This is the final article in our 6 Pillars Powering Cross-Channel Personalization series — a six-part series on uniting all marketing channels for truly connected customer journeys.
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When it comes to personalized omnichannel marketing, a great deal of thought goes into crafting the creative content that your customers will see. Likewise, a significant amount of attention is placed on the technology that will facilitate 1:1 customer engagement and help deliver tailored, relevant messages in real time across all your channels.
But one crucial aspect of personalized marketing — and to some marketers, the least interesting part — is measurement and analytics. The fact is, personalization for the sake of personalization isn’t the goal. Rather, i’s a means to an end: driving growth and revenue for your business. So if you aren’t measuring and analyzing the results of your personalized marketing, how do you know if it’s successful? How do you prove that it’s worth the time, energy, and cost you put into personalized marketing?
For a truly powerful personalization strategy that not only satisfies and delights customers but actually drives tangible business results, you need to measure, analyze, and optimize your 1:1 marketing efforts.
Measure Personalization So You Know What Works
At the end of the day, the customer comes first. Customers want to be treated as individuals, which means your marketing team should put the customer at the center of everything you do. Part of how you do that is by tailoring your marketing to each customer via personalization.
But if you want to make sure your personalized marketing is actually having a positive impact on customers, you need to measure the results and improve your personalization over time.
Better Personalization for Customers’ Sake
First of all, why bother to improve and refine your personalization? As long as you provide personalized content and your technology delivers those 1:1 experiences, what harm is there in operating full steam ahead?
It comes down to what’s best for the customer.
According to Patty Soltis, eMarketer principal analyst at Insider Intelligence, “Personalization is an expectation of the customer, making it mandatory for the retailer. The consumer expects a seamless transaction of all facets of the retailer from email to text to website to in-store.” Knowing it’s a customer expectation, your competitors will be working hard to continuously improve their personalization efforts, so don’t get too comfy with a set-it-and-forget-it approach.
Get 1:1 marketing right, and your customers are happy. Get 1:1 marketing wrong, and you diminish customer loyalty and risk losing them forever. So for the sake of your customers… make sure you’re good at personalization.
Identifying Opportunities and Optimizing through Attribution
By measuring the results of your personalization, you’ll know what is and is not working in your personalization strategy. Attributing purchases to specific programs allows you to identify the highest-performing personalized campaigns, as well as the ones that aren’t succeeding.
Some personalized campaigns will be a huge hit and drive loads of customers to take action or make a purchase. Keep past successes in mind for future campaigns and invest extra time and resources into pursuing the opportunities that are based on those previous wins. Other personalized campaigns will fail to inspire or entice your customers. Learn from these misfires and avoid repeating the same mistakes next time. The more you do this, the better you get at personalization.
Pro tip: If you have analytics built into your customer engagement solution, you can more easily determine which parts of your 1:1 marketing strategy are working and why. You can also identify which variables can be adjusted for better results, such as:
- Creative copy
- Personalized Incentives/offers
- Timing
- Channel execution
Discover the 6 pillars that power today’s most successful cross-channel personalization strategies.
Prove Marketing’s Impact on Revenue
As a marketer, you are focused on engaging, delighting, and satisfying customers that shop with your brand. But of course, that’s not your only priority. You also have a responsibility to generate positive results for the business.
Keeping an Eye on the Bottom Line
It’s important to keep an eye on how marketing is directly impacting the bottom line — because of course, your C-suite will be. This is especially true if you’ve invested considerable resources into technology to better personalize the customer experience. Yet 60% of marketers say they struggle to meet the increasing pressure to prove ROI (eConsultancy).
If you can’t measure the results of your personalization in a quantitative way, you’ll struggle to adequately prove ROI or marketing’s ability to impact growth and revenue.
Getting into the 1:1 Omnichannel Marketing Weeds
A key part of a sustainable omnichannel personalization strategy is the ability to get granular when measuring your results. And of course, different channels bear different results. Ensure you can measure sales generated by personalization for these channels:
- Push
- SMS
- In-App
- In-Store
You should know not only the effect your 1:1 marketing efforts have on total revenue, but other important metrics like:
- Customer acquisition
- Purchase frequency
- Average order value
- First purchases
- In-store sales
- Retention
- Customer loyalty
A detailed breakdown of where your personalization makes the biggest impact allows you to fine-tune your approach and get surgical with your 1:1 marketing.
Final Thoughts
“Practice makes perfect” is a common expression. And it’s true, but only if you’re practicing good technique. If you can’t measure and analyze the results of your 1:1 marketing, you might end up practicing and repeating ineffective personalization techniques that do little in the way of satisfying your customers… or your business.
The most optimal, accurate, and efficient way to measure your personalization is through analytics built directly into your customer engagement solution. This way, you can see the sales generated by personalized content across all your channels — down to the individual campaign level — as a percentage of your total revenue. This leads to better allocation of your resources over time and proves to the C-suite just how impactful your 1:1 marketing efforts are when it comes to driving results for the business.
The beauty of using Emarsys to build and deploy 1:1 omnichannel marketing campaigns is that you can view them all side-by-side to see how their performance compares. Our built-in channel analytics and reporting allow you to effectively measure and improve channel impact.
If your current customer engagement solution can’t help you see the fruits of your personalization efforts, now is the time to consider a switch.
Measuring your results so you know what works is just one part of a complete, results-generating cross-channel personalization strategy. To learn the 6 foundational pillars top marketing teams use for building a cross-channel personalization strategy that accelerates business outcomes, download the ebook.
After measuring your marketing success, celebrate it! At the Power to the Marketer Festival, we’re raising a glass to all the ways you make an impact.
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