Study after study confirms that personalized marketing communications are more effective than generic messages. A study by global research firm Accenture, for example, found 91% of consumers are more likely to shop with brands that know them and provide relevant offers and recommendations1.
The study also found consumers will share their data if it leads to engaging experiences and if they can trust brands to be transparent and responsible with private information.
Yet, even as consumers crave better interactions and brands realize personalization is the key to client retention, this sophisticated form of outreach is not always easy to achieve. Before the personal email can be sent, or the personalized document hits the press, significant preparation and groundwork is necessary. Companies can take one of two approaches to achieve the objective of producing personalized customer documents — merge the unlinked databases into a central repository or compose the documents with separately managed data brought together by the document composition software.
We know by now that collecting data is relatively easy. It comes from many channels—purchases, website traffic, items stored in carts, geographic location, and interactions with brands. Companies gather customer data from many sources—customer relations, sales, and marketing departments. The challenge isn’t data. The challenge is knowing how to leverage all those disparate bits of information for maximum results.
