9 Common personalization challenges (and how to overcome them)

Good businesses are always looking for innovative ways to engage with their customers, from developing new digital experiences to integrating new capabilities into their content management tech stacks. 

Content personalization has become critical to customer engagement in recent years. By tailoring content experiences to personal tastes and preferences, brands build stronger relationships with their customers, and increase the likelihood of conversions. 

But getting personalization right isn’t easy. There are plenty of challenges that prevent marketing teams from creating the digital experiences they need to appeal to their customers on that one-to-one level. 

In fact, research suggests that only 25% of marketers have the data they need to support personalization, while only 19% think that they have the right technology in place to execute their personalization strategies.  

Personalization might seem daunting, but don’t panic — if you’re familiar with the challenges that you’ll likely face, you can prepare your team, and your tech stack, to face them. 

With that in mind, in this post, we’re going to explore nine of the most common personalization challenges — and how to overcome them.

1. Data challenges

In order to create a personalized experience for your customers, you need to have access to their data. Customer data is the key to understanding what each individual customer wants and needs. And it's essential for powering marketing personalization engines.

That's why marketers are always looking for new and innovative ways to collect it.

But what happens when you have too much of it? Or when it's not accurate?

The data challenge is complex, so it’s worth breaking it down into the following key components.

Data volume

Studies suggest that the average person switches between multiple connected devices to complete a task, and uses multiple channels to communicate with businesses — and that trend is set to continue in the future. 

The point is, as customers, we generate an incredible amount of data — much of which is incredibly useful for businesses. However, in order to optimize that data for personalization, businesses need to focus on identifying and extracting the most valuable information from it.

The purpose of personalization is not to simply collect and use all of the customer data that you can get your hands on. Your objective should be to identify the most important audience traits, using only the minimum necessary amount of data, in order to tailor the content experience for each prospect. 

So, while knowing what data is most important to you is critical, being able to filter that important data out of vast amounts of irrelevant data is tricky. 

Bad data

Most marketers point to the quality of their customer data as one of the primary challenges to effective personalization.

Unfortunately, customer data can degrade in quality, going from “good data” to “bad data,” quickly. Here, bad data simply means that the information it contains is likely to be outdated, irrelevant, or factually incorrect. 

And, bad data undermines personalization. Using bad data, you might end up targeting customers with the incorrect message and content, creating unsatisfactory experiences that can drive shoppers away. 

Privacy and regulations

As companies strive to create personalized customer experiences, they face new regulatory challenges — in particular, those concerning data privacy. 

Balancing the need for customer data with the requirement to protect user privacy can be difficult, but it's important for businesses to find a way to walk that line. Failing to do so can lead to serious consequences, including regulatory fines and, worse, reputational damage and a loss of trust with customers.

If customers are informed about the data collection process, things look better. Recent research shows that 69% of consumers appreciate personalization so long as it’s directly based on data they’ve shared with a business.

That figure suggests that businesses that gather, manage, and store data responsibly have nothing (or at least, less) to worry about. Privacy rules and regulations only threaten personalization efforts that are based on improperly gathered and maintained data.

In other words, customers are more willing to give over their data if they feel secure about its use, where it’s going, and who has access to it.

And this can only help with personalization.

Non-unified customer profiles

Customers are everywhere. They may arrive via different channels, visit your website more than once, and interact with you through a variety of digital touchpoints.

However, without a unified view of the customer, you can’t really create relevant and timely experiences for them across all channels.

A unified customer profile is critical for making smart decisions about your personalization strategy, and delivering the right message at the right time. And so, to obtain a clearer understanding of who your customers are, and create those valuable, unified customer profiles, marketers must be able to collect and compile customer data from various sources accurately, and efficiently. 

2. Segmentation challenges

Segmentation is one of the most important steps in effective personalization. By isolating and targeting specific groups of customers, businesses can improve the digital experience and increase their chances of conversion.

Of course, that’s easier said than done.

As most digital marketers know, it can be difficult to segment customers accurately and efficiently based on their specific characteristics. 

Technology and automation represent a huge advantage for segmentation — and it’s worth leveraging AI solutions to help determine what segments to create and which customers should be assigned to them. 

3. Talent, skills, and organizational challenges

When we talk about personalization, we usually think about how to collect data, which data to collect, the best technology stack to execute the personalization strategy, the best way to segment users, and so on. However, we often forget the most important factor that makes a huge difference to the impact of data and technology: people.

Or, more specifically, the relationships between people in different departments of an organization. Interdepartmental collaboration can be a key differentiator between good and great personalization strategies. 

However, in many businesses, different teams work with different tech stacks, and different marketing tools, independently of each other. That lack of alignment across teams leads to knowledge silos, and makes it more difficult to execute effective personalization. 

In order to deliver the best personalization experience for customers, companies need to invest in collaboration technology, and cultivate a culture of collaboration between teams so that everyone is on the same page, working together toward personalization objectives. 

By collaborating and communicating, and emphasizing common goals, everyone in the organization will develop a better understanding of customer needs and preferences, and how to deliver on them. 

4. Real-time delivery challenges

Simply put, real-time personalization means delivering a digital experience tailored to the specific wants and needs of the customer, in real time.

That means that, as soon as a customer interacts with your brand, the experience they receive should be specific to them.

In a world where customers are inundated with advertisements and messages, the ability to provide a real-time personalized experience is a key brand differentiator, and critical to building meaningful engagement and ongoing loyalty. 

Most companies struggle to do this effectively because it requires the seamless orchestration of data collection, segmentation, cross-channel profile synchronization, and execution.

There are two major reasons for that:

• A lack of organizational alignment.

• A lack of orchestration between components in the tech stack.

Fortunately, brands can solve real-time personalization challenges by focusing, once again, on their tech stacks — or, more specifically, by integrating content management tools that facilitate better collaboration and organization alignment. 

5. Omnichannel delivery challenges

Today, most businesses seek to improve their customer experience (CX) as a way of staying ahead of the competition. There are plenty of strategies to enhance CX, but one of the most effective is omnichannel personalization. 

In this context, omnichannel refers to a shopping experience that is continual and consistent regardless of the channel on which it takes place. For example, a customer could browse a brand’s ecommerce store, and add items to their shopping cart, and then switch to the brand’s mobile app and continue the shopping journey there. 

A number of obstacles stand in the way of successful omnichannel personalization, the primary being the need to effectively synchronize data across different channels. Siloing is also a common challenge — since each department typically concentrates on its own business goals and objectives, customer data is often kept separate and isolated.

With those issues in mind, omnichannel personalization challenges are very similar to those that affect real-time personalization, including:

• Poor organizational alignment and communication across teams.

• A lack of orchestration between tech stacks.

• No unified customer profiles or data synchronization across channels.

Understanding and overcoming these challenges by integrating a flexible, headless content management tech stack is key to achieving an effective omnichannel environment — and delivering the kind of personalized experience that sets you apart from competitors. 

6. Technology challenges

We’ve talked about how having the right content management tech stack can help brands overcome personalization challenges — but acquiring and integrating the right technology tools may not be easy. 

And, even when you have the right technology in place, translating customer data into useful, actionable insights can be a feat in itself. Once you’ve harnessed the data, you’ll need to analyze it effectively, and put the relevant insights into practice in a way that delivers true personalization. 

All of that means that companies need to invest time and resources into identifying and implementing the right personalization tech. As you may have realized by now, not all personalization tools are created equal: some offer more functionality than others and may be better suited for your business goals. 

So how do you know which to choose?

When you’re choosing a personalization tool, consider its capabilities and how they align with your personalization objectives. Look for the following features and capabilities:

• Omnichannel personalization.

• Customer segmentation.

• Easy and seamless integrations with other tools.

• Real-time personalization and optimization.

• Testing and experimentation.

• Predictive and rule-based personalization opportunities.

• Customer data management and unified profile creation.

7. Success measurement challenges

You’ve implemented your personalization strategy, and integrated your personalization tools — but, how do you know if your personalization efforts are working?

Having a metric by which you can measure the results of your personalization efforts will show you what's working, and what needs to be improved. But, applying metrics can also be a challenge, not least because personalization often requires time to showcase its effects. Similarly, since those effects, which are often defined nebulously as "customer attachment" or "customer trust," can be difficult to quantify. 

Set out the metrics that you’re going to use to measure the success of your personalization strategy clearly. In fact, you can define personalization success by applying conventional marketing metrics, such as click-through rate, conversion rate, bounce rate, time on page, and so on. 

8. Scalability challenges

As your business grows, so will your need to create personalized customer experiences. But scaling personalized experiences while sustaining true personalization is hard. 

That’s because, achieving any level of personalization involves the following activities:

• Analysis of huge amounts of customer data.

• Dedicated content design and creation for each customer group.

• Effective usage of communication channels.

So, how do you stay ahead of your personalization scaling challenges? Well, artificial Intelligence (AI) can provide a degree of automated scalability that ensures every customer receives a unique, personalized experience — even at a massive scale.

9. Getting started challenges

Many businesses struggle to understand where to start when it comes to personalizing their interactions with customers.

Even if you have a good understanding of what personalization is and how it works, figuring out how to actually implement it can be a daunting task. That challenge is compounded by the fact that there are so many different ways to go about personalizing the customer experience.

To be able to deliver and execute your strategy successfully, first you need to understand the fundamentals of personalization. Let’s set them out here:

• Personalization starts with customer segmentation. To create segments, you not only need to have customer data, but understand it.

• You need to understand your personalization maturity level in order to determine how you’re going to improve. 

• You need to understand and define your personalization channels. While website personalization is an important focus, you can personalize many other experiences (mobile, wearable, and so on).

• You need to understand the relationship between personalization and experimentation. Personalization is a process: To create the best possible customer experience, you’ll need to refine your content through continuous experimentation.

• You need to understand the scope of your personalization goal. While personalization can be daunting at first, there’s no need to revamp your entire web experience. Instead, start small, and work toward a comprehensive personalization strategy step by step.

Bottom line

Personalization sets brands apart from the competition and keeps your customers coming back for more. However, the challenges involved in creating true personalized experiences aren’t going to take care of themselves — you’ll need to think carefully about how you approach them, and the technology that you use to overcome them. 

To find out how AI-powered personalization technology can make a difference to your brand, why not explore Contentful Personalization. If you want to get started today, get in touch with our team to discuss details. 

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