How do you scale?

The 4 requirements for implementing and scaling personalization

4 things you need to personalize communications at scale

1. Customer data and analytics

In order to get started, you need to be capturing some kind of meaningful data about your customer and their needs. A third of marketing leaders identify marketing analytics as one of the most vital capabilities supporting marketing strategy. This is a surprisingly low number given the significance and opportunity of digital channels where data is key to understanding and improving performance.

You don't need a perfect 360 view of your customer to start doing personalization, but you do need to know the right kind of things about them - varying by sector - to personalize in a way that is relevant and meaningful. This is about using the most contextually informative data you can get hold of, like which products they've spent the most time browsing or which topics they've been most engaged with.

2. Decisioning and triggers

What are the behavioral events you're able to capture that will steer how and when a particular communication or offer is sent out? When starting out it's totally ok to use common sense and hypothesis for this, which you can then return to and refine based on performance data down the line. This can range from a complex centralized "brain" that automates decisions and distribution to a tool that helps frontline staff shape an offer or piece of content.

3. Cross-function collaboration

Executing personalized customer experiences at scale requires teams from across the business to work together. No silos are allowed. Agility is key, and scaling agile initiatives well requires key experts working across the customer journey to be brought together regularly to evaluate performance and pivot as needed.

4. The right tools

To put personalization into practice, you need tools that capture the data required for decisions and triggers. You also need tools to support the creation and distribution of personalized content across digital channels. The latter depends on the format and nature of the personalization you would like to do, but the wrong tools, or lack of them, are the biggest barrier to scaling the personalization of communications beyond emails and webpages, which in the B2B space is where the real value lies.