Your Personal Trainer for Personalization Program Growth and Success

In my role with Adobe Target, I have the good fortune of meeting with a wide variety of companies across all industries — from leading enterprise organizations to up-and-coming small- and medium-sized businesses. We often discuss the personalization goals they want to achieve and how they can meet those goals. While each company’s metrics and goals may differ, all agree that personalization is essential for them to stay competitive, meet customer expectations, and deliver meaningful moments and exceptional customer service throughout the customer journey.

While many organizations do have detailed visions for how they would like to personalize their customer experiences, I regularly hear these questions: How do I get set up for success? Where do I get started? How do I evolve beyond basic rules-based targeting? And ultimately, how do I know if I’m achieving success?

Experience optimization — a muscle you have to exercise

Experience optimization, which includes personalization, is not a set-it-and-forget it practice. Nor should it be, given the dynamic nature of websites, apps, and screens, based on changing preferences, design, content, and campaigns. To me, establishing and building your practice is much like doing the same with a fitness regimen. It requires more than just positive thoughts and hope. It takes dedication and tenacity. It also requires a systematic and repeated process of setting a measurable goal, benchmarking your current state against that goal with data, outlining the steps required to reach your goal, defining what successfully meeting your goal looks like, evaluating your incremental progress toward the goal, and refining your approach as you go.

Fear of failure, resistance to change, and lack of support can present obstacles to program success. Just as with an exercise regimen, though, when you stick to that practice with honesty and diligence, you’ll find it becomes second nature. At some point, you’ll find you can’t imagine not doing things this way. As you reach each goal, you’ll evolve, improve, and strive for bigger goals. With exercise, that bigger goal might be participating in a triathlon; with experience optimization, it could be expanding personalization beyond your website to additional channels.

The Personalization Maturity Model 2.0 — a personal trainer for program growth

In this Adobe Target announcement, we’re sharing our Personalization Maturity Model 2.0. It’s the latest evolution of our earlier maturity model, with 15 years of program and governance best practices built into it that we’ve obtained from pioneering this space with leading practitioners.

We’ve developed the model as a self-assessment that, much as a personal trainer would do, helps you diagnose your current state. Areas in which it will assess your practice through a series of questions include Culture, Methodology, Execution, Leadership, and Organization. You’ll be asked to select statements that indicate answers to questions like: Where do your optimization and personalization ideas come from? How do you collaborate with your Analytics team and act on their insights? How do you prioritize your roadmap? How do you organize and streamline your processes and resources? How do you measure your efficiency and create improvement?

A sample of the self-assessment, available on your mobile device.

Our most progressive customers—those you’d categorize as leaders in their respective industries like retail, financial services, healthcare and insurance, automotive, media and publishing, travel and hospitality, and B2B — take this assessment on a quarterly basis. They understand that to improve, they need to gauge their progress and identify areas where they’re succeeding, and as importantly, to discover where they missed the mark or can do better.

Upon completion of the assessment, you receive a detailed report on your current state, along with highly prescriptive next steps. The report also shows you how you stack up against your competitors with an industry comparison based on aggregate data we have collected through the tool. It provides an honest snapshot of areas in which you currently succeed and fall short, and answers the critical question: What should I do next?

Sample results from the self-assessment.

The report also assists with setting the program milestones and success metrics on which you will grade your progress from quarterly business review to quarterly business review — not just in terms of KPIs and revenue lift, but also your effectiveness in communicating your successes, growing an organizational culture that embraces experience optimization and personalization, and designing and executing activities that move the needle.

Ready. Set. Grow!

Because we equate our success with yours, once you’ve taken the assessment, we would love the opportunity to sit down with you, review your assessment results, and help you apply its recommended next steps as you launch or grow an outstanding optimization and personalization program.

If you want to learn about all the Adobe Target new features and enhancements that we’re announcing, read the first overview announcement post that my colleague Drew Burns wrote. Then get more details about the rest of the new features or enhancements by reading these additional announcement posts:

New Adobe Target Features to Drive Adoption of and Gain More Value from AI

Adobe Target Announces Greater Support for the Modern Web, Including SPA