consolidated tools

The second component to discuss is sometimes a natural byproduct of the first. A need to unify the view of the customer brings with it a need to consolidate the tools used to collect, manage and analyze that data. 

With a customer data platform (CDP) at the core, seamlessly integrating disparate systems or removing overlapping platforms provides a sustainable way to keep a robust first-party view of customers. This also helps you to take actions based on this view, using tools like customer journey orchestration and a next-best-action approach. 

3. Data governance

The last component of a first-party data strategy is customer data governance. Fragmented data poses a risk, and inaccurate or incomplete data causes customer dissatisfaction. 

How you collect, manage and update customer data greatly impacts your customers’ trust in your brand. 

Data governance isn’t just a one-time initiative, either. It requires consistent maintenance and training of the teams entrusted with valuable customer data. Thus, guidelines and how customer data is utilized must be regularly reviewed and updated to ensure best practices and compliance with regulatory requirements.

While these three components may contain a lot of individual pieces, they provide an overview of the scope of your first-party data strategy. 

How does this change your marketing approach?

Although you may have some or all of the above elements in place, an excellent first-party data strategy is about more than just the right pieces. Its effectiveness lies in how you use those pieces. Let’s explore a few ways it may change how you perform some of your marketing. 

It’s time to plant your brand garden

This may not be a big change for companies cultivating their first-party data for years.

But if you have an intermediary selling your products or if you have been heavily reliant on third-party data for advertising, start building a robust infrastructure to communicate and sell directly to your customers. Or, as some refer to it, a brand garden.

Don’t just ask more questions — ask the right ones

It could be easy to interpret the need for more first-party data to mean you need to start asking customers many more questions. But that isn’t always the case. Customers want to ensure they share information that feels relevant to your brand and will provide you the ability to tailor their products and experience better. 

If you ask many questions that don’t seem to have anything to do with the products or services you offer, you risk losing your customers’ trust. So make sure to keep your requests for data relevant and clearly demonstrate the reward customers get for sharing more. 

Consider a cooperative approach

Is a brand garden not right for your business? Don’t have enough opportunities to ask customers questions directly?

Then consider finding complementary brands and use a cooperative approach of sharing first-party data to broaden your ability to reach customers and personalize your offers, messaging and experiences. 

This approach can include shared customer data clean rooms and other joint efforts. Just make it absolutely clear to your customers what you are doing, who you are partnering with and why it benefits them. After all, customers are already wary of their data being shared by unknown parties. 

Even if you are mindful of only working with parties your company trusts, ensure your customers understand your process of vetting trusted partners.

While aspects of your marketing may remain unchanged, having a greater focus on collecting, utilizing and safeguarding your customers’ data might change some parts of your marketing but will improve and safeguard your brand and its future efforts. 

How do I get started?

Even though dates such as Google’s third-party cookie deprecation still seem in flux, it doesn’t mean starting immediately isn’t critical. Here are a few ideas if you haven’t started on this yet.

Determine the current state of your first-party data

You can start by better understanding where your organization is on a journey to greater customer data maturity. You may be further along than you think, even if there may be many dots to connect to have a true first-party data strategy.

Evaluate your third-party usage

Next, you should better understand where you rely on third-party data and what impacts there will be as the industry evolves. Create a gap analysis so you can start planning immediately.

Create a first-party data strategy to fill the gaps

Once you have the first two steps in place, you can then build a strategy and implementation plan to:

• Shore up your first-party customer data gaps.
• Compensate for any shortcomings your marketing infrastructure will have if you minimize or discontinue the use of third-party data.
• Build for the future personalized customer experiences your audiences crave.

Strike the right balance in your first-party data strategy

As you can see, having an effective first-party customer data strategy means that you can balance two sets of customer needs.

• First, you will have the capabilities to support a more personalized experience.
• Second, you will have greater control over your customer data to maintain the highest levels of privacy.

In the third article in this four-part series, I will discuss the need for brands to embrace a customer lifetime value model and the benefits it can bring both the customer and the business.

The post North Star goals for category leaders: First-party customer view appeared first on MarTech.

Which CDP vendors should I consider?

First, you have to find the right vendors. Here’s how to do that:

• Inventory all your databases and martech applications and be sure all stakeholders weigh in on which data and system integrations are priorities. CDPs offer numerous out-of-the-box connectors and APIs to make the integration process faster and more seamless. Prioritizing the applications you want to integrate first, makes it easy to ID vendors with programs that already have native connections to them.
•  Speak to your marketing peers to find out who is using which CDP vendor and why. (Many of the vendors also provide whitepapers and interactive tools that can help.)
• Once you know which vendors meet your criteria, send them the list of capabilities you need and set a timeframe for them to reply.
• Decide whether or not you need to engage in a formal RFI/RFP process. This is an individual preference. However, be sure to give the same list of integrations to each vendor to facilitate comparison.

The next step is setting up demos.

Why should I schedule a CDP demo?

Demos are an opportunity to assess both the systems and the companies behind them. The second part is every bit as important as the first. You want to see who responds well under pressure, who has a fixed way of doing things versus who can adapt to how you need it done.

Schedule all the demos relatively close to each other to help make relevant comparisons. Also, make sure all potential users and stakeholders are on the demo call. Ask them all to keep in mind these questions:

• How easy is the platform to use? 
• Does the vendor seem to understand our business and our marketing needs? 
• Are they showing us our “must-have” features?

Explore platform capabilities from vendors like Blueconic, Tealium, Treasure Data and more in the full MarTech Intelligence Report on customer data platforms.

Click here to download!

Questions to ask the CDP vendors

To help you navigate the demo, here are a few questions to ask each vendor:

1. How does the platform provide identity resolution? How does it stitch data points together?
2. How does it handle both structured and unstructured data?
3. How does it ingest and manage offline data?
4. How does it monitor integration success and/or failures, and report on data variances or anomalies?
5. How does it handle connectors and integrations with outside martech systems?
6. Are your “must have” integrations rock solid?
7. What is the CDP’s approach to integrating with the specific martech systems that your company uses? Just because a connector exists doesn’t mean it will necessarily work for your organization and how you use that third-party platform.
8. How does the platform allow users to create customer segments based on behaviors and preferences?
9. How does it employ machine learning for data analytics, such as predicting customer trends and patterns?
10. How can we send personalized and targeted messaging from the CDP?
11. How can we use the CDP to coordinate and track multi-step marketing campaigns?
12. What data security regulations does the platform comply with?
13. What data security certifications does the platform have?
14. Can we pay the software license month-to-month? Or is an annual contract required? Is there a short-term contract or an “out” clause if things don’t work out?
15. Will there be a price increase when I renew next year — if so, how much? Will the vendor commit to capped increases over a period of years?
16. What are the additional fees? (i.e., set-up costs, add-on features, API, quotas)?
17. How long is the onboarding process typically? Will we have a dedicated resource? Who will be the day-to-day contact?
18. What is the level of support included in the price? What support is additional?
19. Who pays if your system/team makes an error?
20. Will our support team work with us to test new features and assess the results?

Our new report, “Customer Data Platforms: A Marketer’s Guide” is now available for free download.

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As marketers, we must constantly balance the ideal with the practical and achievable. This comes amid a flood of competing priorities, including: 

• Demands for short-term financial results from shareholders.
• Leaders needing to achieve business objectives.
• Customers demanding the best possible experience.
• The competition catching up or pulling ahead. 
• All the chatter from our own community about the latest and greatest technology and how quickly every brand has to adopt the newest three-letter marketing acronym. 

Because of all this, it is easy to lose sight of the long-term goals that will help us achieve continued success and build loyal, lifetime customers.

I use the term “North Star” goals to mean those ideal points we should be navigating toward, even if they feel unreachable at the moment. Just like the North Star guided travelers throughout history, these marketing goals will guide today’s marketing leaders toward the optimal way of providing the customer experience of the future. 

As an advisor and consultant to marketing leaders at top brands, I have seen four overall trends that set category leaders apart from their peers. I took these four trends and turned them into a set of North Star goals that I also explore further in my latest book, “House of the Customer.“

This four-part article series will explore each of the trends and goals in depth, including what they are, how realistic the goals are for most brands and the first steps you can take to achieve them.

In this first article in the series, I will explore the first North Star goal — providing a one-to-one, omnichannel personalized experience.

Let’s explore this by breaking down each of the three parts of this goal and then we’ll tie it all together and explore just how realistic this is for most brands today.

Breaking it down

To start this discussion of one-to-one, omnichannel personalization, let’s make sure we have a good understanding and example of each component.

One-to-one personalization

The first part of our goal means thinking beyond broader audience segments and treating each customer individually. While they may share behaviors and traits with other customers, what we do for them factors in. 

For instance, if you are doing personalization broadly, it is based on some type of segmentation, like sending an email to all customers who bought a product within the last 10 days. While tailored to the recipients, the message doesn’t consider any specifics beyond the date of purchase.

Simply saying “Hello Greg” in an email to me is what I refer to as a simple substitution, one slight step above saying “Hello Customer.” 

Sending a truly personalized email message means using the information you already have about me, such as the type of product or service I recently purchased or reviewed. 

If I’m a frequent customer and you haven’t heard from me lately, send a reminder that it’s time for me to buy again. Or if I rarely ever engage over email but am responsive via SMS, take that into account. 

In other words, give me something beyond a generic message that could apply to anyone based on what you know about me and what I might want to see.

Omnichannel engagement

Brands that can deliver meaningful personalized content, offers or experiences on a channel like a website, mobile app or even in an in-person environment are likely to make a great impression, if not a sale. 

But today’s consumers don’t use a single channel or method when researching, purchasing and using our products or services. Thus, brands must ideally provide seamless and consistent experiences across all channels — or omnichannel.

Doing omnichannel well involves consistent messaging and visuals across channels. More importantly, customer data is carried across and utilized to tailor content, offers and experiences in both digital and offline worlds.

Dig deeper: The ROI of personalized experiences: Audience measurements

How realistic is this for most marketers?

You might think all this sounds great, but how realistic is it to implement an ideal one-to-one, omnichannel personalized experience for customers?

Anyone working on an effort like this can attest that it is still a lofty goal, even for many sophisticated organizations. Let’s discuss hurdles that often get in the way of achieving this.

Data and platform silos

Let’s start with the technical part first. Access to customer data, access to platforms or even one platform’s access to another are common challenges for large and small organizations.

Such issues prevent us from connecting the dots both for ourselves as marketers and for customers and the experiences they can receive.

Dig deeper: How to overcome data silos and fragmentation

Organizational silos

Similar enough to the data and platform silos, bureaucracy or lack of communication and planning channels may get in the way as well.

For instance, how are you supposed to create an omnichannel experience when the website team, the email team and the advertising team aren’t able to coordinate their efforts?

Cost versus benefit

Finally, when looking at how realistic this might be, you need to consider costs versus benefits.

While we’ve read statistics on how consumers are more likely to buy based on personalized experiences, you must determine how to incrementally move toward this one-to-one omnichannel approach while making smart investments over time. 

After all, there might be major benefits from specific improvements, while others may have no effect. Taking a test-and-learn, iterative approach can benefit your business greatly here.

How do I get started?

While we just went through a few reasons why this goal may not be immediately achievable, rest assured that there is hope.

The good news is that while “one-to-one” and “omnichannel” may be the goals, you can start incrementally and work your way toward them. Let’s discuss a few ways to do this.

Start with segments instead of one-to-one

One-to-one personalization is our goal, but we often need to start somewhere. This means that we can start with audience segmentation. 

You’re almost certainly segmenting your users in some ways already. So rather than focusing on broad categories, create additional types of segments or more detailed ones based on behavioral and other data-driven factors. Getting more granular with your segments can be a good bridge to a one-to-one personalization approach.

Build from a single channel to multi-channel

While omnichannel sounds great, it’s not easy even for organizations with more resources. Large organizations have more extensive requirements due to working in multiple countries and languages, and often with more third parties such as platforms and distribution partners.

Because of this, the best approach is to build from single, disconnected channels to a multi-channel approach. Add a channel at a time to a seamless experience and allow your brand the ability to focus on optimizing one channel at a time. 

Avoid trying to tackle everything at once, which might indefinitely delay your efforts while trying to solve the data, platform and organizational hurdles discussed earlier.

Dig deeper: How brands can create omnichannel customer experiences

Build bridges with your partner teams

Just like connecting the dots between data and platforms, building connections with the other teams in your organization is vital. You will need allies to move toward a one-to-one, omnichannel personalization approach. 

If you are in marketing, make sure you know who your key allies on data and technology teams are. Have conversations about what your North Star goal is and involve them in the solution from the very beginning.

Start with a proof of concept

Finally, you may be in a situation where you can’t simply convert all audiences, or even the entirety of a single channel to use a personalized approach. 

If your brand has multiple, distinct audiences and many product categories and lines, it may make more sense to use an iterative approach where you start with an audience segment or product type. 

For instance: 

• If your company sells both consumer and business products, each with various different needs, you might decide to start with your consumer audience.
• If you sell both computers and headphones, you might start with your audience for headphones. 

This doesn’t mean that you won’t get to all of them eventually, 

Start with a proof of concept such as, “We will personalize our experience for consumer headphone customers across three channels.” Doing so allows you to get the data and learn about internal difficulties in setting up the initiative, all while achieving a focused goal in a reasonable amount of time and money.

The path to one-to-one, omnichannel personalization

One-to-one omnichannel personalization may not be attainable for your organization immediately. But by building a consistent experience one channel, platform and audience at a time, you can work towards that goal and make consistent progress doing so.

In the next article in this four-part series, I will discuss the importance of a first-party data strategy, our second North Star goal.

The post North Star goals for category leaders: One-to-one, omnichannel personalization appeared first on MarTech.

After examining how audiences and content are measured in terms of personalized experiences, let’s discuss how brands should approach the process that drives personalization. 

Process measurements require looking at the methods used to personalize, how efficiently they are performed and how they are improved over time.

In this article, we will:

• Cover three aspects of operationalizing personalization.
• Do a reality check for those brands that want to go all in on 1:1 omnichannel experiences.
• Explore the viability of doing this and the cost of not doing it.

Great personalized experiences require alignment across teams

Organizations that are misaligned and have disconnected internal operations will have difficulty providing seamlessly personalized experiences externally to their customers. Let’s look at a few ways this plays out in the real world:

• Siloed marketing teams, where the “ecommerce team” doesn’t regularly interface with the “email marketing team.”
• Siloed departments, where marketing, data and engineering all might as well exist on different planets.
• Siloed product teams where widget A is marketed and supported in a completely different manner than widget B.

To make it even more challenging, some organizations have all of the above. This doesn’t mean you can’t start with some low-hanging fruit. Focus on building bridges where there are the most commonalities and potential benefits.

For instance, if the processes to create mobile app content and email campaigns often overlap, start there. Sure, it won’t provide omnichannel personalization overnight, but you can build consistency and, more importantly, a case for why more coordination and collaboration are needed within the organization.

Breaking down silos and having greater coordination inside your organization is a key step toward creating more holistic and valuable personalized customer experiences.

Dig deeper: Managing the unpredictable: Getting marketing, sales and operations aligned

Testing against hypotheses eliminates anecdotal noise

Most marketers have an opinion about how effective personalized experiences are in influencing engagement and conversions. The challenge is that many of these opinions are anecdotal and what I would call less than scientific. 

To counter this, we need to run true tests, which include:

• A hypothesis (what our assumption is).
• A null hypothesis (what must be rejected first to determine that the hypothesis can be true).
• A threshold of statistical significance that justifies further testing and/or investment in the efforts. 

In other words, welcome back to Statistics 101. 

The best way to determine the effectiveness of your personalization in this way is to do a true A/B test, where the “A” variant provides all users with a generic message/offer/experience and the “B” variant personalizes it. With statistically significant data, you will be able to see if your efforts to personalize

I also recommend that you examine this in a few dimensions. Personalization can be more subtle or more extreme. The cost to deliver — whether that is actual hard costs or time and resources — can vary depending on how extensive that component needs to be personalized. For instance, creating an endless variety of customer imagery can be resource-intensive, while doing database lookups can have a minimal cost once the initial rules are set.

Regardless of how extensively you approach personalization, creating a culture of testing and validation ensures you focus on the right things, cutting through the clutter and anecdotal noise that holds teams back from greater success.

Dig deeper: Why testing is a marketer’s most powerful tool

Feedback loops and continuous improvement

Of course, even rigorous testing is only as good as the process used to incorporate the findings of those tests back into the workstream. This requires a commitment to consistently find ways to enhance and optimize personalization efforts. Two big pieces are a feedback loop and governance over the process.

First, you must create a feedback loop that takes your learnings from your efforts (including your tests) and ensures the people and platforms that rely on them are connected. 

I’ve worked with organizations that were great at measuring and creating in-depth reports of exactly what happened, where and to whom — but had no meaningful way to translate those results into any changes or actions for the next time they needed to do something. 

They had a beautiful library of charts and reports. Yet, their efforts never improved, other than by anecdotal sharing of what made it into reports and what must have been lucky guesses.

Additionally, you need a set of processes to ensure you can change and adapt by incorporating feedback while also not changing too much too quickly. This prevents internal teams — and your customers — from getting confused or frustrated by too much of a well-intentioned thing.

This is where a governance model for your personalized customer experiences will play a role. Remember, it’s not always about moving quickly. Instead, a good governance model:

• Has transparency and consistency.
• Moves at the right speed to allow you to adjust your personalization efforts.
• Avoids too much change that might overwhelm your teams or provide inconsistency to a customer’s experience.

Feedback loops and governance models standardize and systematize your ability to continuously improve the customer experience and, consequently, the ROI that personalization efforts can deliver.

Dig deeper: Implementing agile marketing experiments leads to leadership buy-in

Can lagging organizations catch up to the leaders? 

Some of you may be reading this and thinking that all of this sounds amazing, yet it’s simply not possible in a short timeframe. The leaders in personalized experiences aren’t pausing for the laggards to keep up. 

Large brands may struggle with departmental or product silos. Smaller ones may struggle with the resources and infrastructure required to do all of this well. Setting up the systems and platforms that support personalized customer experience takes investments.

The hard truth is that, despite the challenges, it is imperative for companies that have fallen behind to catch up. Each day that goes by, the gap between the laggards and the leaders continues to expand. The processes, platforms and knowledge from testing — and even missteps — that the leaders gained will only grow more valuable.

In other words, choosing whether to offer more personalization or not isn’t what you should be considering. Instead, it is how you will bridge the gap between you and the competition, all while maintaining profitability and not disrupting either internal (employee teams) or external (customers and partners) audiences.

An iterative, incremental approach is the best and really the only way to do this. A strong prioritization model can help you understand which initiatives will have the biggest impact on the business and your customers while having the most minimal impact on resources.

Measuring the ROI of personalization

Getting a true return on investment from creating and delivering personalized customer experiences requires a holistic view across audiences, content and channels and the processes used to create, manage and continuously improve all of the above.

The post The ROI of personalized experiences: Process measurements appeared first on MarTech.