Aberdeen Group: Get personal with your customers

Marketers are still struggling with advanced personalization techniques, concludes a recent report from the Aberdeen Group, despite acknowledging the lift in ROI that personalization can create.

by Helen Leggatt

Getting through to consumers via email is getting tougher and tougher with all the inbox noise they have to deal with on a daily basis. Personalization is one way to attract eyeballs by email and the Aberdeen Group’s recent study, “Email Marketing: Get Personal with Your Customers”, found that 96% of the 550 organizations involved agreed.

However, the survey also found that some marketers are still struggling with advanced personalization of their email communications. This was found to be mostly due to a couple of specific issues – lack of data and the inability to create personalized content.

The Aberdeen Group identified a Best-in-Class segment of respondents and found that this group had overcome the above issues. They used a variety of sources to supplement existing customer data, namely landing pages (78%), forms and survey tools (57%) and segmentation tools (49%). Likewise, their ability to create personalized content brought about a 57% rise in average order value.

In a separate report released earlier this month by Tiffany Barnett White, marketing professor at the University of Illinois, found that consumers may be turned off by over-personalization and that it gave many of them the creeps. White’s advice was to keep any personalization relevant to the communication and not to personalize for personalization’s sake.