• by Jack Loechner , Staff Writer @mp_research, February 1, 2016

According to eMarketer, when it comes to personalization marketers may still be stuck on the basics. Researchscape for Evergage shows that 49% of marketers worldwide had expected to increase their spending on personalization in 2015, vs. just 8% who intended to decrease budgets. However, based on a study by VB Insight, marketers still rely on beginner metrics when it comes to such efforts.

When asked about the types of personal/identity-related data used for personalization purposes, marketers were most likely to cite the basics, such as email address (57%), name (45%), location (41%) and demographics (40%). More advanced figures, such as location-related data (18%), lifestyle details (15%) and psychographics (8%), were far less common.

Research in 2015 by Econsultancy and IBM found similar results. When it came to understanding customer behavior, necessary for effective personalization says the report, marketers in North America were most likely to use customer service history (71%) and demographic profiles (66%). Past online purchases as well as offline interactions and geolocation were used by fewer than half of respondents.

However, many agree that technology today is making it much more straightforward to personalize at scale, according EConsulting research presented by EMarketer. More than three-quarters of client-side marketers worldwide that in a survey from Econsultancy, as 21% of respondents remained neutral about it and 4% disagreed.

And, while 42% of respondents said that personally identifiable information is needed for true personalization, almost the same percentage were neutral about it, says the report. Similarly, 41% of client-side marketers said contextualization is more important than personalization and 51% were neutral.

Furthermore, says the report, though 21% of respondents said the experience needs to be completely unique to the individual to be truly personalized—and 31% felt neutral about it—almost half (46%) of client-side marketers disagreed.

Attitudes toward personalization may vary, but there are benefits to using enriched and personalized content to drive engagement and conversions.

According to June 2015 data from the CMO Council, higher response and engagement rates are the No. 1 reason to using personalized content. Senior marketers worldwide also said that timely and relevant interactions, greater customer affinity and more persuasive communication were also leading benefits.

For more information from eMarketer, please visit here.