Climbing the personalization mountain ain’t easy. How can an audit help?
You’ll face set backs, run into frustrating data issues, and find yourself confused as to why things just won’t work. With marketers juggling so many tasks these days, most simply don’t have time to take a deep breath and really untangle their technology stacks, execution points, and channels to pinpoint where marketing personalization priorities should lie.
For our clients that want to quickly pursue a path to marketing personalization, the first thing we tackle is a comprehensive audit of their customer experience through website, contact center, mobile app, and even brick & mortar to get a feel of their current personalization capabilities. The goal is to let marketers focus on what they do best while we do the analysis necessary to make marketing heroes.
Our audit allows our partners to:
- Have a calculated outside perspective on current customer experience
- Benchmark their performance against expected internal performance measures
- Prioritize low effort, high return personalization efforts
- Tackle personalization as a single entity vs. separate silos
If you’re currently personalizing, you can start doing some preliminary audits on current marketing personalization efforts by taking a step-by-step approach.
Step 1: Understand the big picture
You may be working specifically on email marketing, or managing social media, but getting a better feel of the overall picture will set the framework on your audit. It may take an email or some digging, but knowing where resources are spent, and understanding some metrics across different marketing channels will help you build a better foundation (both for your understanding of the marketing role at your company and also for this audit).
Step 2: Connect the dots
What systems integrate? How do they integrate? Are databases linked so personalization flows? You don’t necessarily need to ask an IT wizard or access systems do this. Simply take the path of a customer and engage with your brand. Sign up for your newsletter and check for personalized touches, go onto the website and see if offers change based on your behavior, and even visit a brick & mortar store to see if the cashier recognizes your loyalty sign up. Your job is to find out what connects, what doesn’t, and what level of personalization currently exists.
Step 3: Pinpoint areas in need of improvement
As mentioned in the opening paragraph, it isn’t easy to benchmark given the few companies that have attained high level personalization performance. A much less intensive method of benchmarking is to simply do a comparison side-by-side with a market leader(s). Companies like Amazon are also great to use as a standard for personalization. You can assess your competitors by taking the customer path method in step 2 and appropriating it for the other companies.
Takeaways?
It takes time to do a marketing personalization audit, but it will save you time and effort when it comes time to decide on what needs help and where you should focus your time for the next year.
If interested, we’re offering a complimentary marketing personalization audit for qualified companies.
Marketers who sign up will be presented the very same audit report we give to our partners, and even a short consultation session on specific points in the report. Our goal is to make you a hero – someone who can proudly proclaim that they’re well on their way to conquering the marketing personalization challenge.