Dive Brief:
- Nearly all leaders — 97% — feel unprepared for Google’s phaseout of third-party cookies, according to a survey of 1,000 executives released by Optimizely last week. Leaders are concerned about how the phaseout will affect their ability to understand customers’ preferences and behavior.
- Even without Google’s changes on the horizon, leaders face stumbling blocks with their personalization efforts. Only one-quarter of leaders have a unified definition of personalization throughout their organization, and 2 in 5 lack proper analytics to enable real-time personalization efforts.
- The move away from third-party cookies marks a great opportunity to improve personalization strategies, according to Thomas Randall, director of AI market research at Info-Tech Research Group.
Dive Insight:
The deprecation of cookies offers businesses an opportunity to review and improve personalization efforts — many of which were missing the mark to begin with.
Companies seeking better personalization in general should start by refining their customer personas and segmentation to better understand consumers’ motivations and needs, Randall said.
Businesses can map out journeys to understand common touch points to identify the best opportunities for improvement. By gathering data on these touch points, leaders can apply their findings to serve up better experiences.
Any personalization review should be cross-departmental, according to Randall. Though departments have different use cases for personalization, companies benefit from a unified approach to how they want to personalize experiences and measure results.
“Should various definitions or measurements be used across departments, resources will be inefficiently allocated toward different goals and ultimately lead to poor ROI across investments in sales, marketing and customer service,” Randall told CX Dive in an email.
Companies shouldn’t stop at initial strategy reviews, Randall said. Personalization is a moving target; by reviewing personalization practices regularly companies will be better able to keep up with shifting customer expectations.
