New Report Finds Enterprises Still Struggle to Provide One-to-One Personalization to Customers

New Report Finds Enterprises Still Struggle to Provide One-to-One Personalization to Customers

News Highlights:

  • Only 21 percent of enterprises feel they are highly successful in their personalization efforts
  • Forty percent report their customer personalization efforts have had a direct impact on maximizing sales, basket size, and profits in direct-to-consumer channels
  • Roughly one in four enterprises are leverage artificial intelligence at scale for personalization

Personalization has long been touted as the future-proof way for businesses to connect with and convert consumers. Predictably, such high expectations come with a lot of hype. We wanted to uncover the truth about personalization. In a new report, “The Clear Path to Personalization,” Treasure Data and Forbes surveyed 200 marketing leaders to learn how enterprise businesses prioritize, budget, implement, and measure their personalization efforts.

Personalization Drives Growth

The report finds that many marketers still struggle to achieve the one-to-one personalization they seek—but one group has successfully embraced personalization. Only 21 percent of respondents were identified as “personalization leaders,” indicating they consider their organizations to be competitive or highly successful in their personalization efforts. Of the leaders, 54 percent report they exceeded their revenue targets over the past year, compared to only 15 percent of the “learners,” which included the rest of the survey respondents who are not as actively committed to personalization.

Other key findings:

  • Loyalty programs, mobile apps and product development are the channels that matter most. Customer loyalty programs, including loyalty cards and online point systems, are the top channeled engaged for personalization. Mobile apps and the product itself round out the top three.
  • Enterprises are in the early stages of exploring artificial intelligence (AI) to achieve customer personalization. A quarter of enterprises are applying AI on a significant scale to deliver personalized experiences, see it as essential to executing their personalization strategy.
  • Retailers lead in personalization efforts. Leaders are likely to come from the retail industry, with more than half of retailers, 56 percent, reporting high levels of commitment to personalization. Media follow closely behind, while those in the consumer-packaged goods and consumer packaged electronics sector lagged behind.

Obstacles for Personalization

One of the leading roadblocks to achieving a personalization-driven culture is data quality—a technical challenge cited by 48 percent. In addition, the report shows data is the fuel that powers personalization but using the wrong data may defeat the entire personalization effort. Enterprises can leverage a customer data platform (CDP) to securely ingest, format and unify all of their data to deliver more personalized experiences to customers.

Survey Methodology

The Forbes Insights and Treasure Data survey includes the views and experiences of 200 marketing executives representing the consumer electronics, consumer packaged goods, media, and retail industries. All respondents are employed by organizations with more than $1 billion in annual sales revenue. Participants were primarily located in North America, Europe and Asia Pacific.

Erik Archer Smith
Erik Archer Smith
Erik Archer Smith was a data-driven marketing and sales professional at Treasure Data with 10+ years experience helping companies scale during phases of hyper-growth. Erik got involved with tech early and built the first social media site in Japan using open source technology in the early 2000s. When not working, he enjoys spending time at the beach with his wife and dog, and obsessing over character-build stats in whatever RPG currently has him hooked.
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