Marketers will have to break down several hefty barriers if they wish to up their efforts in personalisation, a new study has found.
Research from marketing personalisation platform Conversant shows that 94% of professionals from across the industry rate gaining a single view of each customer as either “important”, “very important” or “extremely important”.
Yet as 72% of the group declared their intention to increase their spend on personalisation, the challenges such a move would present came to light.
Known issues
Advanced segmentation appears to be throwing up a world of problems for companies as their resources and technical infrastructure become increasingly stretched.
Concerns about privacy of data topped the list of bugbears, with 63% of the group viewing this as either an “extreme” or “major” challenge.
Building a single view of each customer across all marketing channels was cited by 65%, while securing the internal resources necessary for managing a personalised marketing program was viewed as a challenge by 66%.
A total of 61% admitted to having “extreme” or “major” problems in sourcing a vendor or platform to deliver their personalised communications, with the ability to deliver tailored content viewed as a big challenge by 58%.
Marketers pursue end-goal
Despite the stumbling blocks, personalisation is still proving to be a highly popular technique among US marketers. Nearly all of the group (95%) used at least “limited” personalisation for their email campaigns and the vast majority (87%) were found to be marketing to individual users with paid search.
The numerous challenges mean that just one third of marketers rate their current level of personalised activity as “advanced” but this could soon improve if companies start dedicating more resources to marketing in this way.
The survey was conducted by Forrester as part of Conversant’s ‘The Personalization Imperative’ report.