15 Mind-Blowing Stats About Personalization

Personalization has become key to standing out in today’s cluttered digital media environment. But while many organizations say they already provide experiences and communications that are uniquely relevant to existing and potential customers, the truth is they are not quite there yet.

Personalization—a.k.a. one-to-one-marketing—has become key to standing out in today’s cluttered digital media environment.

Below are some stats that paint a picture of where the industry currently is with personalization.

1. When asked to prioritize one capability that will be most important to marketing in the future, one-third of marketers answered: “personalization.”
2. Promotions are one of the most common types of email in retail, so it’s not surprising to see them dominate personalization in this channel. What is surprising is that only 39% of retailers send personalized product recommendations via email.
3. Less than 10% of tier 1 retailers believe they are highly effective at personalization, and nearly one-third report having limited or no capability to support personalization efforts.
4. More than 60% of online users wanted to know why, what, and how Web sites select content personalized for them. Control is critical to consumer acceptance of personalization, be it a little control (29% of consumers) or a lot (41% of consumers).
5. Web site visitors choose to exercise control over personalization through a variety of mechanisms. Almost two-thirds would like the option for privacy controls. Just over half (58%) want personalization based only on user information they proactively provide. Yet another group (38%) will specify their individual interests so that the site can personalize content.
6. The biggest challenges with personalization are gaining insight quickly enough (40%), having enough data (39%), and inaccurate data (38%).
7. In order to be able to personalize experiences for potential and existing customers, companies must first have a single customer view. The top three challenges in achieving this view are inability to link different technologies (40%), poor data quality (34%), and lack of relevant technology (32%).
8. The majority of brands report having at least basic personalization in place today, with 85% agreeing or strongly agreeing that their efforts are based on broad segmentation and simple clustering to execute in individual channels (e.g., search or display), and 83% indicating the same for use of simple business rules and triggers to execute across digital channels.
9. Currently marketers are focusing on building the following capabilities in order to deliver personalized and orchestrated customer experiences across channels: unified login and registration process across digital properties to recognize customers (94% implementing or planning implementation); data and analytics capabilities to mine customer data for targeted insights (also 94%); and customer profile data management capabilities to collect, store, manage, and analyze customer profile data (also 94%).
10. Personalized emails deliver six times higher transaction rates, but 70% of brands fail to use them.
11. Sixty percent of marketers struggle to personalize content in real time, yet 77% believe real-time personalization is crucial.
12. Nearly three-fourths (74%) of online consumers get frustrated with Web sites when content (e.g., offers, ads, promotions) appears that has nothing to do with their interests.
13. In-house marketers who are personalizing their Web experiences and who are able to quantify the improvement see, on average, a 19% uplift in sales.
14. Ninety-four percent of customer insights and marketing professionals across multiple industries said personalization is “important,” “very important,” or “extremely important” for meeting their current marketing objectives.
15. For 66% of marketers, one of the big struggles with personalization is securing internal resources to execute personalized marketing programs.