Personalization: Why it’s so hard to get it right
Guest Post: Ali Hanyaloglu is the Senior Director of Product Marketing at Coveo. With over 20 years of experience in product marketing and solutions engineering at leading technology companies, including Adobe, Criteo and Progress, he joined Coveo in 2019 to lead a marketing team that identifies the benefits of Coveo’s platform and products, and then brings them to life in the language of our customers. He is passionate about compelling storytelling methods, finding approaches to address customer challenges, and enabling others to have their own productive conversations.
Last week I joined my colleague Ciro Greco, Director of AI, and our friends at DigitalCommerce360 to give a webinar to ponder the question “why is personalization so hard to get right?”
We also presented a new approach to B2C personalization and customer experience in a world of rising customer expectations. You can watch the full webinar here, but in the meantime, here’s a summary on what we covered during our presentation.
Why Personalization is a Challenge
I often remind my peers in marketing and tech that personalization, as a concept, is nothing new. It’s certainly been around since the beginnings of commerce. And more recently with techniques and tools such as segmentation and predictive analytics. But it’s always been a challenge to get right. I’m not talking about a Sherlock Holmes-like ability to determine every little detail about you and what you’re trying to do by just looking at your hoodie for a few seconds. Yet targeting every website visitor directly with their wants, needs and desires across every touchpoint that a brand has with them continues to be an imperative.
During our webinar we asked our attendees what they felt the top challenge with personalization is today. Here’s how they graciously responded:
- Customer data (34%)
- Lack of ROI (21%)
- Product data (11%)
- Privacy concerns (5%)
- Other (29%)
This confirms research that has been done as well as anecdotes I have heard directly from marketers that making sense of and figuring out how to activate the customer data they have is a major challenge for them, in particular those with B2C/D2C commerce operations.
Read the full article here
