Personalized marketing involves using data, such as customer interests, buying history, preferences, etc., to customize marketing to each customer’s specific needs.

Personalization goes beyond addressing email subscribers by their first names. Instead, it is a strategy that helps businesses tailor their services and offerings to give customers a better experience. Simply put, personalization ensures the right message gets to the right audience at the right time.

As a result, businesses can quickly identify and reach their target audience, thereby saving resources on the wrong audience or ineffective strategies. It also directly drives revenue, improves customer loyalty, and enhances brand consistency, among other benefits.

Below, you’ll find the most important personalized marketing statistics detailing the benefits, adoption, expectations, and challenges.

Editor’s picks:

1. 89% of online businesses already use personalization.
2. 51% of marketers rank personalized marketing as their number 1 priority.
3. 90% of leading marketers say personalization significantly contributes to business profitability.
4. 97% of marketers saw a rise in business revenue due to personalization.
5. 70% of brands achieve 200% ROI due to efforts directed towards advanced personalization.
6. You get 202% more conversion from personalized CTAs than non-personalized CTAs.
7. Around one-third (66%) of consumers expect brands to understand their individual needs.
8. 74% of Gen Zers, 67% of Millennials, 61% of Gen Xers, and 57% of Baby Boomers find personalized products appealing.
9. 90% of consumers are willing to share their data if it means they will get personalized product discounts.
10. 58% of consumers say brands send them irrelevant items.

Personalized marketing adoption

Since personalized marketing has been around for a while, how well has it been received by marketers? To get an answer to that, we’ll look at the following stats.

• 89% of online businesses are already using personalization.
• 60% of marketers reveal they use extensively personalized digital content for their marketing.

This means personalization is a key part of online businesses, and we may not be far from seeing its adoption by all online brands.

It is already the primary strategy for more than half of marketers.

• 51% of marketers rank personalized marketing as their number 1 priority.

According to a survey, more marketers see the need to do behavioral-based marketing, and they’re making it a priority.

Data from the HubSpot State of Marketing also support the high level of adoption of personalized marketing.

• Personalization is the number 1 tactic email marketers use to improve engagement rates.
• Over 20% of marketers believe personalization can improve email engagement.

So, why are brands adopting personalization?

Benefits of personalized marketing

We’ve established above that personalization enhances relationships between brands and customers, but that is far from being the only advantage.

Reports mention many other benefits of personalized marketing.

• 90% of leading marketers say personalization significantly contributes to business profitability.
• 97% of marketers saw a rise in business revenue due to personalization.
• 63% of marketers report increased customer interaction and resulting conversion rate improvements from personalization.

So, what kind of personalization benefits businesses, and which touchpoints should they be applied?

• 70% of brands achieve 200% ROI due to efforts directed towards advanced personalization.
• 51% of marketers achieve 300% more ROI when they apply personalization to multiple touchpoints.
• When businesses use advanced personalization, they see a return of $20 for every dollar spent.

Personalized marketing doesn’t just increase business revenue; it is also essential for reducing business costs.

• Report says personalization helps a business save 50% of its costs on customer acquisition.

Improved customer experience, improved brand-customer relationships, and increased customer engagement result in lower customer acquisition costs.

That’s because when companies personalize marketing, the mentioned factors increase customer retention, thereby necessitating lesser spending on acquisition.

Also, personalization improves brand perception and consistency across multiple channels, and that means they don’t have to spend substantially to acquire the trust of customers.

• 99% of marketers who participated in a Salesforce survey believe personalization is essential in advancing customer relationships.

• 64% of marketers mention improved customer experience, 63% mention increased conversion rates, and 55% mention improved visitor engagement as one of the main objectives they achieve with personalization.

Some benefits of personalization cannot be measured in terms of money, even though they remain crucial for businesses. For example, improved customer experiences and engagement are one of the foremost aims of personalized marketing, and many marketers are leveraging this benefit.

• 85% of customers are influenced to deal with a company when they personalize the promotions on their website homepages.
• 92% of customers are influenced to buy a product when a business personalizes product recommendations in the shopping cart.

While those surveys show the benefits of personalization, you should note that what makes it possible is the offering of better customer experiences. Recommendations like those in the stats make it easy for the customer to find what they want and make a purchase.

However, while implementing personalization, businesses must embrace transparency, whose impact is shown below.

• Being transparent with personalized advertising can increase the ROI by 38%.

In a Harvard Business Review study, targeted ads were delivered to customers who were informed that the ads were generated by on-site activities.f As a result of this transparency, they recorded increased product sales and CTR.

• Getting customer data that they’ve not provided by themselves can lower their interest in making a purchase.

Hence, it’s not only what businesses do but also how they do it.

Personalized marketing for email marketing

• Segmented email marketing campaigns generates up to a 760% increase in revenue, according to marketers.
• Personalized email subject lines improve the open rates by 26%.
• You get 202% more conversion from personalized CTAs than non-personalized CTAs.
• 52% of consumers will look elsewhere if an email isn’t personalized.

Personalization is essential in email marketing, and it has to apply to all parts of it, from list building to subject lines and CTAs.

Personalized marketing and consumer expectations

Customer expectations are at an all-time high, and the same applies to personalization in marketing.

• Around one-third (66%) of consumers expect brands to understand their individual needs.
• 84% of consumers say they are more likely to buy from brands that understand their individual needs.

And it doesn’t just stop at understanding customer needs. The understanding will impact the provision of better personalization.

• 61% of consumers expect brands to tailor experiences based on their preferences.
• 90% of United States consumers agree with the idea of personalization.
• 91% of consumers prefer to buy from brands that send them personalized offers and recommendations.
• 75% of consumers are more likely to buy from brands that personalize their digital experiences.
• 56% of online consumers are more likely to return to a digital store offering product recommendations.

Personalized product recommendations help to retain customers. Consider adding recommendations to your sales receipt emails.

• 74% of Gen Zers, 67% of Millennials, 61% of Gen Xers, and 57% of Baby Boomers find personalized products appealing.
• 72% of consumers say they will respond to personalized marketing messages.
• 60% of customers will turn to repeat customers when brands offer them personalized shopping experiences.

If customers find personalization appealing, how do they feel when they come across the opposite?

• Shopping experiences that aren’t personalized frustrate 71% of customers.
• Content that isn’t personalized frustrates 42% of customers.
• Impersonal emails from brands frustrate 70% of millennials.
• 63% of consumers will ignore brands with poor personalized marketing.
• Online retail stores will lose 47% of their consumers to Amazon if they do not offer personalized product suggestions to shoppers.

So, ignoring personalization will make a business lose customers to competing brands.

Personalized marketing and data privacy

Data privacy is a key part of personalized marketing since brands need to collect data to understand customer needs.

Let’s look into what consumers think and how they expect businesses to navigate this delicate aspect of personalization.

• 90% of consumers are willing to share their data if it means they will get personalized product discounts.
• 60% of millennials said they would be willing to share their personal information in order to receive personalized offers and messages they’re interested in.
• 52% of consumers presume all offers or messaging from brands to be personalized.

That is not to say customers love every form of data collection.

• 41% of consumers think it is creepy when brands send them personalized texts when they walk by a store.
• Businesses must avoid invasive forms of personalization, such as tracking customer locations or activities that the customers have not authorized.

Personalized marketing challenges

Despite the effectiveness of certain personalization strategies, there are still challenges that prevent businesses and customers from taking full advantage, as seen below.

• 63% of digital marketers still struggle with personalization.
• 35% of consumers find it creepy to see retargeting ads from items they’ve browsed on social sites.

Retargeting ads are an effective form of personalization, but it remains unwelcome to many customers who find them invasive.

• 58% of consumers say brands send them irrelevant items.

This shows that item suggestions may be irrelevant sometimes, and more brands must invest in personalized marketing campaigns.

• 38% of customers like the idea of personalized marketing but are not ready to share too much data.

Conclusion

The highlighted statistics show the many advantages of personalized marketing for businesses and their customers.

They also outline the effective methods, challenges, and best practices to navigate the thin line between personalization and data privacy breaches.

Personalized marketing remains one of the most effective methods for generating revenue, and I hope these statistics have been helpful.

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