Marketers have recognized the importance of personalized and targeted customer experiences since the early days of the internet. In 1999, DoubleClick launched DART (Dynamic Advertising Reporting and Targeting), setting the stage for tailored digital experiences. Companies like Google and Facebook have since built highly profitable business models around these principles. However, many companies still find it challenging to implement even basic personalized digital experiences.
Let’s talk about this historic appetite for personalization and how our new partnership with Lytics CDP squares into it.
Web Personalization Backed by Research
A lot of research has been done on personalization. By now, most consumers have accepted, if not embraced, the concept of white-glove web experience over the noise of irrelevant content suggestions and ads. That acceptance has a direct impact on web engagement, conversion rates and return on advertising spend.
Customer Engagement
According to this McKinsey report, over three-quarters of consumers said that receiving personalized communications was a key factor in prompting their consideration of a brand, and 78% said such content made them more likely to buy from the same brand again. For businesses, personalization often drives a 10 to 15% revenue lift, research shows.
Conversion Rate
Higher engagement and better conversion rates are two key factors that tend to drive revenue uptick. Increased engagement also means the customer feels more connected to a brand. This connection translates to greater brand loyalty and retention. According to the Adobe research of 400 marketers and 1,000+ adult consumers, personalization impacts and increases customer retention by 43% and customer loyalty by a whopping 53%.
Return on Advertising Spend
Personalization can significantly impact return on advertising spend (ROAS) as customers respond more favorably to ads that are tailored to their needs and wants. Gartner’s Making Personalization Pay research shows most businesses saw improvements by personalizing website content based on customer ads and behavior.
As marketers spend more time, resources and budget to drive qualified leads to conversion, personalization has proven a measurable way to improve and optimize the conversion rate and return on ad spend KPIs. In the Adobe study, marketers reported a 25% increase in conversion rate when delivering effective personalized experiences to their customers.
But There’s a Wrinkle
Many companies have made attempts at personalization in the last decade and failed. This is rooted in the fact that aligning data about a particular prospect or customer with a proper and timely interaction is a complex intersection of strategy, technology and content.
The data is collected and stored in many different systems. Assembling and coalescing that data into meaningful intelligence about the customer, aligning your content to those findings, making informed decisions, and delivering that content at the right time is a massive effort. That’s not to mention the death of the third-party cookie and its impact on a marketer’s ability to personalize the customer’s experience. But all is not lost.
Pantheon & Lytics: The Partnership that Changes it All
As a Pantheon customer, you will have experienced our deep commitment to providing a platform that helps you achieve your business objectives. We do this by delivering unmatched performance for Drupal and WordPress sites with streamlined workflows, scalable infrastructure and lightning-fast performance. And we want to do more.
As we continue this commitment, we’ve embarked on an advanced technology partner program that aligns partners with complimentary offerings that enhance the value and ROI of our customer’s investments in the Pantheon platform. When we began considering what segment of partners to consider first, it became clear that solving the website personalization challenge for Pantheon customers could have a significant impact on their marketing.
If we could just find a partner whose values align with ours and whose offering could solve the industry-wide difficulties associated with implementing personalization. This initially proved to be a challenge. Meeting with many leading CDP and personalization vendors, we saw a path leading right to the challenges so many have experienced trying to deliver personalization. High technology and implementation costs, as well as large efforts associated with customer segmentation and content auditing.
Then we met James McDermott, CEO and Founder of Lytics, and a powerful partnership opportunity emerged.
It became clear that James and Lytics were ideally suited from a values and objectives’ perspective. It also became clear that combining the Lytics CDP and Website Personalization engine with the power of the Pantheon platform on Drupal and WordPress would become a market-disrupting solution. This partnership provides a way for marketers to rapidly implement and deploy personalized web experiences and begin positively impacting customer engagement and conversion rates.
If you’re a Pantheon customer or Digital Agency partner, you can get started with Lytics here for free today.
