Personal development in 2019: challenges and prospects

Marketing personalisation: challenges and prospects

based on the 2019 Personalised Marketing Barometer

Personalisation is a key issue but is not sufficiently developed.

Whilst personalisation is a reality for most marketing departments, it still accounts for only a small proportion of their total communications with customers. Only just over 20 per cent of organisations personalise more than half of their communications.

Personalisation is mainly implemented in the content of communications – in newsletters, for example – in product and service recommendations, and in digital advertising. Here too, the most accessible solutions are favoured. More complex approaches – those requiring greater maturity, drawing on IT resources or involving cross-functional teams (pricing, Next Best Actions, etc.) – lag significantly behind in terms of personalisation use cases.

Marketers are reluctant to step outside their comfort zone…

For the vast majority of marketers, personalisation is implemented with a view to improving the customer experience and satisfaction (for 63 per cent of respondents) and much less so to achieve specific business objectives (ROI or increased turnover). These are more complex to set up and/or measure, which once again highlights a lack of maturity in this area.

Today, personalisation is overwhelmingly used in the context of email campaigns. Web journeys and social media, to a lesser extent, are also used by marketers as part of personalised campaigns.

... But they are aware that they will have to do so

The proportion of personalised communications sent to customers is currently relatively low. Marketers are, however, aware of the importance of this approach for consumers and the vast majority (84%) wish to develop personalisation in their communications. Marketers wish to develop and accelerate personalisation across the traditional digital channels they are most familiar with, namely email, web journeys and social media. They are seeking to capitalise as much as possible on the channels they believe offer the highest ROI.

With a view to improving personalisation, advertisers wish, on the one hand, to develop their segmentation capabilities by collecting more data and, on the other hand, to enhance their capacity for advanced activation through the implementation of marketing automation tools. For a relatively smaller proportion of them (23 per cent), personalisation will involve the implementation of personalisation tools or Artificial Intelligence.

Collecting first-party data, gathered during the customer journey, is the priority for advertisers (53 per cent of them) when it comes to enriching their data. In the long term, this ensures independence from the GAFA companies and control over customer relations. To achieve this, they must begin overhauling the customer journeys they offer. To enrich their data, organisations also plan to focus on customer acquisition campaigns (via competitions, for example) or on reconciling online and offline data.

Full results of the 2019 Barometer

Would you like to find out more about the results of the 2019 Personalised Marketing Barometer? Please feel free to download the full report.