ROI boosts personalisation take-up

The adoption of personalised digital marketing messages is expected to treble within the next 12 months as brand owners flock to the technique in an effort to boost loyalty and secure a rapid return on investment.
The claims come in a new survey by Neolane, which quizzed 600 marketers from across the UK and mainland Europe on their current and planned marketing strategies.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the most effective ways of acquiring the intelligence to enable customised online experiences include building a complete customer profile, and monitoring purchase and web behaviour.
The survey claims that by 2014, nearly three times as many brands as today, will offer their customers realtime website experiences, helped by the fact that fewer than 5% of marketers doubt the ROI potential of web personalisation.
However, budgets are being kept in check, with nearly three quarters of those charged with creating more personalised web experiences allocating a spend of less than €50,000 (£42,000).
Yet of those who have invested in delivering personalised web experiences, more than half recouped the cost of the investment ‘within months,’ rather than years.
After the web, personalisation of email, call centre and point-of-sale experiences are seen by marketers as their priorities today, but by 2014 most expect social and mobile content personalisation to become their main focus, after the web.
Neolane UK head of marketing Martin Smith said: “Once they opt-in to personalised experiences, today’s consumers expect to be recognised by the brands they purchase from and to be presented with relevant content and offers.
“The survey indicates that delivering a personalised web and email experience will become the ‘norm’ for European brands and that social and mobile personalisation too should be on every marketers’ horizon.
“Brands which have not yet grasped how to build the processes that deliver personalised customer experiences could be undermining customer loyalty and profitability, perhaps also risking the loss of market share to more innovative competitors.”