The weird, frustrating and insanely short-sighted thing about personalization.An unseemly tirade by, for, and about retailers with ambition.

You know what’s frustrating?

Watching someone do something even when they know it’s going to end badly… and (sure enough) it does.

Well, if that’s frustrating, how about watching an entire industry do something counter-productive even when everyone knows for a fact that it’s wrong and even agrees on the smart thing to do.

That’s retail right now.

Today, as you’re reading this,

every single retailer knows that a personalized experience is better than a generic, same-thing-for-everyone experience.

And the biggest news?

Customers know it too. They expect you to take account of what you know about them. Why the hell wouldn’t you?

Five years ago, some people would have argued that personalization isn’t worth it. But today, it’s an accepted fact:

If you can take what you know about someone and use it in your interactions, you’ll get better results than if you ignore what you know and treat them like everybody else.

Retailers also know that personalization is much more than a product reco here and a “Hi Sophie” there.

Every part of the customer experience can now be personalized. Any web page. Every email. All interactions on mobile sites.

Anything and everything can be personalized (and even linked across channels). There’s no excuse for delivering the generic version.

Every retailer also knows that the Great God of Optimization is actually a myth.

And that if you test and tweak for ten years to ‘optimize’ that one landing page for all audience segments what you’re actually doing is making it sub-optimal for every specific segment.

When you segment your audience, and treat the segments differently, you improve every metric that matters:

Whether it’s engagement, traffic, conversion or loyalty. That idea is not even debated any more in retailing circles (yes, we hang out in circles).

Every retailer also gets that you can’t just personalize in one channel, like email.

They know that customers just don’t think of your brand as a bunch of specialist teams that never talk to each other (even if that’s true) (which we really hope it isn’t).

Your customers see you as one brand. One thing. One entity and personality and organization. And you should return the favor.

But if you get all chummy and personal in an email then treat a person like a stranger when they hit the website, it feels kind of… eerily fake.

So okay.

Remember that frustration you feel when you see a smart person do a not-so-smart thing?

Now you know what it feels like to watch the online retail industry put their fingers in their collective ears and hum the theme tune to Gilligan’s Island.

6%are actually doing it.

96%of retailers say

personalization is awesome but only

Because, even though every (and we mean every) retailer knows the power of true multi-channel personalization, only the few, the best are actually doing anything about it.

A statistic from Econsultancy:

6%are actually doing it.

96%of retailers say

personalization is awesome but only

Because, even though every (and we mean every) retailer knows the power of true multi-channel personalization, only the few, the best are actually doing anything about it.

A statistic from Econsultancy:

Short pause for that depressing reality to settle in.

Now let’s snap out of it.

Because the exasperating gap between what retailers know and what they do is actually a big, fat, shiny and awesomely lucrative opportunity for any brave retailer willing to close that gap.

(We’re thinking of you here).

Because, here’s the thing:

The reason retailers are delaying their personalization efforts is based on two total misconceptions.

(Misconceptions that the vendor community has actually helped propagate).

The first misconception:

“Personalization is hard.”

“It will create more work for a team that can hardly handle the work it’s already got. The more segments we create, the more special experiences we’ll have to design and deploy and test and measure. That’s scary.”

(Well, if we believed this, we’d hold off too.)

The second misconception:

“Personalization is complex”

“One-experience-fits-all is complicated enough. Shattering our customer journey into lots of segmented customer journeys is going to be hellishly messy. This calls for a multi-year research project, with maybe consultants and models and data warehouses and road maps and stuff.”

(Yikes.)

The weird thing is that both of these misconceptions are actually true if you approach personalization like a typical data warehouse re-platforming or IT migration.

Done the old-school, IT-driven way, it’s gonna hurt. And take forever. And, let’s face it, probably fail.

But here’s the tragicomedy of it all:

Personalization is WAY easier and far simpler than retailers think it is.

It does NOT take a team of ten to create and deploy personalized experiences for a few dozen meaningful audience segments.

It doesn’t even take a team of five. It takes a team of you. Over a few lunch breaks.

And it does NOT take years of research and a snafu of systems integrators (ooh: a new collective noun) with a new data warehouse and six coders to link to your ecommerce platform.

You can actually get going in a week or so. And once you’re up to speed, you can deploy new experiences for new segments in minutes. Without bothering the very talented but very overworked IT dudes.

This isn’t something we wish to be true. This is something we know to be true.

We’ve seen dozens of retailers do it every day. We help them do it better every day. And, yes, we give them the platform that makes it almost embarrassingly easy to do it every day.

(No, we’re not going to get all salesy on you. Yet.)

So let’s wrap this sucker up:

So let’s wrap this sucker up:

Every retailer knows that personalization is the way to go. But most retailers think it’s too hard and too complex to tackle.

A few have already discovered this is a myth and are acting on this knowledge to their advantage.

A few have already discovered this is a myth and are acting on this knowledge to their advantage.

So let’s wrap this sucker up:

And one has just started to suspect there’s a way forward on this personalization thing. And that it’s going to be good. And that one is you.

Every retailer knows that personalization is the way to go. But most retailers think it’s too hard and too complex to tackle.

So let’s wrap this sucker up:

And one has just started to suspect there’s a way forward on this personalization thing. And that it’s going to be good. And that one is you.

We can’t wait to talk.

Monetate powers multi-channel personalization for the world’s best brands.

We do it with a powerful personalization platform that works with your technology stack to deliver real-time customized experiences to an unlimited number of audience segments.

And it’s all ready to help you personalize now: with whatever data silos you have and whatever marketing tools you love.

Drop in and see us.

The perfect place to start is exactly where you are. And the best time… is right now.

Monetate. Personalize now.

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