• by Jess Nelson , June 16, 2016

Bad personalization is the monster underneath the bed of the marketing world, according to a new study by marketing technology provider Evergage.

Bad personalization is a frightening prospect to many marketers, according to the Evergage study, which surveyed 250 global organizations on their marketing initiatives. 71% of marketers polled asserted that bad personalization was scarier than sending an email campaign with a typo, 46% found it scarier than higher-than-average unsubscribe rates on an email campaign, 43% said it’s worse than forgetting to attend a meeting scheduled by the CMO, and 40% said it’s scarier than a “page not found” error on their site. 

The fear of incorrect personalization may correlate to its extreme important to marketing campaigns. 74% of respondents asserted that personalization was "very" or "extremely" important to their organization, and 89% of respondents confirmed they had seen measurable improvements to their campaigns thanks to personalization.

A jump in conversion rates, increased visitor engagement and improved customer experience were among the benefits that marketers who had implemented personalization in their marketing outreach reported.

Marketers most commonly use personalization in email marketing (67%), followed by Web sites (56%), mobile Web sites (27%) and mobile applications (20%).

The fear of incorrect personalization may also be related to poor personalization use, such as siloed data sources and poor segmentation.

Eighty-five percent of marketers used personalization to some degree, according to the Evergage report, but the majority of marketers graded their use of personalization -- and the use of their competitor’s segmentation -- as subpar or worse.

In fact, only 18% of marketers polled by Evergage expressed that they were "very" or "extremely" satisfied with their personalized marketing outreach.

The greatest barriers to personalization expressed by marketers included a lack of effective technology; budget and human resource constraints; insufficient integration and consistency across all marketing channels; not enough time; bad-quality data and poor scalability across sites. 

“For years, 1:1 personalized experiences have been the dream for digital marketers,” states Karl Wirth, co-founder and CEO of Evergage, in a press release. “While companies are getting closer with implementations of personalization, to be effective and truly deliver a 1:1 experience, marketers must ensure they have a platform that collects and maintains a unified profile for each individual visitor, and enables a response to the data -- across any channel -- in real-time. This is no longer a pipe dream -- it’s an imperative.”

Evergage provides a cloud-based platform that delivers personalized messaging to Web visitors in real-time, based on customer behavioral data.