Too many companies are stuck running the bare minimum of personalized campaigns—using first_name campaigns that only scratch the surface of what great personalization can do.

Providing tailored experiences to customers remains a challenge for nearly two-thirds (63%) of digital marketing executives. That's because many businesses consider personalization a flashy tactic and not a core competency for your customer experience. 

Investing in personalization can be easier and faster than you think. By fully centering the customer's needs and preferences throughout the customer journey, you can give your customers a more tailored online experience that pays off big time for your revenue goals. 

The power of personalization

Your customers expect a personalized experience when they shop. Seventy-one percent expect some level of personalization, and 76% of shoppers get frustrated when they don't find it, according to McKinsey. It's an effective part of the buying cycle from consideration to customer loyalty, with 76% of shoppers more likely to purchase after a personalized experience.

That means personalization strongly impacts revenue and growth. McKinsey's research also showed that personalization provided a 10-15% revenue lift overall. Of the companies they analyzed, those with the fastest growth rates were more likely to prioritize personalization as part of their customer experience. 

We’ve seen results like that with our own customers too. By making personalization a core part of their marketing strategy, the team at Ruggable was able to increase conversions by 25%.

Businesses need to stop thinking about personalization as a tactic and start thinking about it as a strategy. By tailoring your messaging and content to your audience segments, you can infuse personalization into nearly every aspect of your website. This level of personalization gives you more control over the experience — and guides customers to interact with what they’re most interested in.

Think of it like creating a premier shopping experience in a designer boutique IRL vs. a yard sale. You wouldn’t want to set out random boxes of inventory and hope customers can find something. Instead, present the products they want to buy on a pedestal, making them easy to purchase. That has a real impact on your bottom line.

It's time to tie your personalization strategy to your revenue goals.

Why you should tie personalization to revenue goals

Aligning personalization and revenue provides a clear roadmap to experiment with your customer experience and facilitate real results. Doing so allows you to:

1. Quantify your performance to determine impact

There's no better way to prove to your team that personalization works than by connecting personalization directly to your revenue. 

While it's useful to track traffic, for example, as a website manager, your executive team cares more about sales generated from your funnels.

Testing personalized headers, images, and detailed CTAs on a revenue basis, for example, rather than top-line traffic, can show how powerful personalization can be for your organization.

2. Identify high-performing use cases and double down

Like any "best practices" advice, some tactics will work great for your audience, and some will fall flat.

Evaluating each of your personalization use cases based on revenue allows you to single out the specific tactics that resonate with your audience — so you can scale those learnings across the rest of your channels beyond your website.

The more data-driven you can be with your efforts, the more you can optimize your programs against your organization's overall goals.

3. Communicate the value of personalization to the broader organization 

The more you tie your personalization efforts to the bottom line, the easier it will be to showcase your program's impact to the rest of the organization. Consider creating a dashboard that can show how your experimentation moves the needle, and be sure to surface those insights to the rest of the team regularly. 

Bring the results of your personalization efforts to the larger marketing team so they can better understand their audience and how to best connect with them. This way, you’re creating a more complete, tailored experience for potential customers from the moment they hear about your business to when they click “buy.”

How to tie your personalization strategy to revenue goals

You're probably thinking, "But I don't own revenue. That's so-and-so."

The thing is, everyone in the business should be able to tie their individual activities to revenue. Whether they're writing code for the product or building relationships with customers on social media, everything done should have a purpose. 

Here's how to add revenue goals to your personalization strategy:

1. Work backward from your overall organizational goals

Your CEO has a number in mind of what they want to hit this year as an organization. But your personalization efforts aren't responsible for that big number. Find a realistic revenue goal for your program by working backward from your overall number, sales and marketing responsibilities, and channels. How does what you own connect to revenue? 

2. Set a baseline for your current performance

Before you can set a goal to improve that revenue number, you have to know your current state. Understand your full-funnel impact, from impressions and opens to engagement, click-through rate, and conversions. You can't improve revenue without moving the needle on one or more of those funnel metrics. And you can't improve anything without knowing how you're currently performing. 

3. Identify your leading indicators to watch

Sort these KPIs (key performance indicators) into leading indicators (metrics that help predict future success, like calls booked or customer lifetime value) and lagging indicators (metrics that help show past performance, like web traffic and social media engagement). As you watch your performance change, these help you know which lever to pull.

Like most popular KPIs businesses use to determine their success, revenue is a lagging indicator. However, your leading indicators will help you forecast your revenue impact as a channel. In email, for example, your list growth and hygiene can be a leading indicator for your overall performance. If you're constantly acquiring new leads for your email list, you're more likely to generate more revenue in the future. The same is true for your website traffic. The more top-of-funnel traffic you receive, the more likely you'll see conversions down the road.

4. Connect your revenue to your marketing efforts

Some channels are more difficult to directly connect to revenue than others, which is why your leading and lagging indicators come in handy. But if you're working with a sales channel — your website, mobile app, or email, for example — you should be able to measure revenue directly.

5. Experiment with your individual campaigns 

Once you know which metrics to track, you can run personalization use cases to optimize your personalized experiences against revenue. 

This kind of personalized experiences can take many different forms, including:

• Surfacing categories on the home page that shoppers tend to visit.

• Showing local stores or events based on geolocation.

• Adjusting CTAs based on where browsers are in their customer journey.

• Changing the hero image for your web page based on demographic data.

• Swapping out customer testimonials based on industry or company size.

• Matching website messaging to retargeting ads or email campaigns to keep the journey seamless.

You’ll have to test what resonates the most with different segments of your shoppers. Tapping into their preferences can take time — and you may find yourself surprised by the results. Software company Personio saw a 46% conversion uplift on their site for small businesses and a 45% conversion increase with Enterprise customers. Personalization was the assist their marketing and sales teams needed to run a fully locked-in ABM strategy. 

Connect your personalization strategy to revenue with Ninetailed

Adding personalization into your website experience doesn’t need to take hours of time fiddling with code or weeks trying to get personalized experiences into a sprint cadence. 

Ninetailed allows you to create personalized experiences right inside your CMS workflow, so you don’t need to depend on developers to make it happen. Create, analyze, and iterate your website personalization at scale. Learn more here.

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