Almost all marketers will utilize real-time personalization for online customer interactions within the next year, according to a new study from Researchscape International and Evergage. Indeed, 91% of the 242 global B2B and B2C marketers surveyed say that they either use or plan to use real-time personalization (“data-driven personalization completed in one second”) within the next 12 months.
To put this number into context, approximately 58% of marketers use real-time personalization now. Of the 42% of respondents who don’t use it, 78% intend to leverage it within the next year. In other words, approximately 33% of all marketers surveyed don’t use real-time personalization, but plan to.
Clearly, users and non-users alike recognize the benefits of real-time personalization. Consider the following: 86% of marketers who leverage real-time personalization report a lift—with about half seeing a lift greater than 10%. What’s more, marketers who plan to deploy real-time personalization expect to see increased visitor engagement (78%), improved customer experiences (78%), and increased lead generation (60%).
“Personalization is an age-old concept, but extending the customized experience to online visitors in real time—based on deep customer analytics—is a new way to ensure each and every interaction with a prospective customer is relevant and engaging,” says Karl Wirth, cofounder and CEO of real-time Web personalization software provider Evergage. “When nearly 90% of marketers realize lift from personalization initiatives, it’s clear that those who embrace this strategy will outperform those who do not.”
However, companies looking to enhance their real-time personalization efforts should be prepared to increase their allocated resources. For instance, almost half (49%) of respondents intend to increase their real-time personalization budgets over the year ahead, and about 80% plan to increase them by more than 10%. In addition, 51% of marketers say that their companies are designating employees to work on real-time personalization programs specifically.
Wirth also emphasizes the importance of giving marketers the tools they need to leverage real-time personalization without constantly consulting IT.
“The primary challenges to successfully using personalization underscore the importance of developing business intelligence, customer analytics, testing, and personalization tools that marketers can use without the help of IT or data scientists,” he says. “Marketers need to be able to easily access a well-rounded view of customer information, and act on it to calibrate and deliver highly relevant and engaging experiences in real time, every time.”
Additional findings include:
- Marketers using real-time personalization have deployed it across their websites (76%), mobile sites (29%), Web applications (22%), and mobile apps (16%).
- Among the most common methods for real-time personalized content delivery are inline content (53%) and call-outs (41%).
- When segmenting visitors, marketers use several different methods; the most popular being the type of content viewed (48%), location (45%), and time on site (36%).
- One third of those using real-time personalization report increased e-commerce revenues and 73% see increased visitor engagement.
- Marketers are doing a good job of measuring the ROI of their real-time personalization campaigns—with only 11% not measuring. Areas primarily looked at include conversion lift (58%), time on site (40%), and revenue lift (39%).
