You’ve probably been reading and hearing about Personalization, since it garners over 50% popularity on Google Trends. It seems everyone is trying to understand it and figure out how to use it. 
We have many posts on our blog about the topic, including Essentials for your Digital Strategy-Smart Personalization and The Key Differences Between B2B and B2C Personalization. We often hear “personalization is needed for great customer experiences.” Others say that “personalization leads to greater conversion rates.” Still others claim that “personalization promotes customer loyalty.” Of course we think all of those statements are true.
Rather than write again about the importance of personalization, I’d like to explore how marketers actually use personalization. Evergage recently published a report aptly named “2019 Trends in Personalization Report”, where they surveyed 314 marketing people to understand what’s going on with personalization.
Key Trends
Here are some key findings in their report:
- 78% of the marketers personalize eMails, which is good.
- 75% of the marketers personalized emails by including first and last name. To me this is an easy form of personalization, that while necessary, doesn’t lead to that much impact. Only 56% tailored emails based on audience segments and only 21% personalized messaging at the individual level. This may be a reason that only 18% of marketers are very confident (15%) or extremely confident (3%) in their strategies. In addition, only 16% of marketers are very or extremely satisfied with the level of personalization in their efforts.
- Other channels for personalization include: Website 58%, In Person 42%, Online Ads 35%, Mobile app 28%.
- B2B companies are using personalization to drive customer experience at a higher rate than B2C. 89% of B2B marketers use personalization for better customer experiences, while 84% of B2C did the same.
- Marketers are finding data more available for personalization. In 2018, 45% of marketers felt their data was sufficient. In 2019 that number jumped to 55%.
- What parts of the message do marketers personalize?
- In-line content (adding or inserting content): 50%
- Banners: 47%
- Call-out messages: 38%
- Pop-ups: 31%
- In page edits (modifying or replacing existing content): 30%
- Various aspects of an overall experience can be personalized separately. Here are some major parts of the experience that marketers personalize:
- Email content: 73%
- Home page: 49%
- Landing pages: 41%
- Interior pages: 36%
- Online ads: 30%
- Product detail pages: 23%
- Search: 19%
- Marketers are using machine learning to personalize 50% more in 2019 (40%) vs 2018 (26%). Marketers are also more satisfied with machine learning approaches to personalization (30% ML vs 19% rules based).
- Rules-based targeted still dominates at 68% and has stayed steady year to year.
The Evergage report includes more information than I could outline in this post.
