Personalization at Scale: Tips to Select the Right Personalization Platform

In the last blog Personalization at Scale— How to Achieve, we discussed how you could make your personalization initiative successful, by planning it right. Now the next critical step is to select a technological platform that can support this plan. 

Customer data and engagement analytics are fuel for personalization. To 'scale personalization,' your understanding of customer preferences and persona needs to be tightly coupled with your brand orchestration, content, and campaigns across channels.

Personalization is not a technological upgrade; it is your business’ requirement to communicate with the customers effectively— a means of achieving your bigger business goals and marketing objectives. 

Brands who have operated in channel silos tend to struggle here, as a channel-driven experience approach does not sync well with multichannel customer journeys today. Personalized experience on one channel is not easy to replicate and adapt across other channels without a strategy; the right people are enabling technology for orchestration. Marketing leaders need to look beyond location and demographic segments, towards behaviors, lifestyle, buying stage, and other behavioral indicators across channels such as social media.

Here are some of the necessary abilities that a personalization platform should consider:

• Ability to Collect and Analyze Information from every touchpoint along the customer journey and creating a single version of the truth to be able to run marketing programs.
• Ability to Integrate first- and third-party data across the Martech stack e.g., CRM, DMP, DAM, etc. to enable personalization use cases.
• Ability to track thousands, if not millions of customer interactions across channels and over time, iteratively update customer profiles, creating audience segments and personalization goals, which, when hit, can trigger personalization rules in real-time.
• Marketers are frequently challenged by the massive amount of data available to them without knowing what to do with it. Your experience platform should have the ability to analyze what the data entails, help you understand engagement analytics & orchestrate relevant brand messaging at the right time, at the channel of your customers’ choice.
• Ability to Customize & Control Workflows- Marketers today run into what we call the content crisis, as the very scale and nature of content management has changed. With channel proliferation and the emergence of new markets, content creation can no longer afford to be siloed. What has also changed is the volume, richness, and diversity of data that needs to be managed, requiring a re-think in the way data, content, and the way information is perceived in organizations. Most marketing teams are using multiple tools, disjointed systems, convoluted processes with the inability to collaborate, plus poor visibility into how the content is performing. Also, the ability to manage the complete content lifecycle, from creation to approvals to publishing, reporting, and to be able to customize workflows, so content updates are accessible and executed across all intended touchpoints is crucial.
• Here’s an obvious one, Omnichannel Capability. The ability to identify (triggers such as goal completions, page scroll, cart additions, form submits, purchase events, etc.), trigger a wide variety of content (e.g., Browser push, dynamic email content, dynamic web pages, test variations, promotions, etc.) across channels e.g., Web, mobile, email, etc.
• Ability to fulfill your Global Aspirations. Your digital experience platform should have multi-lingual, multi-currency abilities with the capability to create workflows and enable the integration of all your brand websites /web properties.
• Lastly, an ability to meet global regulations around data protection, accessibility, security, and privacy.

Our fifth blog will help you in Martech Stack Integration to Create a Single View of Customers as the next step towards personalization at scale.