“What truly makes for a good experience?
We all know that personalization, done right, yields results.
It is seamless, unobtrusive, and has a human touch.
Consumers are more likely to purchase following personalized experiences1. Ad budgets go farther when campaigns are personalized2. A personalized customer strategy creates a competitive moat that is very hard to replicate3.
But if we all know that, why aren't we all doing that? What's stopping us from doing personalization with all of our prospects and customers, in all of our interactions, in all of our channels, all the time?
The answer, of course, is simple:
Scaling personalization today is complicated.
Personalization's Killer Complexities
Personalization at scale is one of those things that requires an alignment of stars – in order for the entire customer experience to be personalized, there are a lot of things that have to go right. Unfortunately, we've all definitely felt at least a few killer complexities get in the way.
1
Keeping content relevant to your users is hard.
And it's more than just pulling a product recommendation out of a hat. It's aligning all of the touchpoints, your application and the different parts of the website or an email they should see, keeping it all coordinated and relevant.
2
Today's tools for personalization are both expensive and complicated.
They often require pretty heavy services lifts, which also means that anything you want to change will also be expensive and complicated. It's hard to make progress on a project that was too expensive to start in the first place.
3
Personalizing to everyone means that you have to understand everyone.
This is hard even for known users, and almost impossible with unknown users. Personalizing to someone you don't know anything about is basically content roulette. Sometimes we mask this as "A/B testing", but that's often code for "I don't know how to personalize here, so let's just make it random and we'll run with what works for most people."
4
The best personalization feels like a dialogue.
And it's more than just pulling a product recommendation out of a hat. It's aligning all of the touchpoints, your application and the different parts of the website or an email they should see, keeping it all coordinated and relevant.
5
Personalization should be happening everywhere, in all of your channels.
Existing martech tools are pretty good at doing email and ads. They often leave the rest (like, um, your website) on the floor. And even if they do website personalization, it's definitely not in coordination with your email service provider.
Despite these universal complexities, the opportunity for personalization remains real, with trillions of dollars at stake4. But continuing with business-as-usual tactics will lead to business-as-usual results.
And those results aren't good. Over 90% of companies say that data-based personalization is important, yet 1% say they're using their data to deliver fully cross-channel experiences5.
So how do the 99% of us deliver on the promise of personalization?
Data + Content = Magic
Personalization only works when your content management system (CMS) and your platform for managing customer data (CDP) are completely interoperable.
Adobe gets it…
The 800lb gorilla of Digital Experience Platforms (DXP) offers both content management and data management. They have a Headless CMS and Experience Manager for the content and their Real-time CDP for the data, and, in theory, they all work together.
…except when they don't.
(Which is usually, since it takes so much manual configuration and services to get through implementation, let alone the maintenance.)
When you cobble a suite together through acquisitions, you get Frankenstein's monster. That's why the suites will usually overpromise, and always underdeliver.
What is actually missing is the right connection between your actual content – which for 98.7% of the internet is not Adobe6 – and your data. A connection to your content that is aware of the data, and a connection to your data that is aware of your content.
That connection is called an xCDP.
The xCDP
An Experience CDP, or xCDP for short, helps to solve all of the killer complexities of personalization. It is driven by personalized experiences, and it drives personalized experiences. It bridges the gap between data and content, and helps to turn your CMS into a DXP.
The Future
We have to break free from the model where, after 25 years of talking about it, only 1% of us are actually doing personalization. The future of personalization depends on the xCDP.
It must solve all of personalization's killer complexities. If it does, it will transform your organization from one that talks about personalization into one that actually delivers it. If it doesn't, we'll be right where we are for another 25 years.
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