Evergage Report Reveals Personalization is Reaching Mainstream Status as a Marketing Initiative

SOMERVILLE, Mass., June 14, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Evergage, the real-time personalization platform company, today published its annual research report on the state of personalization, "2016 Trends in Personalization." The study, conducted with Researchscape International, found that 85% of the marketers surveyed are using personalization. However, most companies' initiatives barely make the grade, with the majority of marketers giving their own (55%) – and their competitors' (63%) – campaigns a grade of "C" or lower.

"Each year, we turn to marketers to gauge their priorities and challenges. Over the last 12 months, personalization has seen rapid and widespread adoption. Now, companies must dig deeper into their initiatives, fine-tune what is working and embrace newer, more sophisticated methods of personalization," said Karl Wirth, co-founder and CEO of Evergage.

State of Personalization in 2016
While the majority of marketers have deployed personalization programs, just 42% are "very" or "extremely" confident they have the tools they need to do personalization and think they can go further. Only 18% of marketers are "very" or "extremely" satisfied with the level of personalization currently woven into their marketing efforts.

When employing personalization, marketers today most frequently use it in email (67%), on websites (56%), mobile websites (27%), mobile apps (20%) and web applications (19%).

Of those not already using personalization in some capacity or using only email personalization, over half (55%) plan to implement website or in-app personalization in the next year.

The Value of Personalization
Personalization is increasingly viewed as a strategic priority. 74% of respondents said that personalization is either "very" or "extremely" important to their organization. As a result, they are allocating more staff, budget and resources:

• Dedicated Personnel – In 2015, 51% of respondents had employees dedicated to personalization. This year, this number increased to 57%. Of this group, 39% have personnel dedicated full-time to personalization.
• Measuring ROI – Respondents using personalization in their marketing campaigns realized increased conversion rates (65%), increased visitor engagement (62%) and improved customer experiences (61%). Additionally, 89% report an overall lift from personalization efforts (a 3% increase over 2015), a majority of which (53%) have seen a lift greater than 10%.
• Poor Personalization – Your Worst Nightmare? Marketers reported that incorrect personalization is worse/scarier than: sending an email campaign with a typo (71%), higher-than-average unsubscribe rates on an email campaign (46%), forgetting to attend a meeting scheduled by the CMO (43%) and a "page not found" error (40%).

"For years, 1:1 personalized experiences have been the dream for digital marketers," continued Wirth. "While companies are getting closer with implementations of personalization, to be effective and truly deliver a 1:1 experience, marketers must ensure they have a platform that collects and maintains a unified profile for each individual visitor, and enables a response to the data – across any channel ­– in real time. This is no longer a pipe dream – it's an imperative."

Barriers to Personalization
When asked why their organizations have not yet adopted website or in-app personalization, 39% of marketers indicated that the top barriers are a lack of effective solution/technology, budget constraints and a lack of knowledge/skills/people.

Other barriers include insufficient integration and consistency across all marketing channels, not enough time, bad quality/dirty data and scalability across sites, to name a few.

"Personalization doesn't have to be a challenge. As marketers look to implement personalized campaigns into their marketing mix, they should look for an integrated platform – one that talks to the other solutions in the marketing stack, supports both rule-based and algorithmic personalization and can react to data in real time – to support their efforts," said Wirth. "A platform that is also marketer-friendly and requires no support or intervention from IT will make it easy to quickly tailor customer experiences and realize the greatest ROI and results from personalization."

Looking Forward
Turning to the next 12 months, organizations revealed their plans and priorities on personalization:

• Budgets – More than 1 in 3 (35%) plan to increase budgets for personalization, with 40% expecting their budget to increase between 1-10% and 38% expecting it to increase 21-100%. Just 4% of respondents said their budget will decrease.
• Greater Emphasis – 64% of marketers want to see personalization be a bigger priority in their organizations.

For more information and to download the full report, visit: http://www.evergage.com/resources/ebooks/2016-trends-in-personalization-survey-report.

About the Survey
Evergage enlisted Researchscape International to help survey 250 organizations of all sizes about their marketing initiatives and interest in personalization. Respondents came from a range of industries and held a wide variety of marketing or senior-management titles. While most came from the United States, the study includes the viewpoint of respondents from 14 other countries. Researchscape used an online survey and the results were not weighted.

About Evergage
Evergage's cloud-based platform delivers real-time personalization to more than 1 billion web visitors, improving demand generation, revenue growth and customer success for over 120 organizations, including Gardener's Supply Company, Intuit, Publishers Clearing House, Rue La La and Zumiez. Evergage empowers marketers to increase engagement and conversions of visitors and users through real-time 1:1 personalization based on deep behavioral analytics and customer data. Evergage is a 2015 Best in Biz Awards, Golden Bridge Awards and The Stevie American Business Awards winner, a two-time MITX Awards winner and a two-time BostInno "50 on Fire" finalist. For more information, visit http://evergage.com or contact the company at [email protected] or 1-888-310-0589.

Media Contact:
Sarah Otterstetter
LEWIS
Email: [email protected]
Phone: +1 781-418-2416

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160328/348442LOGO

SOURCE Evergage

Related Links

http://evergage.com