What are the Biggest Constraints for 1-to-1 Personalization

62% of consumers are willing to pay more when they receive a personalized service.

In this digital era, brands need to be on their toes to capture customers and retain them. It’s time to forget the strategy of One-size-fits-all. You need to understand that, your customers are just a click away to slip into the ever waiting competitors hands. It’s very important as brands to keep your visitors happy.

The secret to keep your visitors happy is to show what they like. The easiest way to drive genuine engagements is through personalization. But it’s easier said than done.

In simple words, 1-to-1 Personalization can be stated as ” the ability to take a known customer’s, stated preferences and turn them into reality. “

Marketers do understand that personalization can drive traffic and the traffic can be converted to engagements. These genuine engagements drives retention and loyalty. But what’s stopping them from personalizing?

Let’s understand few key points that’s stopping companies to personalize.

Constraint 1: What to personalize?

Businesses understand that personalization is important, what they don’t understand is, what to personalize, how to personalize and how much to personalize. The common practise that businesses follow to personalize is, they design a basic segmentation based on location, demographics or devices etc. which is just not enough. This might be effective, but when designed in the angle of 1-to-1 personalization it is infinitely large.

Constraint 2: Data Quality or unorganized customer data

To personalize for each user, you need to have actionable customer data. Data are usually collected through loyalty programs, transaction history, and/or online check-ins. Getting the data might be hard, but organizing the data that has been collected in usable format is much more difficult.

Constraint 3: Infrastructural constraints

The way people reach out to you is changing with digitalization. With this, brands are not left with an option but to change. As a company you might be only thinking of building an online website or optimizing your website for the search console. But you need to understand that your viewers are looking for a better user experience. Hence it’s very important for you to personalize content for every individual.

Now you are left with the question, How to personalize? Should I build a new team to give a better experience? It’s very difficult for you as a company to build a new team. It costs you and even consumes more time to understand what to personalize, how to personalize and many more questions.

Constraint 4: Computational Complexity

Businesses are either short of people or on the technology to personalize content for every individual. It is very difficult to stitch together all the data that you have collected to provide a rich personalized experience.

Constraint 5: Lack of content

To deliver personalized experience you need to have a huge volume of content that are unique. But it’s difficult for a small business to create content in such a huge volume.

Where can you find the consumer information?

When consumers walk through your online portals, they leave their consumer DNA. As a brand, it’s imperative to take advantage of those information. You need to capture all the information and behavior of the user in order to provide the best 1-to-1 personalization.

Modern consumers desire experiences that are relevant and contextual at every point of their buying journey. Hence delivering personalized content depending on the individuals interests and context increases the chances of them doing business with you.