Personalised marketing has a big impact on brand loyalty and customer retention, but the practice remains hard to implement, according to new survey of marketers.
The study, from Exact target and Forrester Consulting , is based on 121 American digital marketers, reveals insights including:
• 84 per cent of marketers believe that personalisation directly impacts customer retention and loyalty
• 48 per cent of marketers face challenges in personalising each customer interaction and as a result, marketers plan to increase their budgets to solve such challenges
More than three quarters of digital marketers report personalisation impacts customer retention and loyalty metrics, according to a new commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of the ExactTarget Marketing Cloud from salesforce.com (NYSE:CRM).
The study, “Refresh Your Approach to 1:1 Marketing,” found that marketers see value in marketing personalisation and predictive intelligence – 86% report they use personalisation and targeting based on broad segmentation and simple clustering and 84% report personalisation impacts customer retention and loyalty.
However, marketers face challenges in personalising each customer interaction (48%), meeting expectations of the always-connected customer (42%) and analysing the constant flow of customer interaction data (42%).
As a result, there are four key predictive and data analytic tools where marketers said they plan to increase investment to overcome these challenges.
• 58 percent of marketers plan to increase spending in site optimisation tools
• 52 percent plan to increase spending in real-time interaction management
• 51 percent plan to increase spending in predictive algorithms
• 51 percent plan to increase spending in guided selling
“The ability to deliver personalised customer experiences and contextual, unique offers is essential to retaining and converting customers to brand advocates,” reads the study. “But the expectations of empowered, connected consumers make this easier said than done. They have instantaneous access to information across multiple devices and want to interact with brands on their terms — across channels and whenever they want.”
“The future of marketing is the customer journey. Today’s hyper-connected consumer requires companies to create personalised experiences and deliver value at each touch point to increase brand loyalty and drive sales,” said Woodson Martin, CMO, ExactTarget Marketing Cloud. “Marketers need to be empowered to use data to drive these 1:1 journeys and experiences with their customers.”
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