A majority of marketers (88 percent) have shifted away from traditional campaign activities to omnichannel strategies, according to the third installment of Merkle’s Customer Engagement Report. The report explores marketers’ data usage, barriers to personalization and marketers’ measurement capabilities.
Merkle’s research shows that personalization is growing, but there’s a need for growth toward real-time personalization. On where they have high visibility into their customer journeys, 84 percent of respondents cited digital channels such as website, social media and email; followed by 59 percent and 44 percent who have high visibility into customer journeys in offline channels and mass media, respectively. A quarter of respondents said their focus is on real-time personalization tactics whereas the remaining three quarters prioritize pre-defined personalization or somewhere in the middle.
The report also found that brands have a strong reliance on customer input as well as management technologies in their martech efforts. Eighty-two percent of respondents answered seven or higher when asked what degree of customer input they apply to product strategy and improvements. More respondents (58 percent) are investing in databases and management tech over campaign and decision management tools.
When looking at overall implementation of personalization to date, 54 percent of US marketers have implemented personalization in five or more channels compared to 57 percent for UK marketers.
For greater personalization, Merkle suggests applying martech investments to operational activities such as identity, data and insights given that 29 percent of marketers have dedicated 21-25 percent of their budgets to identity solutions.
There’s room for growth when it comes to how brands are measuring the effectiveness of their marketing efforts as only 54 percent of respondents said they have clear definitions for each key performance indicator (KPI) across their business. Similarly, 23 percent of marketers have only a data management (DMP) platform or neither a DMP nor a customer data platform (CDP).
One of the case studies highlighted in the report includes British daily newspaper The Times’ success in growing click-through rates by 200 percent via artificial intelligence-driven models applied to newsletters.
Findings in this report are based on a survey conducted by a Merkle Company, Ugam, in November 2019 with 400 marketers at major US and UK brands across different verticals.
