Marketers often have a tough job getting their team to buy into new ideas, especially when those ideas cost money to execute. Particularly in the digital space, marketing evolves so quickly that, to finance and management professionals, it can seem like we’re haphazardly jumping from one idea to the next. It’s our job to tell the difference between hollow trends and genuine innovation, and the difficulty in that is magnified if you’re looking to lead the pack rather than chase a competitor, who you can use to justify the spend. Thanks in no small part to the rise of the experience economy and a seismic shift in consumer expectations of the online shopping experience, personalization has no doubt been one of the most discussed technologies around boardroom tables for the past few years. If the challenge of selling personalization to your team has fallen to you, then we’re here to help.
Why Selling Personalization to Your Team is Hard Work
One would think that justifying spend on something so critical to building a great customer experience would be a walk in the park. Unfortunately, the reality is rarely so simple. For marketers, getting buy-in from finance is often as simple as being able to predict ROI, showing which metrics will be affected and mapping realistic timelines. Because personalization is most often a process that requires ongoing input and continued investment, though, such predictions are far more difficult to make accurately.
It’s not that no short-term gains are possible, just that personalization is more of a commitment to changing the way that a brand interacts with its customers, rather than being a single tool with a set number of uses. As personalization is rolled out in different areas and at different touchpoints, it can influence acquisition and retention, promote engagement with existing assets and do a whole lot of work in promoting brand loyalty. That’s all good, but none of it is going to help you get finance onboard. For that, you’ll need to make a strong business case for personalization.
Learn to Speak CFO
“The experience economy” is likely a term that will draw little more than an impatient frown from your CFO. Finance people are not customer experience experts, and that’s fine. We need them to do the numbers stuff that keeps those paychecks coming in each month. What this does mean, though, is that it is important to not just explain what personalization is, but why it has become such a critical tool for brands competing in the modern marketplace too. Here’s a shortlist of topics to cover:
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What is personalization in the context of our brand?
It’s still important to explain the practical applications of personalization, as they apply to your assets and channels. Do you need a smart article recommendation engine to boost engagement with your blog, or could intelligent product recommendations improve cart values at your online store? Where will it be implemented and what are the intended outcomes?
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Where and how do you plan to roll it out, in the short and long-term?
Transformation needs to start somewhere, and you’ll want to identify the areas where personalization can have the most significant impact in the short term, in order to secure buy-in further down the road.
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How will personalization assist with achieving existing marketing objectives?
Personalization is rarely about moving the goalposts. Instead, it’s about leveraging a technology in pursuit of existing goals, be they improving differentiation, lowering Cost Of Acquisition (COA), or reducing attrition. You stand the best chance of explaining the value of personalization clearly if you can do so within the context of existing marketing objectives.
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What metrics will you measure?
The impact of personalization might be a little more complicated to measure than other initiatives, but you’ll be fighting a losing battle if you can’t explain how you’ll measure success. This is not just important in getting your team on board. Measurement is critical to understanding what impact personalization is having on your marketing channels, and essential when tuning and tweaking to extract maximum ROI.
A Smaller Financial Investment Than You Think
We don’t envy marketers who had to get buy-in to personalization in past, when it still required a staggering investment in development and infrastructure, along with a whole team of data scientists and programmers. Now, Liftigniter makes it possible to bring the full power of a true, cross-channel personalization AI to your marketing efforts. Best of all, it comes at a fraction of the cost of developing your own personalization technology and requires almost no IT involvement. It has never been easier to get your finance team members behind personalization.
