To forge meaningful connections with their customers, businesses need to provide solutions to their problems. But keeping pace is no easy feat – customers’ challenges are prone to shifting unpredictably and without notice. And it’s already affecting organizations, with 95% of global executives thinking their consumers are changing faster than they can change their business.

A strategy of identifying simple ways to categorize and predict consumer actions is missing the mark for many brands, with research showing that there’s a disconnect between what companies are investing in and what consumers identify as most valuable to them.

Even though the landscape is moving quickly, brands can regain control by harnessing user data to reveal crucial customer insights and increase profits. This allows you to recognize and understand how customers are engaging, so your organization can provide richly personalized experiences whenever they’re needed.

This increased personalization can have an impact on profits too, with 67% of brand leaders saying their ROI expectations were exceeded with this approach.

In this blog, we’ll explore some of the marketing context and challenges that get in the way of personalization and the best-in-class technology needed to unlock its opportunities.

Understanding the market’s impact on personalization
It’s no secret what consumers want, and crucially what they expect from your business – connected, memorable experiences that are tailored to their behavior, across all channels, touchpoints and moments. Despite this, they’re becoming more cynical about brands than ever before.

Globally, 37% of people think companies are prioritizing profits over providing better customer experiences. This shift means businesses are now having to fight harder than ever to win over these hyper-critical customers.

Modern businesses could remedy the situation by embracing the value buried in our data-based world, but surprisingly, this isn’t always being done. The fact that less than one-third of marketing technology leaders are equipped for personalizing journeys across channels and touchpoints shows that for many, relevant customer connections are still out of reach.

Businesses should be actively working to deliver personalized and contextualized brand messages. When they do, their customers recognize the effort being made to connect with them as individuals, and this translates into promising results.

What’s getting in the way of personalization?
Restricted customer insights: Access to comprehensive data assets and signals throughout the entire marketing funnel can be limited. As a result, data acquisition strategies are required to enhance and build first-party data.

Fragmented data ecosystems: Customer data may be scattered, preventing unification across brands or a single and extensive ID.

Dynamic customer behavior: Consumers have varying purchasing processes that follow unpredictable paths. If organizations aren’t agile, they won’t react quickly enough to changeable customer behavioral signals.

Behind on value exchange: Brands may be playing catch up in creating meaningful value exchanges with customers’ data.

Shift to first-party data: Regulation has led to third-party cookies being phased out. To align with compliance, brands must develop a robust data-collection strategy that’s underpinned by user consent.

Data privacy and security: Personally identifiable information must be securely stored, transmitted and used. It’s an essential step for preventing identity theft and remaining legally compliant.

Need for scalability: It’s not easy to manage customer journeys while creating new content and keeping it fresh. Brands need the right technology and tools to achieve it.

Unlock your data. Reimagine their experiences
In today’s world, driving stronger, closer and long-term connections with customers depends on having best-in-class technology at your disposal. With Sitecore Engagement Cloud, you get a solution that not only recognizes your consumer data, but it also remembers and learns from it too. This means you can harness your data in new ways to keep aligned to your customers’ behaviors, today and long into the future.

Sitecore Engagement Cloud is made up of:

Sitecore Personalize: Activates data across all touchpoints, ensuring you create and deploy seamless, consistent customer experiences. Sitecore Personalize gives you the power to truly recognize each customer, allowing precise personalization for user-specific, contextual experiences.

Sitecore Customer Data Platform (CDP): Connects and activates customer data across your whole ecosystem to create a persistent, unified customer database that’s accessible to other systems. It’s like the glue for all your channels, as the context follows the customer.

Both applications can work seamlessly together. Or you can deploy Sitecore Personalize alongside your existing CDP for a streamlined connection to your existing apps and to maximize your personalization capabilities. It’s all in keeping with Sitecore’s composable approach to designing flexible solutions that adapt to your evolving needs.

Accelerate your personalization journey
Avanade’s Experience Personalization Accelerator will support you to achieve more with personalization through Sitecore’s industry-defining digital experience technology. Providing high-level KPIs, our team will guide your business to uncover value and continue to prioritize new opportunities.

For example, you could choose to target and create personalized product service guides to help customers maintain their purchase’s performance. Or we could help you harness conversational AI, building towards meaningful personalized moments while keeping content production costs down.

By building in these contextualized customer experiences, you can help guide your consumers to their next best action at exactly the right moment, creating brand advocates who feel genuinely connected to your business.

Avanade and Sitecore: A partnership to power your personalization
Navigating the intricate and ever-changing digital marketing landscape can be challenging. Our approach is driven by our expertise in advisory, experience and technology. It’s how we guide you to uncover richer insights into your existing landscape and make the metric-driven decisions that better align your platforms with your evolving needs.

Together, Avanade and Sitecore help you keep every customer at the core of your business, so you can revolve around them. Just as we revolve around you. Our creativity and strategy centers in on your exact business needs, so you can benefit from a unique experience that you can pass on to your customers.

Are you ready to elevate your customer experience through the power of data-driven personalization? Explore how Avanade and Sitecore can help you build differentiating experiences with your data.