Pitching personalization to your boss

Digital personalization is the key to a long-lasting, value-creating relationship with your current and future customers. It is the only way to offer them relevant and unique experiences that closely address their needs.

For your personalization strategy to succeed you need resources, time and a well-thought out plan, along with a dedicated team with the right skills. Finally, you need a technology partner that will enable you to deliver on your strategy.

Clearly, it is your bosses who will allocate these resources. Successfully launching personalization will therefore depend on your ability to demonstrate to them that this program is an investment that is really worth making.

In this article, we therefore provide you with the best arguments and strategy to use when pitching personalization to your managers.

1 What arguments can you use to convince your boss of the importance of personalization?

Different stakeholders in your project will need to convinced with different arguments dependent on their individual needs, constraints and goals.

For users, it’s the quality of the tool that is most important. However, decision makers with a strategic vision will want to find innovative and profitable solutions that enable them to retain a competitive edge in the market.

From talking to our clients, we know that certain factors carry significant weight when it comes to convincing top-level executives.

Here are the arguments that, in our experience will have the greatest impact.

To convert, consumers want personalized experiences  

Personalization has been used as an essential lever by brands for several years, and consumers increasingly demand it. Moreover, 48% of consumers have already left a website and bought from a rival due to a poor experience. 66% of global consumers surveyed by Kameleoon said the experience delivered now would impact their future purchasing behavior.

Managers may argue that personalization is intrusive as it is based on the collection of personal data, damaging brand reputation with customers.

However, 83% of consumers agreed that are happy to share their data if this leads to a personalized experience, as long as the company is transparent about how the data is collected. Among these consumers, 73% say they’ve never experienced excessively invasive personalization.

Furthermore, the most useful information for segmenting your audience is the behavioral data linked to the context of their current visit or, in other words, hot data. This is anonymous and doesn’t reveal the identity of your visitors. Ultimately, cold data (from your CRM or other systems) is just secondary information for your marketing strategy.

To quote François Marical, Chief Data Officer at Cdiscount:

“If you’re trying to take your entire data ecosystem on board at all costs to use personal data, then you’re wasting your time. Real-time visitor behavior is the most important type of data for successfully personalizing their experience in a meaningful way.”

Personalization is a key part of any general digital optimization strategy

75% of websites that have over one million visitors now conduct A/B testing to improve the overall user experience. This is an essential conversion optimization method that enables you to gather facts and figures to evaluate the impact of changes and experiments on a website.

However, for your optimization strategy to be truly effective, it’s not enough to just improve the general experience on your website by choosing what suits most people on average. You need to go further - not all of your visitors will have the same expectations and needs.

With personalization, you can address your different visitor segments or even each individual consumer, in a differentiated manner. This more precise, tailored approach has a powerful impact on your conversion rates.

If you are in the early stages of your digital strategy, you should already be thinking about personalization and how it will fit into your overall conversion strategy.

Indeed, by adding personalization to your digital strategy at a later date you may have to rethink your organizational structure or the tools that you use.

Therefore, as soon as you start optimizing your digital presence, you should look to include personalization and choose the right tools, such as a comprehensive solution that covers the entire conversion optimization chain.

You need to act now to avoid being left behind by rivals 

In one of its studies, Gartner estimates that the companies that have invested in online personalization will earn 30% more income than rivals.

Those brands that adopted personalization early have had time to create a new organizational structure and to gain optimization skills that benefit their competitiveness.

Companies that personalize also improve their customer relationship, increasing retention and upselling opportunities.

In other words, the longer you wait before embracing personalization, the further ahead your competitors will be.

While they have a head-start, they can be caught if you act quickly. According to research by The Boston Consulting Group, only 15% of companies can be considered true personalization leaders and 65% are still using segmented marketing or even mass-market approaches. 

Personalization can reduce the cost of your marketing program 

Personalization allows you to improve the customer experience on your website across the entire lifecycle: you can engage visitors, encourage them to convert, build loyalty and retain them.

You might already be achieving these goals, but how and at what cost?

Personalization not only allows you to reach your goals, but enables you to optimize the cost of achieving them.

Research published in Harvard Business Review, found that personalization enables companies to reduce acquisition costs by 50%, increase income by 5%-15% and improve the efficiency of marketing spend by 10%-30%.

Optimizing marketing costs is a clear goal for many brands. Demonstrating the benefits of personalization, French retailer Cdiscount halved the cost of running promotions, compared to traditional campaigns, all while boosting revenue, through AI-driven personalization.

Investment in personalization delivers tangible ROI 

90% of leading marketers say personalization significantly contributes to business profitability.

The reason that many marketers are investing in personalization is because it is very profitable to do so, both in terms of income and time savings.

Personalization enables you to increase your turnover and margins while also saving time by automating tasks that are complex, if not impossible, to perform manually.

According to research by The Boston Consulting Group, brands that have a personalization strategy are seeing revenues increase by 6%-10%. This is two to three times faster than those that do not personalize.

Companies that invest the most obtain the best results. On average, personalization leaders invest 30% more than other companies.

So, don’t just take into account the core investment; think about what it can bring you in terms of revenue and time savings.

2 What approach should you use to persuade your managers about personalization?

1. Identify the resources you need for your program 

To embrace personalization, you will need resources: time, skills, and a technology partner. And of course, all of this has a cost attached.

The best way to convince your superiors is to turn up prepared. If you’ve identified in advance the necessary resources for your project, then you’re making the task easier for your boss: they will have access to all the facts that they need to make a decision.

The main resources required for a personalization strategy are:

• People: you’ll need to recruit or train optimization specialists, project managers, data analysts, developers and designers. Here's our advice for building a dedicated personalization team.
• Tools: you’ll require a personalization solution that meets your current and future needs and covers the entire conversion optimization chain, avoiding the need for multiple tools. Here's our advice for choosing the right personalization solution.
• Time: the time needed from different stakeholders (regular meetings, training, etc.)

It’s up to you to assess what this means for your team, so you have all the necessary information at hand when you meet with your superiors.

2. Demonstrate the added value personalization brings, using examples from your sector

Give your managers a concrete demonstration of the benefits of personalization by showing what has already been done and examples of what has worked well.

Take a look at relevant use cases that correspond to your sector or to businesses with challenges or goals similar to your own.

For example, if you are in the automotive industry, look at success stories of other big brands to show how personalization has added value by increasing the volume of qualified leads sent to dealerships.

In e-commerce, present a retention use case focused on improving conversions from those visitors who are about to leave the website, for example.

We provide a range of resources to help you find the most relevant use cases for your goals and industry:

• Find tangible examples of use cases from big brands on our Resources page. These can be filtered by goal and industry.
• Identify the challenges faced by each industry and how personalization addresses these on our Sector page.
• Kameleoon’s consultants are available to chat to you about your personalization project and work with you to devise specific use cases for your challenges

3. Provide an outline roadmap for the program

One last tip: be ready to provide an initial roadmap for your personalization strategy. Creating a roadmap also helps prioritize the different stages of your project, thus showing that you have considered your long-term strategy.

To create your roadmap, you must involve all stakeholders and take into account all available resources, along with the time that you are dedicating to the strategy alongside your ongoing projects.

The roadmap legitimizes your project and enables you to estimate provisional results. You can thus set yourself goals that fit your situation and enable your team and your manager to visualize how the project flows, along with how it can potentially improve your priority KPIs.

You now have everything you need to pitch your personalization project to your bosses and to convince them to invest. Over to you and good luck!