Vast Majority of Marketers Struggle to Deliver Real-Time Marketing across Channels

Although a personalized customer experience has been shown to boost marketing effectiveness, new research indicates that marketers’ strategies are still relatively immature. The “Contextual Marketing Imperative” report by SAP Hybris has found that just 16 percent of marketers have the ability to capture customer intent and deliver real-time marketing across all channels.

However, 91 percent of marketers say that their priority is to improve customer experience through personalization over the next year. Marketers use an average of 11 channels, which could be responsible for inconsistent customer experiences.

“Consumers today are bombarded with more marketing messages across more channels than ever before, and the vast majority of these communications are irrelevant,” said Charles Nicholls, senior vice president of Product Strategy, Marketing Solutions at SAP Hybris.

About 66 percent of marketers believe their personalization efforts are “very good” or “excellent.” However, just 31 percent of customers believe that companies are consistently delivering personalized, cross-channel experiences.

B2B Marketing and Personalization

For B2B marketers, research indicates that personalization is already a main priority. The “Data-Driven Marketing Trends Survey” from Ascend2 recently discovered that 60 percent of B2B marketers consider personalizing the customer experience to be a top data-driven marketing objective.

In the coming months, 67 percent say that they will spend more money on data-driven marketing. About 90 percent state that they have been successful at achieving their top goals thus far, which include measuring data-driven marketing ROI and targeting individual segments of their audience.