Do You Make These Common Personalization Mistakes?

1:1 personalization is the new gold standard for marketers, but it can be difficult to achieve. Well-executed personalization requires a curated tech stack, solid data, and the dream team to pull it off. While on the journey to flawless customer-centric messaging, you may experience a few hiccups. These blips, while somewhat embarrassing, are red flags for larger problems at hand. What are the most common personalization mistakes, and what do they mean for your business?

You offer up “relevant” recommendations to customers… but they’ve already purchased that

One part of executing great personalized messaging is establishing relevance to each customer. You’ve successfully pinpointed items that customer x will love, but there’s a catch. They’ve already purchased! Not only can this be irritating to customer x, it passes up the opportunity to suggest add-ons or new products. Legacy or basic systems can have trouble, or simply can’t ingest, both product, customer, and transactional data into one unified view. This leads to a disconnect with your marketing automation, and lost chances to retarget.

Hey %%first name%%, you’ll love $$product_xyz$$!

The quintessential personalization mistake is the missing data blunder. It’s the most obvious and inauthentic feeling mistake that can be presented to your customers. When considering the CX side of things, missing data is their biggest pet peeve. The underlying problem is a lack of identity resolution. Marketers need systems that can ID customers across the multiple channels they use to build a complete customer profile.

Wait, why did anyone think I should get that ad?

We’ve all experienced a segmentation slip up. While age, gender, and location can be helpful at determining interests of consumers, it’s not fool-proof. Behavioral data, as opposed to demographic data, is more likely to predict what customers really want. To tap into the wealth of behavioral data your customers are already leaving behind, you need a system that can record, ingest, and rationalize data to a unified customer ID. From their, you can segment customers based on demonstrated interests, rather than what they “should” like given their demographic.

So, have you made any of these common personalization mistakes? If you have, you’re most definitely not alone. When brilliant marketers are backed with subpar tech, their vision falls short. Discover how data activation can help you achieve true 1:1 personalization, what you need to now to start your activation journey, how to build your ideal martech stack. Done researching and want to talk to a real person? Connect with our team for a demo of our Customer Data Activation Platform.