What you need to know

• Don't think personalisation like Amazon (especially if you work in financial services).
• While many brands have invested in personalisation programs, they can be notoriously difficult to implement.
• Industry analysts Gartner say few marketers could defend their personalisation programs in the face of budget cuts if it meant jettisoning other priorities.
• At IAG overlaying personalisation with a customer experience mindset is delivering solid results.

Ask your customers this simple question: If you can have only one, would you prefer that brands sent you ads and other content tailored to your purchasing interests or would you rather they fixed their web sites and made them easy to use?

That in a (admittedly simplified) nutshell was the dichotomy in the marketing personalisation debate for too many years.

For much of the last decade personalisation was stymied by pairing these competing philosophies as marketers planned strategy and teams fought over internal resource. Marketing technology vendors sat firmly on one side of the divide, focussing almost exclusively on personalised campaign messaging because that's what their software did, irrespective of whether that's what brands, and ultimately customers, wanted.

But as BUPA's former personalisation head, Simon Belousoff, now IAG's manager, data strategy partnerships repeated as a mantra to his team,  customers just want their experiences to be simple, fast and easy.

Personalisation can also be notoriously difficult to deliver, particularly in heavily siloed organisations with disaggregated data sets.

How hard? In 2019 global IT research firm Gartner was predicting that nearly 80 per cent of personalisation projects would fail by the middle of this decade. By 2021, Gartner had softened a little, but its research released two years ago still revealed that nearly two-thirds (63 per cent) of digital marketing leaders were struggling to deliver personalised experiences to their customers. 

Meh. Kill it

And last year Gartner’s Senior Research Director Jason McNellis said only one out of 18 marketers would be willing to defend personalisation in the face of budget cuts.

It’s little wonder then that marketing technology vendors such as Adobe and Sitecore have moved the cheese in recent years, and their messaging now sails much closer to the customer experience agenda.

Last year at its local (and low key, Covid-friendly) version of Adobe Summit, Simon Tate, the company’s APAC president went so far as to describe earlier iterations of personalisation as "a myth" in the absence of access to first party data. He acknowledged the shift away from third party cookies and DMPs and a greater reliance on first party data meant the vendor’s view had shifted more towards a CX perspective.

In paid advertorial placement in the WSJ on Monday this week, Sitecore’s CEO Steve Tzikakis made a similar observation.

But brands don’t get a free pass either.

Anna Bohler, IAG’s manager, personalised marketing joined the firm in 2019 – she had previously helped Prospa deploy its personalisation strategy – suggests organisations often have overly simplistic ideas about personalisation that can be distilled down to "copy Amazon".

“You walk into a financial services organisation, which has 10 products, and everyone [says] we want to be over there with personalisation the way that Amazon is doing personalisation. Well, Amazon has 10 million products; products that are re-purchasable and products that are physical, that are used up, that need to be purchased on a regular basis. It’s a very different way to approach personalisation, when we're talking about personalisation within financial services."

“We’ve got to start thinking about those things a little bit separately."

She also accepts that there are different ways of thinking about the topic. “Personalisation is something that I've been doing for a little while. But interestingly, it keeps surprising and changing. Yes, it's about personalising communications. Customers do want to be spoken to like we know them because we promised them that we know them. But I think more importantly than that, it's about creating relevant interactions. And I think that interactions are probably the new playground of experiences.”

Shopping cart blues

When she arrived at IAG, Bohler inherited a nascent abandoned cart program which she and the team have further developed. Last year helped introduce a client onboarding program, the first of its kind for IAG’s NRMA Insurance brand.

While both programs are delivering measurable, strong results, she described the brand’s personalisation efforts as still emerging. She says there are early wins though.

According to Bohler, “over the last three years, we've completely changed the unconverted quote (abandoned cart) program, from what was fairly simplistic, reactive follow up to complete a quote, to being a proactive nudge program."

She describes the approach as moving into micro-moments throughout the experience to help customers at the exact point where they are stuck.  

“We’ve seen really strong results there.”

Abandoned cart processes can be very complex, she says

“There is a significant number of steps. First you make a choice on the product. Then you make a choice to actually check out, then you make a choice to go back out and find 17 different promo codes and you forget about your cart where you've left something after you press checkout, then you come back three days later. There's this whole psyche of how we as humans, move through a purchase," per Bohler.

"And isn't always incredibly straightforward so addressing that, we see a significant uplift takeups.”

In simple terms the new approach takes the customer back to where they were, but also, importantly, addresses the reason that they left.

Onboarding

Unlike the early stages of the abandoned cart program which predate Bohler’s arrival at IAG, she has been involved from the start with the customer onboarding project. Insurance companies have a unique challenge – customers are paying a premium for a product they hope to never use. That makes it hard to demonstrate value. Bohler says it a Catch-22. 

“So it's creating an experience [where] all customers can experience that feeling of help from day one. We've seeing really, really positive results across both commercial but also customer results in NPS and 12 month retention rates."

Two-way street

She adds: “Personalisation for the IAG personalised marketing team is a function of creating increased relevance in interactions with our customers, and creating two-way value for both IAG and our customers.”

Confidence is a component of that, but onboarding customers is more than just confidence, Bohler told Mi3.

"It's about giving customers value across their digital activation and making sure that they've got information at their fingertips as and when they need it. It's about helping them use their policy and understanding all the extras that they have, and being able to understand how they can best make use of it. And it's also about giving them additional information and helping them actually be safer in in their environment."

According to Rajan Kumar, co-founder and CEO of The Lumery, a marketing and technology consultancy that has worked with IAG on their personalisation approach for several years, “personalisation is one of the most confused terms in industry”.

He prefers to avoid the semantics of the debate and instead ask simply: “What's the customer challenge? And what would the customer want.”

For IAG, he says, that requires being appreciative of the product and the service that they provide. “What do the customers need, and where can they [IAG] really communicate... and where doesn't it really make sense [to communicate]?”