Top Challenges With Marketing Personalization, July 2014 [CHART]

Personalization is an area of growing importance, recently found to be US digital marketers’ most important future area. Yet research indicates that marketers continue to struggle with it, and many industry respondents have trouble linking data to individual customer profiles. A couple of recent studies – one from Experian Data Quality and the other commissioned by Janrain and conducted by Forrester Consulting – take a closer look at the use of personalization and its associated challenges.

Both studies find that personalization tends to be in its early stages, with some respondents still limited to a single-channel approach. According to the Janrain study, which was fielded among “190 IT and digital marketing professionals with responsibility for personalized/targeted messaging and digital customer identity and recognition” across 4 countries, problems with data management are holding back greater sophistication of marketing personalization. Asked to rate the level of complexity with various customer data management activities, respondents indicated that analysis is their most difficult, with 44% rating the activity challenging or very challenging. Data collection followed close behind, with 43% rating it challenging or very challenging. Read the rest at MarketingCharts.