Personalization continues to be top-of-mind for B2B marketers. In fact, 74% say it should be a bigger business priority and 97% plan to maintain or increase their personalization budget in 2019, according to new research from Evergage and Researchscape International.
The report, which polled more than 300 marketing professionals, found that despite heavy investments in personalization, only 18% of marketers are very or extremely confident in their company’s current strategy. More than half (65%) give themselves a grade of C or lower and 45% say they don’t have the data and insights they need. The research also shows that the top drivers for deploying personalization include delivering a better customer experience (88%), increasing loyalty (59%) and generating ROI (50%).
“Companies overwhelmingly recognize that personalization is an inextricable part of a good customer experience and want to deliver on that,” said Andy Zimmerman, CMO of Evergage, in a statement. “Rather than tackle everything at once, many organizations find the greatest success when they start small — pursuing easy, initial wins and then moving onto bigger projects with greater confidence. While it’s true, too, that your personalization is only as good as your data, you don’t need to clean up all your data before starting to personalize. Take that same crawl-walk-run approach: start and succeed in one channel, then move on to the next.”
