Personalization of Customer Experience Is Top Goal for 70 Percent of Data-Driven Marketers

Personalizing the customer experience is the most important goal for 70 percent of data-driven marketing strategies, according to new survey results from Ascend2.

Acquiring new customers (43 percent) and measuring data-driven marketing ROI (40 percent) round out the top three priorities for data-driven marketing.

The survey results show marketers are feeling positive about the current state of their data-driven marketing efforts; 37 percent consider their data-driven strategy to be “best-in-class” and 44 percent called their current strategy “above average” when compared to the competition.

Half of the survey respondents named both integrating data across platforms and enriching data quality and completeness as the two most significant barriers to achieving data-driven marketing success.

When it comes to analyzing the most effective data-driven tactics, topping the list is email message personalization (47 percent), targeted landing pages (43 percent) and contact data segmentation (38 percent).

“Effectively personalizing email messages – a top data-driven marketing personalization tactics – requires quality contact data that is complete and integrate across platforms,” notes the study’s authors.

However, marketers are still struggling to master many of the most effective data-driven marketing personalization tactics, including lead intelligence collection (50 percent), web content personalization (48 percent) and contact data segmentation (41 percent).

To handle the more difficult tactics, many marketing departments are seeking outside expertise. Eighty-five percent of respondents, which included a mix of B2B and B2C marketing professionals, said their company outsourced all or part of the data-driven personalization tactics.

Data-Driven Marketing Top Strategic Priority in 2016

The “2016 Digital Trends” report from Econsultancy and Adobe found more than half (53 percent) of marketing professionals placed data-driven marketing as a top strategic priority in 2016.

Marketing professionals aiming to offer unique customer experiences named personalization (31 percent), content optimization (29 percent) and social media management (25 percent) as goals for this year.

Roughly 1 in 5 marketers considered optimizing the customer experience to be the most exciting opportunity for the year ahead. Other top opportunities included creating compelling content for digital experiences and data-driven marketing.