Personalization at Scale: Challenges

According to a survey conducted by SoDA and Sitecore on the current state of personalization, 59% of the respondents believe that they are experts in delivering personalization. While another 15% of respondents confirm that they are delivering comprehensive, dynamic, advanced program and are prepared to optimize it through regular investments and improvisations.

In last blog of the series-- Marketing Personalized at Scale, we discussed what marketing personalization at scale is all about and why is it gaining so much popularity. While a few of us are doing an excellent job with Personalization, there are marketers who are struggling to embrace this idea and benefit from it. 

Digital marketers and martech companies are all trying their best to connect the dots and figure out how to communicate constantly as a brand, engage with the customer and delight them across multiple channels, device types, and formats. 

So What Is Stopping The Rest Of Marketers From Succeeding in Their Personalization Initiative?

Let’s look at the barriers to personalization and find out how marketers can remove friction, improve engagement, get their personalization strategy right, and, most importantly, drive revenue and business results.

Most of the brands are not yet ready to take the next conclusive step towards personalization, because of one or more of the below reasons:

• The Mindset- Personalization is a Digital Overhaul: Often it is difficult to convince the decision-makers to include personalization in their plan, and reason behind it is clear. Personalization is a change of perspective. It is a customer-first approach that aims to reach out the customer rather than waiting for them to reach out to you.

  This change in approach demands a technological overhaul, which means a lot of effort, resource, and financial investment. 

  Brands often spend a lot of money into their marketing initiatives. Personalization is often seen by them as an addition to the workload. Besides, they feel that a lot of homework is attached to it, as personalization needs building and gathering of extensive data of the customers- they will only see value, if they can do it all now.

• Inability to Showcase its Value: Launching personalization at scale requires re-thinking and rehashing the marketing strategy.So any step towards personalization will demand justifying its value to the leaders and decision-makers, which often becomes a challenging task for the marketers.
• Apprehension of ‘Experimentation': Every organization is working on certain goals. Any new idea is seen as experimentation and it is a task to bring people out of their apprehensions and adopt the new idea.
• Platform: Those who are set to adopt personalization for their business, often struggle to find right technology platform with relevant capabilities. This can be because you feel you have a unique industry, or just due a lack of information.
• Process/Organization Structure: Many organizations feel that their business structure doesn’t allow them to adopt new technologies like personalization. They feel restricted by invisible walls, in lack of knowledge.
• Executive Support: Lack of relevant resources to support the plan, is one of the top concerns of organizations, which deters them from taking steps forward to personalization.

Once you overcome these barriers to Personalization, what should be your next strategic steps to successfully implement it in your business?

Is your resource power strong enough to take care of it? If not, how can you achieve Personalization at Scale? Our third blog on personalization at scale  how to achieve delves deep into it.