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Marketing is like magic. It’s a spark that can light up the hearts and minds of your audience, building trust and deepening their loyalty. When your message is well-honed and it lands with your customer at the right moment, their journey is more personal, and the brand experience is objectively more effective.
Great experiences impact the bottom line. Companies that drive successful personalization strategies see upticks in engagement and an increase in incremental growth. It’s no surprise, then, that pursuing personalization is now an imperative for many CMOs. According to one of our recent surveys, personalization strategies have become the top marketing investment with 97% of leaders calling it a high or medium priority (71% high).
Many of the same marketing organizations that are making these investments often struggle to realize value from the initiatives. Even when they’ve made progress in scaling the experience, analyzing the impact and potential value can remain a challenge. To realize the value of personalization, we need to look past the magic of marketing and find a more effective approach to measurement. The answers, it turns out, can be discovered in the numbers.
Why it’s critical for marketers to measure the impact of their marketing
Marketing leaders are being asked to do more with less at a time when only 40% of CMOs strongly agreed that the value of marketing is understood by key decision-makers in their company — a proportion that has declined from 54% in 2023. Marketers need to be able to prove the value and growth potential of their strategies, using language and metrics that resonate with the CFO and other C-suite leaders. That means getting access to the tools—and the data—to have ROI-oriented discussions that clearly show the value of the work.
Historically, though, assessing the value and impact of personalization programs has been hypothesis-driven and directional at best. A range of issues can get in the way of an effective approach to measurement:
Speed of experimentation
Operators are launching tests more frequently than ever. Generative AI and other technologies accelerate both content creation and the need to measure its impact.
Disparate experience data
Many companies are pulling data from multiple sources, and digital experience tests are often measured independently.
Manual measurement and reporting
Analysis, visualization and reporting often requires offline tools and custom reports. Creating these instruments from scratch can increase the risk for error and the time it takes to share insights.Capacity for analysis
Overloaded data science and finance teams are often weeks behind in responding to requests, delaying real-time insights and data-driven business decisions.Insights are point-in-time
Companies can gauge conversion rates and other data for an experience that’s launched in market but lack the ability to forecast incrementality.
The previous generation of digital experience analysis tools have lacked the ability to aggregate reporting across a suite of tests, measure and forecast accurate revenue outcomes, and easily visualize the insights and impact of optimization programs. Change is here.
How to measure the outcomes of personalization initiatives
Now, we're at a point where tools like our Experience Value Analyzer, an Adobe accredited solution, can provide near real-time, personalized views of customer behavior through digital channels. It’s possible to organize and visualize disparate data into clear and actionable summaries, giving you a transparent view of your digital optimization and experimentation performance—and making it easy to communicate the value for other stakeholders, especially the CFO.
With the right tools and framework in place, you can measure personalization incrementality through a series of steps:
1. Measure and aggregate lift from individual tests, identifying how well each individual test experience is performing.
2. Calculate actual revenue on a lookback basis, gauging the incremental revenue a given test has realized to date and determining how many incremental members have enrolled in the program.
3. Forecast incrementality based on statistically significant results, anticipating the revenue a given experience test is expected to contribute.
4. Report on lift and ROI relative to the target revenue goals.
Summary
As we’ve said before, the promise of personalization should be about more than rewards or the allure of new technology—it requires a coordinated and extensive shift within and across the business. Change management must be a focus and cross-team alignment a priority. By standardizing and streamlining measurement and reporting, you can reduce manual effort, replace ad-hoc analysis, and bring other leaders enthusiastically on-board.
Sources:
1 PwC, "CMO insights from the PwC Pulse Survey", 2024.
2 PwC, "The power of personalization: Building a strategy that works" , 2024.
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