Marketing Personalization Is Broken (But Fixable)

No One is Arguing About Personalization's Value

No one. Even if you haven't read all the overwhelming data proving the impact of personalization on every interaction between businesses and their audiences, all you have to do is think about what it's like to be a human. What do you enjoy when talking to a friend or, yeah, a company?

When they treat you like a person.

So why is personalization falling so flat?

Because Personalization Is Broken

This beauty was in my LinkedIn invites:

"I came across your profile while searching for leaders and entrepreneurs who are boosting the entrepreneurial ecosystem. I was impressed with your experience and intent to solve problems of clients and businesses, and hence this request to connect."

I have [co-founder] in my LinkedIn title. The logic follows... If [co-founder] then [entrepreneur block].

Is this message better than just a blank connection request? I guess?

But they could have actually read my LI profile. I'm super active there so thumbing through my posts and post engagement could offer up a treasure trove of insights for them to build on.

It's hard work to do. I know. But better to do the hard work for a few prospects than churn through your addressable market with mediocre high volume tactics.

We actually got a video of an SDR in the wild who just hit send on a "personalized" sequence to 5,000 prospects:

Lots of folks like Benedikt are feeling this:

So who broke it?

Software Did When It Traded Quality for Volume

Let's start with the obvious. Personalized outreach takes effort:

What Benjy is calling out here is very, very real. It's hard to do. You need a lot of great data. You need to connect the dots. And then you have to deliver.

So it's no wonder sales execs like Eric are begging the question about whether the payoff is there:

So what you find is that personalization, if we're all being honest, is still a mass-marketing effort as Bill has called out here:

So if good (read: real) personalization is so hard and the automation tools in the market are forcing us to still think at the segment level (at best), you can't blame leaders like Neal for opting to cast wider nets:

So Do We Just Abandon Personalization?

Going back to Neal's message about hitting 5K first-time customers vs 500 known customers...

Let's use the data from another ATC blog post about the impacts of personalized emails showing that personalized emails result in 80% higher clicks.

And another post in which we shared research on how web personalization results in a 2.5X increase in revenue.

In Neal's example, let's say the average conversion value is $5:

So, sure, in the above scenario, by increasing your audience by 10X with no personalization, you'll do 2X the revenue.

But there are massive trade-off's here:

• We have calculated all of this as if both audiences were cold. The Personalized, loyal audience is not. Every single one of the benchmarks in the right-most column would be higher in real life. There is little to no increase in revenue with the non-personalized mass approach.
• On the Personalized audience, you know who those people are. But the 5K new prospects? You're going to have to get them somehow. And that costs time and money.
• In impersonal marketing, things like unsubscribe rates are far higher and the willingness of people to keep hearing from you is a lot lower. That means that in the impersonal scenario, you're going to have to go back to the lead well over and over and over. That's expensive and it doesn't scale.

Personalization is by far the most sustainable, impactful strategy any organization can deploy in growing their business.

Sustainable.

How Do We Fix It?

Well, having a business case doesn't hurt.

But it's more work and a different kind of work than a lot of teams are used to getting to do.

Here are a few things to consider:

• There's a bigger mandate for Marketing Operations to be in the room (there ALWAYS is, but if you want to pull off personalization, it cannot be done without MOPs!).
• You probably won't be able to use your standard playbooks. That doesn't mean toss them out. If you have a webinar promotion campaign that crushes it every time, go for it. But with personalization it's best to start from square zero rather than trying to augment prior campaigns.
• Data will matter more than ever. What's in your CRM and marketing automation systems? Do you have access to unique data sets within your product? Do you need to identify high value data sets to pull into your own systems?
• You might not need any new tools OR new data. But I'd be remiss not to mention that Air Traffic Control automatically personalizes your emails and webpages thanks to AI. It's kinda like having your cake and eating it, too.

What we should all be able to agree on is that personalization has a powerful business case AND, yes, it's not easy.

The best things (almost) never are.