“What products or content do I want my customers and prospects to see?”
For marketers, often faced with formidable metrics and KPIs to achieve, it’s a tempting question to ask. But effective personalization requires a shift in mindset and the ultimate customer-centric approach. Instead, the key question is: “What does the customer or prospect want to see?”
When you look at customer experience delivery from that perspective, you can make what seems like magic happen – driving experiences that are helpful, individualized and memorable, and turning the 1-to-1 communications dream into a reality. It takes a bit more than saying “abracadabra” though. With a mix of actionable data, well-trained algorithms (or well-crafted rules) and some testing, you can harness the power of personalization to drive greater engagement and more conversions.
Here are three keys to maximizing the results of your personalization efforts and initiatives:
1. Insist on Seeing Magic in Action
Personalization has a certain magic to it, and when I began my internship at Evergage this past fall, I was eager to see the magic in action. And it’s impressive! All the steps that go into experience delivery – from analyzing an individual’s in-session behavior to factoring in their previous history across channels to pulling in third-party data to deciding on the optimal experience and then to displaying it – happen faster than you can blink your eye.
Unlike some magicians that bat away prying eyes and won’t let you look behind the curtain (a “black-box” approach to personalization), Evergage takes a white-box approach: giving marketers insight into the machine-learning algorithms that power their campaigns, along with the ability to test and fine-tune them. That type of approach and technology is important in helping business users see and understand how their recommendation strategies and algorithms work, driving adoption and maximizing success.
2. Go to The Personalization & CDP Summit!
For six years straight, Evergage’s Summit has helped hundreds of marketing, e-commerce, customer experience, product management, data analysis and software development professionals learn and apply best practices for turning raw customer data into refined, relevant experiences in real time. Attendees learn from knowledgeable Evergagers, industry experts, end-users and, importantly, each other.
Sessions and insights are geared toward B2C and B2B practitioners at all levels, with valuable information for non-technical and technical users alike. See some takeaways from this past Summit in this news article.
Evergage’s Summit occurred during my first week on the job. Much like some of the attendees who were just getting started with personalization, I appreciated the opportunity to hear about successful campaigns, cross-channel and omnichannel strategies, the power of a unified personalization and customer data platform (CDP), and how to create a single view of each customer to deliver relevant and cohesive experiences across every touchpoint. (When I take a step back and put on my “consumer hat,” it’s easy to see why this unified, actionable profile is critical. When my experience is seamless and personalized, it adds value to all my interactions and bolsters my impression of a brand. (And when the personalization is done right, I don’t even realize it’s happening.)

Here I am, on the far right, at Evergage’s Personalization & CDP Summit in September 2019 – helping set up the main stage.
3. Use ‘Extensible’ Systems
New needs pop up constantly for marketers and developers. (“If we could only add this function…” “We also really need our personalization solution to do that…”) Accommodating these important one-offs doesn’t have to result in an untamed martech stack or the need to build custom modules from scratch. To support personalization, customer data management and other critical programs and functions, businesses are seeking platforms with “extensibility” – so they can easily and continually add features to their existing platform, rather than buy (or build) multiple “point” solutions whenever there is an unmet need.
Extensibility is at the heart of Evergage’s personalization and customer data platform in the form of Evergage Gears™, which enables customers and partners to add functionality that extends the power of Evergage and to easily integrate Evergage with other systems, among other capabilities.
The CDP Institute has an illuminating white paper about the importance and benefits of CDP extensibility that’s worth a read.
Final Thoughts
My internship at Evergage has shown me how fast technology needs to move to keep pace with and anticipate customers’ needs. As a student-athlete, I’ve also enjoyed being welcomed onto Evergage’s “team” – with friendly, talented and dedicated individuals; a winning and market-leading platform, and a fun atmosphere (with team outings and Friday sushi lunch trips with the business development reps… I always look forward to that!).
It’s especially been illuminating to see and be a part of the personalization “magic,” and I hope these tips help you turn your customers’ experiences into helpful and enchanting ones as well! To learn more about how Evergage can be the personalization and customer data platform for your company, request a demo today.
