Because of poor personalization, consumers will switch from companies that fail to meet expectations to those that do.

The best personalization occurs over various stages that span multiple touchpoint in the customer's journey. These include the interconnection of personalized marketing campaigns, website experiences and mobile engagement.

But where should you start?

EMBRACE

Build a foundation for personalization by establishing the right strategy, people, processes and technology foundation for the long term. The goal is to move away from tactical ad-hoc campaigns (beyond basic A/B testing). Define specific personalization goals (quarterly benchmarks), such as reduction of contact center phone calls, or reduction in web page bounce rate. It can be helpful to get a team together and brainstorm ideas for achieving these initial goals. For example At&T developed a 'personalization playbook' that addresses 3 questions: (AT&T Technology Transformation Manual)

• What data attributes are available for personalization?
• Which visitor states (authenticated, anonymous, new, returning) should be personalized?
• What can be personalized on the webpage?

Some general personalization strategies include:

• Creating personalized landing pages for individual customers (or potential customers) who match specific behavior or profile data.
• Targeting offers based on category affinity.
• Comprehensive list of promotions, content and product suggestions to be shown to customers across multiple visits.
• Remarketing and retargeting offers across other channels (other media, email etc).

Support your foundational strategy with data, content and intelligence:

• Data: Regularly collect anonymous behavioral data from your digital channels (cookies, mobile IDs etc). This is the data that will help you define your audience segments (groups of consumers with specific personalization).
• Content: Structure your content in a CMS (Content Management System), allowing variations of content and digital assets (images, video, dynamic media; optimized for viewing in multiple screen sizes and device types).
• Intelligence: Decisions for optimizing personalization can be based on a combination of Market and Artificial Intelligence (delivering personalized experiences based on specific audience segments, or automatic layouts based on user profiles). A good example of personalization-enhancing Artificial Intelligence is Adobe Sensei.

EXPAND

As your personalization strategy matures, you will be able to expand personalization efforts across all channels and use cases.

• Data: Begin to establish a unified visitor profile that provides a 360-degree view of your customer (demographic, lifestyle and behavioral propensities; shared data from industry partners). You might begin to develop a Data Management Platform (DMP).
• Content: Over time, you will understand key attributes of high value customer segments (for example: "visitors from email campaigns, who view more than 3 pages, are more likely to buy items from category A"). These in turn can be used create new refined personalization.
• Intelligence: Always be on the lookout for new technologies to expand and refine your personalization strategies.
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EXCEL

Over time, you can become a Personalization Motivator, inspiring personalization strategies elsewhere.

• Data: Continue to expand your visitor profile from experiences in new channels (Internet of Things, Virtual Reality / Augmented Reality, Digital Assistants, Gaming, Point-of-Sale Devices etc).
• Content: Move to AI-driven metadata to manage thousands or even millions of media asset variations.
• Intelligence: Implement algorithms to support one-on-one experiences at scale.
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EXPERIENTIAL PRIVACY

When done right, privacy is a positive part of personalized experience, and further delights the customer.

• Be thoughtful about what data you collect,
• Provide easy-to-understand notice about how that data is used, at meaningful points along the customer journey.
• Offer consumers choices about how their data is used.

This level of communication can highlight the benefits of user data to the consumers (who would otherwise be unaware).