80% of Marketers Believe Their Customers Care About Personalization

As more marketers turn to customization to provide a more robust customer experience (CX), new research suggests that they are also becoming increasingly aware of the demand for more personalization.

Merkle recently published “The State of Digital Transformation” report, and statistics indicated that the majority of marketers (80%) believe their customers care about personalization “a great deal.” About 17% said that they at least care about it “a moderate amount.”

To date, most marketers (34%) claim that they have between three and four channels personalized for the sake of the customer experience. About 33% have between five and six channels personalized, while 7% have eight or more channels personalized.

Marketing Personalization and the Overall CX

Marketers may be personalizing the customer experience for most, but this does not mean that they are taking a customer-first approach to their entire marketing strategy, according to previous research.

London Research and BlueVenn conducted the “Omnichannel Marketing Excellence Report,” and data showed that only 17% of marketers have a fully customer-first approach with a dedicated team and formal responsibility for CX at the executive level.

Overall, most respondents (31%) stated that they have some customer-centric metrics, such as a repeat purchase rate and engagement recency. However, they are secondary to campaign and channel performance metrics.

“Senior level buy-in is not just a vanity consideration, but rather about the practicalities of strategic change management or business transformation – cultural and structural – across the enterprise,” wrote the authors of the report. “Truly omnichannel customer experiences, and the technology and data that underpins them, require cooperation across business functions, including marketing, sales, finance, operations and IT.”