Personalization has been the center of attraction for years now. Everyone talks about it, reads about it, writes about it, and as a user – expects it. But this “simple” ideal demands a powerful engine – a customer engagement platform that gathers data, analyzes preferences, and orchestrates personalized interactions across every touchpoint.
In today’s digital age, personalization is crucial, and push notifications, powered by cutting-edge customer engagement platforms and tools, are at the forefront of delivering tailored user experiences. However, when it comes to implementing customer engagement software in practice, the process isn’t as straightforward as it seems. We recognize this complexity.
At a glance, these are the major challenges that marketers often face.
Source: Digital Marketing Community
10 Personalization Challenges & How To Solve Them
1. Data Challenges: Data Data Everywhere…
If the personalization module is an engine, customer data is its fuel. Just like an engine cannot run on an empty fuel tank and adulterated fuel can damage the engine, lack of data and bad quality data can impede your personalization efforts.
With the humungous amounts of customer data flowing in from so many sources, marketers often find themselves overwhelmed. Here are the most common challenges they struggle with:
a. Huge volumes of customer data
Users are online on multiple devices 24 by 7, creating scores of digital footprints every day. All of this information may not be useful, but it is hard to segregate useful data from useless while tracking and recording. Hence, most marketers end up accumulating huge amounts of data that start to overwhelm them sooner than later. The pressure to be data-driven further compels companies to focus too much on sourcing new data, without making proper use of what they already have.
A customer engagement platform offers advanced data analytics tools that help marketers sift through vast data, focusing on what’s truly relevant.
b. Bad quality data
In a recent Redpoint Global survey, 70% of participants claimed to get mistargeted information at least once a month, with data quality problems being the root of this disconnect. By bad data, I mean outdated, irrelevant, and incorrect data. And bad data leads to bad personalization.
Imagine you walk into a furniture store. You need a wardrobe. You ask the salesperson for recommendations.
He starts showing you sofa sets. The salesperson reminds you that the last time you were there, you wanted sofa sets. If you come back tomorrow, he will update your purchase intent in his database and will have the recommendations ready.
Sounds absurd, right?
Although this doesn’t happen in a physical store, scenarios like these happen in the digital world when marketers base their personalization on bad data.
A customer engagement platform ensures data integrity by constantly updating and validating user information, ensuring that personalization is based on accurate, up-to-date user data.
So, next time you want to nudge the customer, you can do so by sending personalized push notifications based on the purchase intent. You can trigger relevant product recommendations, content, offers, or discounts through push notifications on the web or app.
c. Siloed data
For personalization, understanding the customers is essential. And that requires you to have a unified view of the customer. With data coming from different disconnected channels, applications, and systems, it is quite a challenge to assemble a single source of truth.
Say, a customer browsed for a TV set online, and then went and purchased it from the physical store. It hardly makes sense if the brand keeps sending emails with discount coupons to encourage the customer to make an online purchase.
It only indicates the problems that occur due to data siloes.
Customer engagement solutions integrate data from various sources, providing a comprehensive view of each customer.
d. Laws and regulations governing data collection
Since the GDPR regulations came into effect, collecting customer data has been a challenge for companies. The laws forbid brands to collect any data without the customer’s consent. Brands have to provide easy-to-understand and access statements on privacy policies to the customers.
Moreover, customers can choose to deny you data.
If they do, it will, by default, mean a certain degree of personalization will no longer be possible. Also, you have to be careful to avoid the severe political and legal ramifications of failure to comply with the laws.
As more and more ambiguous data privacy laws continue to be written, what data you can and cannot collect and use becomes more ambiguous.
Customer engagement platforms can help you build a data-driven website engagement strategy with channels like web push notifications, WhatsApp, SMS, Email, and more to build deep customer relationships.
2. Segmentation Challenges: Segmentation is the question
Segmentation forms the backbone of personalization, but it is not as black and white as it may seem. Fine and effective segmentation involves nuances and complexities that are rarely accounted for.
With so much data at the marketer’s perusal, identifying which data points to use can be daunting.
What if the same users fit into multiple segments? How to assign them? How to know which segments are impactful for them to be in? The fact that these segments are constantly shifting adds to the difficulty.
Marketers often find it challenging to slice the audience into groups that are worth personalizing in the first place. Without this, spending endless hours of effort in personalization strategies does not fetch results.
A customer engagement platform offers advanced segmentation tools.
It not only helps in segmenting users based on real-time data but also ensures that these segments are actionable and relevant. By leveraging AI and machine learning, these platforms ensure that segments are dynamic, adapting to users’ evolving behaviors and preferences.
3. Delivery Challenges: Real-time cross-channel automation – Easier said than done
Delivering true personalization means offering seamless cross-channel experience in real-time across the customer journey. It is easier said than done. It requires a perfectly running system in which data collection, analysis, campaign execution, measurement, and calibration happen in real-time most smoothly.
With multiple ways to interact with customers through multiple channels, it is a daunting task for marketing teams to keep up. When different teams handle different channels, it is a logistical nightmare to deliver a consistent, personalized experience.
Customer engagement software provides real-time cross-channel automation, ensuring a unified customer experience. By integrating data from both online and offline sources, Netcore bridges the gap between digital interactions and in-store transactions, ensuring consistent and timely engagement.
So, personalization stands meaningless without real-time cross-channel automation that runs on real-time customer data.
This is hard to achieve.
With customer engagement platforms, you can send personalized web or app push notifications to customers when they are not active on your website or app across desktops, laptops, tablets, and smartphones, to maximize customer engagement. Harness cross-channel behavioral data to contextualize your messages and capture the attention of mobile web visitors with web push notifications.
4. Technological Challenges: Spoilt for choice
While personalization is a simple concept – ‘show relevant content to every user,’ it is technologically challenging to achieve. Most marketers who intend to adopt personalization often struggle with finding the right tools that suit their needs. There is no dearth of personalization tools to choose from, and perhaps that makes it harder to pick the right one. Even if they start, the struggles don’t end.
As the number of data sources, engagement channels, and web & app properties grow, they go on adding technology and tools to support it.
What starts with a single website spreads over multiple web properties, multiple channels, social media, display ads, and so forth. It usually leads to a complex mess of disjointed tools and platforms.
Customer engagement solutions offer a comprehensive suite of tools tailored to diverse personalization needs.
Instead of juggling multiple disjointed platforms, marketers can leverage Netcore’s integrated customer engagement platform, ensuring streamlined operations and consistent personalization across all touchpoints. With push notifications being one of the essential touchpoints to engage with customers and nudge them on their smartphone about any exciting offers that may be of interest.
5. Metrics Measurement Challenges: What to measure
Management thinker Peter Drucker is often quoted as saying, ‘If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.’
Now, personalization is aimed at leveraging long-term customer relationships. That requires ‘long-term customer relationships’ metrics to be measured.
While knowing how many conversions one particular personalized interaction drove is beneficial, it is a short-term metric. It illustrates what worked for your brand and that you should keep doing it.
But since personalization takes some time to show results in the long run, and it is hard to put a number to “customer affinity” or “customer trust,” marketers struggle to measure the success of their personalization efforts.
A customer engagement platform provides comprehensive analytics and insights, allowing marketers to track both short-term and long-term metrics. It enables you to track the performance of your personalized push notifications and overall campaigns in real-time. By offering a holistic view of customer engagement, brands can understand and refine their personalization efforts over time.
6. Balance Challenges: Striking the Right Personalization Balance
The whole idea of personalization is to help your customers. But this purpose gets beaten when marketers miss the “too much line” or the “creepy line.”
It is hard to ascertain how much is too much because every user has a unique threshold of annoyance and offense.
It isn’t easy for marketers to understand the behavior and reactions of every user in so much depth. So, to avoid getting into trouble, many brands prefer staying away from personalization than doing it wrong.
However, customer engagement tools use advanced AI and machine learning to analyze user behavior and preferences, ensuring personalized interactions are tailored to individual comfort levels and striking the right balance between being helpful and respectful.
This allows you to orchestrate web and app engagement at scale by sending contextual push notifications on your website or mobile application.
Related Read: Is Your Personalization Creepy?
7. Scalability Challenges: Did you say “Personalization at Scale?”
McKinsey & Company has called ‘personalization at scale’ the Holy Grail of marketing.
Scalability is one of the biggest challenges in implementing an organization-wide personalization strategy.
Delivering a one-to-one unique experience to each user means taking the time and effort to craft, assemble, and deliver huge amounts of personalized content variations tailored for different individuals and user journeys.
Also, as digital business becomes more and more sophisticated, the traffic is only going to increase, calling for scalability.
Personalizing the home page for one segment of users is a simple thing. But it is completely a different game when you have 10 user personas, 15 global regions where your business runs, 20 sites, and hundreds of assets you want to personalize.
Customer engagement tools are designed for scalability. With its robust infrastructure and advanced algorithms, they ensures that brands can deliver personalized experiences to a vast user base across various regions and platforms seamlessly.
8. ‘Getting-Started’ Challenges: Tabula Rasa – The Blank Slate dilemma
Since personalization (if done right) permeates the whole system in the organization, marketers who are planning to adopt it new often get overwhelmed.
When you are just getting started, one of the biggest challenges is not knowing what to start from and what to personalize first. This is called the blank slate problem – “Tabula Rasa.”
The degree, type, and strategies for personalization vary based on industries. What is ideal for ecommerce or media OTT isn’t appropriate for BFSI or edtech. Since there is no set formula to do it, it deters many brands from starting it all together for fear of not doing it right or lack of orientation.
A customer engagement platform offers a structured approach to kickstart personalization. With industry-specific guidelines and best practices, they assists brands in navigating the initial stages, ensuring a solid foundation for their personalization strategies.
9. Organizational Challenges: Personalization is not a solo game
Adopting personalization is a mindset shift. It requires intensive collaboration and involvement of all departments in the organization.
Implementing an idea as extensive as personalization requires bringing people out of their apprehensions. Many organizations believe that their business structure is not capable of adopting new technologies and experimentation like personalization.
Moreover, multiple teams work with diverse information, analytics, CRM, marketing automation, storage, and other third-party systems.
Lack of technical know-how and common standards makes it difficult to communicate and collaborate. Thus, without organizational alignment, goal sharing, and continuous communication, personalization is a farfetched dream.
Customer engagement softwares streamline the integration of various systems, fostering better collaboration across teams. By providing a unified platform, they ensure that all departments can work cohesively towards the shared goal of effective personalization.
10. Management Buy-in Challenges: All said and done, but bosses don’t agree
Imbibing personalization as the very essence of all marketing efforts calls for a shift in perspective. Molding the core strategy into a customer-first approach is a mindset shift.
This change requires a technological overhaul, which means huge investments in terms of effort, resources, and finances.
It is often difficult to get a buy-in from decision-makers because the value of personalization can be hard to determine (particularly in the short term).
Personalization is often seen by them as an option, not an absolute need. Besides, they feel that there is a lot of homework that comes with it, a lot of challenges to be faced, and maybe they don’t really need it. Getting a go-ahead from the top management can be a herculean task.
However, customer engagement solutions provide tangible metrics and demonstrable results, showcasing the value and potential ROI of personalization. By offering clear insights into the benefits of a personalized approach, it aids in securing the buy-in from top-tier management, ensuring a smoother transition to customer-centric strategies.
Personalization is Challenging, But it is Worth it
If you have started already, but haven’t embraced it completely or are hesitant to begin, then it’s time you get past your fears and apprehensions. Challenges are indeed big, but what the business gets back in return makes all the struggle worthwhile.
Meanwhile, to understand how an AI-powered customer engagement platform like Netcore can help you achieve the best results through omnichannel personalization, get in touch.
