Brands know that customers want personalized content and experiences, but often fail to connect the dots between delivering that personalization in a way that is cost-effective (e.g. overly burdensome on content creators and marketing operations), measurable (e.g. testing and optimization is clearly defined), and drives real results (e.g. produces meaningful differences vs. non-personalized methods). To do this, brands need to approach personalization and personalized content in a way that can be achieved operationally, and that can provide meaningful insights that drive true business results. The approach outlined in this talk was created to help marketers better and more quickly realize value from their personalization efforts. Led by an industry expert, best-selling author, and keynote speaker with 20+ years in the marketing technology and customer experience profession for Fortune 500 companies, this presentation will walk you through the processes and methods to implement in order to successfully create a marketing personalization program that delivers business value.

1. MASTER
CLASS
PHILADELPHIA, PA ~ MAY 2 - 3, 2022
DIGIMARCONMIDATLANTIC.COM | #DigiMarConMidAtlantic
Greg Kihlstrom
CHIEF STRATEGIST
GK5A
ROI on Personalized
Experiences

2. background
● Started in “digital” in 1998
● Founded and sold 2 companies
(Carousel30 & Digics)
● Lean Six Sigma Black Belt and Agile
Certified Coach
● Worked with top brands on CX and
digital transformation:
FedEX, Coca-Cola, HP, VMware, Choice
Hotels, Dell, Marriott, Sunrise Senior
Living, Blue Cross Blue Shield
about me
day jobs
● Principal, GK5A
○ Consultant on CX and EX initiatives
● Host, The Agile Brand Podcast
● Author, Writer, Speaker

3. ROI of Personalized Experiences
1 | Let’s define
personalization

4. Consumers value personalization
91% 80%
of consumers are more likely
to shop with brands who
provide relevant offers and
recommendations [1]
of customers are more likely to
purchase a product or service
from a brand who provides
personalized experiences [2]
[1] Accenture Pulse Survey [2] Epsllon, “The power of me” report, 2018 [3] McKinsey https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/marketing-and-
sales/our-insights/the-value-of-getting-personalization-right-or-wrong-is-multiplying
76%
of consumers get frustrated
when they don’t experience
personalization [3]

5. The ultimate goal
1:1
personalization
Every customer has a
tailored experience to
their unique needs
Increased
Customer
Lifetime Value
Demonstrated
capabilities that drive
customers to buy, buy
more, buy more often,
and refer others
Omnichannel
personalization
Their experience is
tailored from the time
they become aware of a
product or service until
long after they purchase
Multi-touch
attribution
Brands have a thorough
understanding of what
channels, tactics, offers,
and messaging motivate
customers to buy, buy
more, buy more often,
and refer others

6. What exactly do we mean by personalization?
Scale
Segmentation
1-to-1
Reach
Single channel
Multi- or omnichannel
Context
Prescriptive:
Explicit or Implicit
Adaptive

7. Category 1: Scale
Scale
– How granular we
personalize the content,
offers, and experiences,
– Either at a broader
(segmentation) or singular
(1-to-1) level.

8. Category 1: Scale
Segmentation
– Identifying a subsegment of people
within your larger audience.
o The aim is to produce better business
outcomes by delivering more relevant
experiences.
– One challenge: in order to produce
greater outcomes, you have to target
smaller segments.

9. Category 1: Scale
1-to-1 Personalization
– Focus on delivering optimal experiences
to individuals rather than segments.
– Delivers optimal experience for each
customer using all the data available about
the individual.
– Requires rapid data aggregation and
analysis, cross-channel deployment, and
ML optimization.

10. Category 2: Context
Context
– 2 sub-categories:
o External inputs (the brand defines the
methods and controls for
personalization)
o User-defined inputs (the user’s actions
help define the content they see and
the actions they are able to take)

11. Category 2: Context
Prescriptive: Explicit personalization
– Visitor’s profile determine what content
they will see and the user can change the
content as per his/her needs.
– Example: When you are logged in to
Facebook, you see your profile data, your
friends data, your shared posts etc.

12. Category 2: Context
Prescriptive: Implicit personalization
– The user’s past browsing behaviour determines
what content they will see.
– Example: remarketing on Google

13. Category 2: Context
Adaptive personalization
– What they see is determined by the user’s behavior,
sometimes referred to as next best action
– The system automatically adapts itself and might
provide options to the user to personalise his/her
behaviour accordingly.
– One weakness of segmentation is that that you have to
set up business logic for every segment or block of
users you wish to target.

14. Category 3: Reach
Reach
– How broadly personalization is
available across the customer
experience.
– How many platforms and channels
are working seamlessly together to
provide a personalized experience,
content, and offers.

15. Category 3: Reach
Single Channel
– Offers a tailored experience in the most limited way
possible.
– Warning: there can frustration if only one channel (or a
limited set of channels) provides personalized content.

16. Category 3: Reach
Multichannel
– Delivers the types of cross-channel
experience consumers expect.
– Requires access to shared audience
segment and customer profiles across
the organization.
o Customer Data Platforms (CDPs), Data
Management Platforms (DMPs),
Customer Relationship Management
systems (CRMs) and others.

17. Category 3: Reach
Omnichannel
– Across EVERY channel your brand
provides, and implies that it is beyond
a single stage in the customer journey
as well.
– While this should be the “north star”
for all organizations, achieving true
omnichannel personalization is not in
reach for most organizations at this
time.

18. What infrastructure is needed?
4 categories:
Customer
Data
CDP
CRM
DMP
CMP
Feedback Loop
Continuous
Improvement Process
Activation
● Automation
● Content
Management
● Orchestration
● NBA/NBO
● Multivariate Testing
Analysis
Reporting

19. ROI of Personalized Experiences
2 | Data of
personalization

20. Connecting the dots
Customers
want
personalized
experiences
Businesses
need to realize
value (CLV,
RPS, etc.)

21. Introduction
● Great personalization requires:
– Great data + strategic application
of data + continuous improvement

22. Data of Personalization
2 categories of customer data:
Customer-Specific
Demographic
Contextual
Behavioral
Ownership-Specific
3rd and 2nd party
1st party
Zero-party

23. Data of Personalization
Individual-specific
○ Defined by its relationship to the customer,
and the way it is able to describe the
individual.
○ Used to create audience segments from
groups of individuals who share similarities.

24. Data of Personalization: Individual
Demographic Data
○ Consists of an array of applicable socioeconomic
information, including (but not limited to):
■ Age
■ Gender
■ Ethnicity
■ Income
■ Employment Status
■ Home Ownership
■ Internet Access
■ and much more

25. Data of Personalization: Individual
Contextual Data
○ Provides perspective into a customer or their experience.
■ Last item purchased (and/or date of last purchase)
■ Personal information (name, email, address)
■ Date of last customer service call (and if it was resolved or not)
■ Time on hold
■ Customer’s preferred communication method
■ Attitudes about your brand
■ Last webpage viewed
■ Last email opened or received
○ Most effective when stitched together

26. Data of Personalization: Relational
Behavioral data
• Data collected from a customer’s interactions and
engagements:
– Website or mobile app interactions
– Email sign-ups, opens, and clicks
– Subscription renewals
– In-store visits and purchases
– Customer service requests
• Most useful when tied to a specific individual / channel
– (e.g. website, mobile app, call center, etc.)

27. Category 2: Ownership
Ownership-specific
• Determined by its relationship to the brand how the
information is collected, and the entity or “party” that
can claim ownership over it.
There are four sub-categories:
• 3rd party
• 2nd party
• 1st party
• Zero party

28. ROI of Personalized Experiences
3 | Common pain
points

29. How to do this
Brands need to approach personalization and
personalized content in a way that is:
Cost-effective
● Can be achieved
operationally without
being overly
burdensome on
content creators
ROI-Driven
● Achieves the desired
business result(s).
Measurable
● Testing and
optimization are
clearly defined

30. Common pain points
Five areas where personalization can often run into
roadblocks:
• Technology challenges
• Cross-team collaboration
• Data challenges
• Time and resource requirements
• Attribution challenges

31. Technology challenges
Platforms
Necessary
● Customer Data Platform (CDP)
● Customer Relationship Management
(CRM)
● Consent Management Platform (CMP)
● Data Management Platform (DMP)*
Beneficial
● Multivariate Testing Tools
● Customer Journey Orchestration
● Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS)
● Product Recommendations
● Data/Reporting Tools

32. Technology challenges
Build vs. Buy
Pros
Build
● The specifications for the platform are exactly what is
needed and with the exact systems you want to
integrate with
● Data ownership, usage, consent, and privacy can
sometimes be more tightly managed
Buy
● The time to value is generally shorter
● Integrations are often easier with many APIs and
connectors “out of the box”
● Requires less upkeep and maintenance costs
Cons
Build
● Time to value can be longer than off the shelf
● Can be difficult and costly to maintain integrations w/
multiple changing APIs, etc.
● Doesn’t have a common API language
Buy
● Less influence on the product roadmap and priorities
● May or may not work with all of your internal systems
“out of the box”
● Switching costs between monolithic platforms can be
considerable down the road

33. Data challenges
• Creating unified view of customer
across channels is a major challenge

34. Attribution challenges
● Multi-touch attribution provides fuller view of the
influences on a customers purchase behavior, or other
desired actions
○ More comprehensive than first- or last- touch attribution
● Unified Customer IDs
○ A requirement for multi-touch attribution is a method to tie
together a user’s information throughout a conversion
process.

35. Cross-team collaboration
Marketing
Content/
Creative
Data/
Analytics
Engineering
Customer
Service
Customer
Experience
Website
Social
Email
Advertising
etc.
Personalization Working Group

36. Time and resource requirements
• Creating variations required for
personalized content simply takes
more time and effort in most
cases.
• This time is spread across many
roles and resources

37. Customer challenges
• You will run into immediate roadblocks if:
– You don’t have enough information about your
customers
– You can’t get new customers to provide meaningful
data about themselves
• This becomes even more important with the shift
away from 3rd party cookie usage and support.

38. Customer challenges
Ways to build your customer information:
● ​​Contests
● Gated content
● Offers
● Gamification
● Membership
● Loyalty programs
● Ask for small amounts of
information over time

39. Customer challenges
• It’s not about solving ALL of
the challenges, but being
aware of what they are and
managing conflicts as they
occur

40. ROI of Personalized Experiences
4 | Measuring
personalization

41. How do you measure personalization?
Scale
Incremental
Holistic
Process
Testing & Hypotheses
Efficiency
Feedback loop
Audience
Segment
Journey Stage
Customer

42. Category 1: Scale
Incremental measurements
• Personalized experience
vs. non-personalized
• Cross-channel
personalization vs. not
• Single Channel
Conversion
Holistic measurements
• Customer Lifetime Value
(CLV)
• Audience segment
performance
• Multi- or Omnichannel
Performance
• Journey Stage performance

43. Category 1: Scale
Multi-touch attribution (MTA)
• Required to do holistic measurements well
– Need better ways to determine how different channels
work together when doing multi-channel or omnichannel
personalization

44. Category 2: Audience
● Audience Segments
○ Measuring the segments themselves
○ Measuring content against the segments
● Personas
○ Useful as starting points/assumptions

45. Category 2: Audience
Journey Stage

46. Category 2: Audience
Individual Customer
○ In the short term, individual measurement is important for
customer support, tracking, etc.
○ In the longer term, individual measurement support more 1-
to-1 personalization

47. Category 3: Process
Process
• Systems and methods used to
perform personalization, and
how those systems perform,
as well as how they are
improved.

48. Category 3: Process
Hypothesis & Testing
• Draws on the scientific method:
– Define a question or hypothesis
– Make a prediction to test the
hypothesis
– Perform the test by gathering relevant
data
– Analyze the data
– Draw a conclusion

49. Category 3: Process
Efficiency
• Agile sprint-based approach and velocity of sprints
• Automating processes such as image creation or
localization of content
• Utilizing AI tools to identify relevant images in a large
image database
• Implementing a shared content management system

50. Category 3: Process
Feedback loops
• Performance of audience segmentation
• Impact of content variations, including
messaging, images, and calls to action
• Customer journey performance
• Attribution & measurement quality
• Internal efficiencies

51. ROI of Personalized Experiences
5 | Ways to get
started

52. Measurement sophistication
• Define Key Performance Indicators
(KPIs) for personalization.
• Build your measurement
sophistication over time
• Create a roadmap for your data,
integrations, attributions, and
measurements of success.

53. Map the Customer Journey
• You have most likely created a customer journey map
for one reason or another, but have you included
personalization considerations as well?
• Doing so will allow you to better understand key
moments where personalized content will be of the
greatest value

54. Map the Customer Journey
As you map the journey:
• Do you have enough customer data to personalize?
• Where would multi-channel personalization benefit the
customer?
• What teams and processes are needed to support content
variations and technical integrations?
• How will you perform multivariate testing and analysis?
• What does “success” looks like?

55. Pilot Projects
• Best way to learn and iterate
• Will often help get initiatives like advancing
personalization off the ground.
• Pick a pilot project that is not only low effort, but that
provides metrics that point to an organizational KPI.

56. Moving towards omnichannel
One channel at a time slowly but
steadily builds your multi-channel
personalization capabilities.
Build personalization channel by channel…
Website Email Mobile App Social Live chat

57. Content creation process
Take the time to look into improvements in your workflow
and processes, including:
• How multiple variations of images and copy will be
sourced
• How the legal and compliance approval will be impacted
• How content will be managed, edited, and versioned
• How feedback about the content and process will be
incorporated

58. Plant your brand garden
• Prioritize collecting first- and zero-party
data
• Brands have taken an approach such as:
– adding subscription models
– publishing content
– customer loyalty programs
– membership programs with advanced
access to products and offers
• For the best success, find a natural
approach

59. Center of excellence or steering committee
• Helps to solve for some of the internal cross-team
collaboration challenges discussed earlier.
• Doing personalization well means working across
practice areas, departments, and often nationally or
globally.
• Creating a team that regularly meets to discuss the goals
of personalization and how it will get implemented as an
enterprise can ensure alignment and assist long-term
success.

60. ROI of Personalized Experiences
6 | Summary &
Conclusion

61. The ultimate goal
1:1
personalization
Omnichannel
personalization
across the
journey
Multi-touch
attribution
Increased
Customer
Lifetime Value

62. Summary
• Personalization can benefit both the customer and the
organization
• Important to be realistic about the resources required to
do personalization well
• Create a sustainable personalization program
• Define and track personalization success KPIs
• Ensure stakeholder buy-in and support for the people,
processes, and platforms required

63. Listen to the podcast
@theagile_brand @gregkihlstrom

64. books available for sale
gregkihlstrom.com | Amazon | iTunes

65. ROI of Personalized Experiences
ROI of Personalized
Experiences
G R E G K I H L S T R Ö M