Personalisation strategies need to be built from the ground up

When organisations are about to implement a personalisation strategy, it is best if they build it from the ground up.

Jason McNellis, senior research director at Gartner speaks to Digital Nation about how organisations go about building their personalisation strategy.

“What brands need to do and what we often help brands do is create a multi-part business case. You can figure out where either that breakeven is on the investment or the hurdle rate that you need to exceed to get approval from the CFO, what does that look like?” he said.

When the improvement rate is in single digits, McNellis said that is when he feels “safe”. When he sees business cases with 300 percent improvement, the data collection might have been askew.

“There was a tremendous return in making something functional or their measurement was poorly done. When I see leading brands investing in personalisation or investing in the next stage of personalisation, often that increase is measured in single digit percentage, not percentage points.  

“But if they've done the homework of building the business case that they know that's enough to get the ROI that they need,” he explained.

Personalisation strategies can be divided into two groups: personalisation to remove pain and new experiences from personalisation.

“We have personalisation that's going to remove pain, the classic let's make digital commerce easier, let's reduce friction. If your experiences are cumbersome, you'll get some bits from that. But that's very different from let's add new personalised experiences that take things to the next level,” he said.  

“One of the ways I like to think about it is that first category of removing pain will help Jason buy something on my website. But do I have new experiences, maybe something in the line of quiz commerce that will help Jason shop on my website, those are very different use cases.”

McNellis explains the removing pain strategy is an “established playbook”.

“That is that's where often people start, but if they're going to keep getting returns on their personalisation investment, they're going to need to think about how they can help customers and that's what's going to take them to the next level,” he added.