Survey: Marketers seek personalized interactions

Somerville, Mass. – Almost all (91%) of marketers either use or intend to use personalization for online customer interactions within the next year. According to a new survey from real-time personalization provider Evergage, nearly one in two marketers surveyed (49%) intends to increase their budgets for personalization in the year ahead, with 80% planning to increase them significantly (by more than 10%).



Currently, marketers feel Web personalization is very important to their initiatives, and 51% of organizations have personnel dedicated to working on personalization programs.



In terms of deployment, 42% of respondents indicated they are not currently using real-time personalization, but 78% of this group intends to within the next year. With 86% of respondents reporting lift from their personalization initiatives, and approximately half seeing a lift greater than 10%, it’s understandable that marketers who have not yet deployed these solutions are eager to dive in.



Regarding the methods for delivering personalized Web content, marketers are primarily planning to use inline content (57%) and call-outs (43%). The greatest obstacles to the successful implementation of personalization initiatives were reported to be a lack of knowledge or skills, lack of budget and IT constraints.



Additional findings:



• Primary places for personalization: Marketers using personalization have deployed it across their websites (76%), mobile sites (29%), Web applications (22%) and mobile apps (16%).



• How it’s being done: Among the most common methods for personalized content delivery are inline content (53%) and call-outs (41%).



• Segmentation: When segmenting visitors, marketers use several different methods, the most popular being the type of content viewed (48%), location (45%) and time on site (36%). Overall, location is the most important element for B2B and B2C organizations when personalizing (92% rank it very or extremely important).



• Results: One-third of those using real-time personalization report increased e-commerce revenues, and 73% see increased visitor engagement.



• Measuring ROI: Marketers are doing a good job measuring the ROI of their personalization campaigns, with only 11% not measuring. They primarily look at conversion lift (58%), time on site (40%) and revenue lift (39%).



The study, conducted in conjunction with Researchscape International, examined the attitudes and expectations of global business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) marketers surrounding real-time personalization. A total of 242 marketers from around the world, in a variety of roles and from companies of all sizes, were surveyed.