What’s stopping you from personalizing?

Elena Ruiz
Sep 7, 2018 · 6 min read
The magic of personalization

If I told you I had a magic button you could press which would immediately increase your business’s revenue, average order value, conversion rates, customer loyalty, and every other good KPI in the book, you’d suspect me of telling you something too good to be true.

Chances are, you’re already aware of this magic button, and for one reason or another, you’ve chosen not to implement it right now.

What is it? What’s the secret?

As you may have guessed from the title of the article, I’m trying to sell you on personalization.

I work for an innovative, cutting-edge company that develops a brilliant personalization tool. My job is to help people get the full benefits of personalization, so I can say with confidence that, as a professional in the eCommerce personalization businesses, I’ve seen many of our clients turn their online presence around using personalization.

But outside of work, I’m also an avid online shopper. So from an outside perspective, I can also say with confidence that as a person who spends money online, I like personalization. I like having my needs anticipated, I like having relevant offers shown to me, and I like feeling like I’m being treated specially. When I experience that vibrant, real-time personalization, I buy.

And I’m not alone.

Last time I was on Amazon, I was buying a notebook. I was recommended a set of pens to go along with it, which I purchased. When I went to buy a coffee the other day at a café, the barista asked me my preferences and was able to recommend a slightly nicer (and slightly more expensive) blend. When one of my friends was buying a dress for a party, the site offered her a discount on a dress + shoes purchase, so she ended up buying a dress and shoes.

Customers like personalization, and it’s been proven to work time after time to increase customer satisfaction and your revenue.

So, what’s stopping you?

1. Fear of being replaced

The machines are not taking over

There’s a huge school of sci-fi thought that predicts one day, machines will take over the world. Think Terminator. Unfortunately, many people ascribe to the same views in real life and convince their bosses and colleagues not to invest in personalization software out of fear they’ll be out of a job.

However, modern-day studies show that machines aren’t replacing us — they’re making our jobs easier.

How much of your is spent doing tedious repetitive work? Maybe you sort through all your data to turn those numbers into actionable insights, maybe you spend time keeping up with segment spreadsheets to ensure you’re offering people semi-unique experiences. A personalization tool that uses AI allows you to sit back and let the AI do the drudge work of collecting and analyzing data, while you take the insights it provides you with and focus on doing what you actually like doing — coming up with creative, intelligent marketing campaigns.

2. Data overload

Managing data is made simple

Maybe you’re totally onboard with bringing technology in to make your life easier, but you worry about being overwhelmed with the data that personalization would provide you with. With customers nowadays interacting with stores in very fragmented ways, with multiple touch points and channels, trying to predict what they’ll want can be tricky. Dealing with the large amount of data to provide consistent, relevant personalization can seem like a daunting task.

A good personalization tool lets you leverage your knowledge of how your company works, how your customers interact with your products, while distilling all the data that results from those interactions into simple, easy to understand statistics. It lets you see what’s working, why it’s working, how to fix what isn’t working by grinding the numbers behind the scenes.

The best personalization solution should let you do this in two ways:

a. Automated. This kind of personalization is set up once and then works behind the scenes to continually personalize in real time, deciding what recommendation strategies work best for different types of customers, personalizing search results, and learning as time goes on.

b. Enriched. This type of personalization lets you create content, decide how to target your audience, be as broad or specific as you like, and easily show that content to those people at the places and times you specify.

These two approaches should mesh together to be the most flexible and efficient use of your time and resources, rather than being one or the other. In this way, personalization does all the heavy legwork of gathering and sifting through data, while you can just decide what actions to take, based on those insights.

3. Organization

Keeping up with personalization campaigns should be simple

The third potential obstacle standing in the way of marketers taking personalization on board is lack of time for organization. Most marketers will know that a one-size-fits-all approach is losing out on sales at best, and actively pushing customers away at worst.

However, the thought of coming up with and keeping on top of a personalization strategy that genuinely delivers one-to-one marketing can be daunting.

We’ve already established a good personalization tool helps you do your job, rather than taking over for you. It effectively deals with the avalanche of data rather than flooding you with it. The third quality it should have is the ability to let you layer your personalization efforts, so you can do what works best for you, time-wise. Rely on the AI to begin with, and as you see the results coming in from that, begin to segment your customers and apply personalized campaigns to them. You should be able to start broad and build small, getting more niche as you go on.

Build broad and grow more niche

The takeaway?

Customers are demanding personalization on an unprecedented scale. From both a professional and personal standpoint, I can tell you it really does work. There are a lot of misconceptions around personalization, which is why even though personalization has been demonstrated to be one of the most time-efficient and effective ways of increasing site performance across every KPI imaginable, some people may not be taking advantage of it. But by looking at the facts, it’s plain to see personalization helps your marketing efforts rather than hindering them.

If you want to give your customers what they’re looking for with easy-to-use personalization, check out PureClarity. Get in touch with us, schedule a demo, or have a free 14-day trial and see what’s possible with PureClarity.

Elena Ruiz

Written by

I like thinking about & writing about the intersection of ecommerce and analytics to help people sell more things. Success Manager @ PureClarity

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