How to choose the right personalization tool for your business in 2025

Latest figures show that today's global internet user base is more than five billion people, and the number of us who shop online is constantly on the rise. Forecasts indicate that in 2025, worldwide retail ecommerce revenues are projected to surpass 4.3 trillion U.S. dollars.

Long story short, the ecommerce landscape is evolving, and brands are having to work harder and harder to capture the attention of audiences — who have literally thousands of options to choose from if any single business isn’t meeting their expectations. 

In those crowded digital commerce spaces, personalization technology has become an indispensable part of content management strategies, and a critical consideration for businesses seeking to optimize the customer experience, and enhance business outcomes. As technology advances, personalization technologies are becoming more effective and more sophisticated, and a proven method of differentiating brands from competitors — however, choosing the right tool for your content and business needs isn’t always easy.    

So, in this post, we’re going to discuss content personalization technology, and how to select the right personalization tech for your website, mobile applications, and other customer touchpoints.

What is personalization and why is it important?

Personalization has become such an important part of content marketing and marketing automation because it helps businesses ensure that they’re giving their customers tailored content, based on specific needs and interests.

It’s not just about being able to target your audience more efficiently — personalization reflects changing business trends and customer expectations, and the emergence of new marketing automation technologies. The more personal the experience visitors get from your content, the more likely they are to engage more meaningfully, boosting conversion rates, and, ultimately, business outcomes. 

An array of tools and services is available to support personalization efforts. Contentful Personalization, for example, harnesses advanced AI analytics to personalize content in real time, and help you shape customer experiences down to the smallest detail. 

So, how do you know which personalization technology is going to be right for your brand? Let’s dig a little deeper. 

Understanding your personalization maturity level

Digital personalization platforms are typically more effective when they match a business’s level of personalization maturity. 

Personalization maturity is a way of understanding the required level of personalization strategy. The more mature your personalization requirements, the more sophisticated and detailed your personalization measures need to be. As you advance in personalization maturity level, you’ll need to move from simple audience segmentation to hyper-segmentation, which may include offering predictive personalization via product recommendations, dynamic pricing, smart social proofs, and so on.

For example, an entry-level personalization platform may suit a start-up or a small business seeking to build its audience without any need for complex technical integrations. On the other hand, large corporations typically have more expansive and diverse customer bases, and more customer touchpoints, and so need more powerful enterprise-level solutions with more sophisticated personalization tools.

Exploring and understanding your brand’s maturity needs should be a foundation for selecting your personalization tech, and implementing personalization measures as part of digital customer experiences. 

There’s more to say about personalization maturity, and how to assess your brand’s maturity level, but, for now, let’s move on to picking a tool. 

5 factors to consider when choosing personalization technology 

Not all personalization tech is created equal; some offer more functionality than others and so may be better suited to your business goals. If you’ve assessed your brand’s personalization maturity model, it’s time to consider the following key factors: business requirements, project scope, time to market, scalability, and security.

Let’s look at each factor one by one. 

1) Business requirements

The best technology solution is rarely the same in any two cases. In fact, “best” will reflect a business’ unique profile, its operating environment, resources, and numerous other factors that shape its digital content offering. 

With that in mind, content and development teams should work together to establish their collective needs and business requirements. That may mean asking questions like: What personalization problems do we face? What is our personalization goal? What do we need to accomplish that goal?

It's crucial to identify your business requirements before choosing its personalization platform. 

For example, some companies may favor working with one software language over another. That preference can affect the way developers build out their tech stack and select personalization tools, since they’ll need to find specific synergies with apps that use that language in order to achieve their goals. 

That means you’ll need to make sure that the tool that you eventually select is compatible with your wider business requirements and other critical considerations, which might include omnichannel personalization and customer segmentation, or the easy integration of new technology. 

You might also need to consider testing and experimentation of new personalized content, and how new business considerations are going to affect revenue growth goals. 

2) Project scope

You’ll need to define the scope of your personalization project both in terms of its size and complexity, and how it aligns with your business goals.

By defining the scope of your project, you’ll be able to determine what resources you need to acquire for your personalization solution, and what features you’ll need your tool to have. 

Consider the following scenarios: 

• Small projects: The implementation of small personalization projects typically requires less sophisticated personalization and/or segmentation technologies, and involves solutions that can be delivered faster.

• Mid-size projects: In general, mid-size projects require a higher level of technological commitment. They have an added requirement to provide more sophisticated and diverse functionalities, as well as integrations with other platforms or languages, depending on specific project requests.

• Complex projects: In more complex projects, personalization solutions typically need to deliver several functionalities, and be capable of multiple integrations. Complex projects require tech stacks to be at a similarly advanced level. 

3) Time to market

While some personalization tools can be implemented, and launched, quickly, others may require an implementation period of several months as they go through various coding and design processes. 

With that said, it’s critical that businesses implement personalization as efficiently as possible in order to keep up with competitors, and be capable of adapting to changing customer expectations. 

Developing a realistic timeline for the implementation of your personalization tech is critical. It may be worth opting for a tool with a shorter time to market in order to match a competitor offering, rather than opting for a more advanced, but longer to implement, tool that forces you to drop too far behind the curve prior to launch.  

So, just how quickly can personalization technology be implemented? Find out how Pets Deli set up Contentful Personalization in less than a week, for a 51% boost in conversions. 

4) Scalability

Successful personalization strategies may begin with good ideas but they need to be built on infrastructure that delivers over the long term.

That means you’ll need a tech stack capable of matching your business’s growth rate, and the changing demands of the market. In other words, the personalization technology you choose must have the potential to scale the personalized experiences that it offers.

No one wants to deal with inflexible or, worse, obsolete software when they’re pursuing growth goals. Consider how your tool is going to handle increasing customer demand, how easy it’s going to be to integrate new features and upgrades as your business grows, and how well those factors align with your business requirements. 

5) Security and privacy

Most personalization tools necessarily require ongoing customer data inputs which means brands must be confident that submitted information is secure within their digital infrastructure. 

Security cannot be an afterthought when choosing personalization tech. Most jurisdictions have introduced strict data protection regulations, such as the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which hold “data controllers” (i.e., brands) accountable for protecting customers’ personal information from unauthorized access or disclosure. Data privacy regulations typically impose other obligations, including, for example, a right for customers to demand the deletion of data when it is no longer needed by a company. 

With that said, the data requirements of specific personalization tools can impact a brand’s cyber-security posture — a factor that should be a priority when selecting a platform. 

Personalization priorities 

Selecting the right personalization tech for your brand isn’t necessarily going to be simple — not least because of the array of features and functionalities that you might want for your solution. 

Remember: You don't need a platform that does everything, just one that aligns with your:

• Business requirements.

• Project scope.

• Time to market requirements.

• Security needs.

• Scalability needs. 

Assess tools with those factors in mind, and then make a selection based on value.

For example, after identifying your business needs, you could make a list of personalization priorities, based on "must haves" (non-negotiable features) vs "should haves" (strong preference features), all the way down to "could haves" (optional features) and "no need" (unnecessary features).

Priority ratings may help you assign value to candidate tools and build a hierarchy of options. 

Personalization with Contentful

Choosing the right personalization tool isn’t easy, but if you’re exploring possibilities, it makes sense to start with Contentful.

Our personalization tool, Contentful Personalization, leverages advanced AI analytics to help you tailor digital experiences with speed and precision, and deliver real-time personalization to every step of the customer journey. You can begin your personalization journey today, and explore a Marketplace of partner apps and microservices to help you shape content experiences down to the smallest detail. 

Take a tour

Chat with our team

We'll show you how our composable content platform can enhance 1:1 customer connections and drive growth for your business.

Subscribe for updates

Build better digital experiences with Contentful updates direct to your inbox.