One of the most common obstacles we’ve observed is the absence of a well-defined personalisation strategy. For personalisation to be effective, it needs to be applied and integrated across every aspect of your brand—from data to UX, design to technology. 

However, while the overall impact of personalisation depends on how it is applied within these individual aspects, the direct impact on each one is tough to quantify. As a result, it’s all too easy for the specific initiatives around personalisation to lose priority as other business opportunities inevitably arise.

To secure comprehensive buy-in and justify continued investment in personalisation, it’s crucial to demonstrate its tangible value. It’s a good idea to begin with a few quick wins—such as those achievable through a DXP—where success can be measured through a set of predetermined KPIs. 

Once you’ve accomplished those quick wins, it’s time to pull back and create a strategic approach based on continuous refinement and expansion. Sophisticated solutions like Optimizely Visitor Groups and Optimizely Content Recommendations help make this process surprisingly easy. 

• Optimizely Visitor Groups offers a number of inbuilt capabilities that you can use to create variant content blocks that are adjusted automatically based on who is viewing your brand’s site and when. By taking into account criteria like time of day and whether or not a given user has visited other pages on your site, you can foster relevance and browser intimacy. 
• Optimizely Content Recommendations gives you the ability to effectively index your brand’s content,  providing users with an AI recommendation of content based on what their browser is viewing in real-time. By continuously recommending relevant content, this solution maintains users’ interests much like “Discover” tabs on social media do, helping reduce bounce rates from your brand’s site.

As you gain deeper insight into the customer journey and a more granular understanding of your customer base, you can hone your strategy even further to manifest exponential improvements in customer engagement, conversion rates, and growth.

While businesses amass vast amounts of data, they often lack a structured method for extracting insights, taking meaningful action, and evaluating impact. 

This is where the value of a Customer Data Platform (CDP) comes into play. Without one, the lack of structure will be reflected in the quality of your data. Even if you’re relying on multiple tools in lieu of a CDP, the lack of integration will lead to the same issue. 

Ultimately, the bottom line is that achieving any significant value from personalisation hinges on a deep understanding of your customer base. 

This requires going beyond basic demographics to truly comprehend your customers’ needs, behaviours, and preferences. This is where solutions like Optimizely Data Platform can make a huge difference in your customer comprehension.

• Optimizely Data Platform (ODP) is a CDP that provides real-time segmentation and an assortment of other inbuilt campaign mechanisms, all by serving as a single source of truth for collecting, organising, and analysing your brand’s customer data.
• Optimizely Campaign is one example of an Optimizely solution designed to integrate with ODP. By syncing Campaign with ODP, you can automate marketing campaigns and personalise them based on audience attributes.

Another often overlooked way of gaining this insight is through qualitative research, such as customer interviews and user testing.

Combining those qualitative answers with CDP-enabled quantitative data analysis empowers your business to construct a comprehensive customer segmentation strategy. This understanding facilitates the development of more targeted and impactful personalisation initiatives.

Brands in all industries have obsessed with creating frictionless digital experiences. This is especially true for banking. 

The idea of a frictionless experience began with simple optimisation techniques and exceptional UI. But as benchmarks are repeatedly set and met, banks must take the next step toward frictionless experiences—beyond a pretty interface. 

The next wave of frictionless banking is focused on “How do you make banking feel so integrated into the customer experience that users no longer recognise they’re working with a bank?” 

The future of the banking experience involves integrating financial institutions into people’s everyday lives. It’s no longer enough to be perceived as a secure institution to store money. For banks to succeed in the future, customers must see them as personalised advisers, helping them maximise time and money while reaching individual goals. 

While this sounds challenging at face value, organisations can take incremental steps to move toward this new frictionless era.

Every bank should participate in a recurring friction analysis, a workshop where you define friction touchpoints and explore how you might mitigate them.

This involves identifying pain points, bottlenecks, and areas of customer dissatisfaction across all your touchpoints—mobile apps, websites, physical branches, and even social channels. Bring user feedback, analytics, and customer journey mapping into it so you can understand the specific areas that need improvement.

During the friction analysis, focus on streamlining processes, simplifying user interfaces, and optimising the overall user experience. This probably involves reducing the steps required to complete transactions, eliminating unnecessary documentation, and improving self-service. 

For example, customer handoff is a common moment of friction. If users open a new account at their local bank, they’ll probably access an app within a few hours. Can they log in to their new account with ease, or must they navigate a complicated process? 

This kind of scenario mapping can help you find moments of friction and start to prioritise. 

Once you’ve identified your areas of friction, you must take steps toward a connected ecosystem that integrates digital and non-digital channels. That means customers should be able to start a transaction on their mobile app, continue it on the website, and complete it at a physical branch without any disruption or loss of information. 

To accomplish this, you’ll need technologies that enable real-time data synchronisation and seamless integration between channels, including robust backend systems, APIs, data management capabilities, and, most likely, a customer data platform (CDP). 

A CDP allows you to collect, unify, and activate customer data from various sources in real time. Any interaction or transaction initiated on one channel is immediately reflected on other channels, eliminating the need for users to repeat information or start over when switching between channels. 

For example, if a customer starts a mortgage application on your website but doesn’t complete it, you can send a reminder via your banking mobile app. 

For non-CDP organisations, there are some scrappy but efficient alternatives. One is the common QR code, which can direct users to a specific URL on your website. Another might be creating a cookie and sending it linked via What’s App. 

When the new smart #1 car launched, they wanted to sell directly to consumers–a big change for the brand. 

Their goal was to build brand awareness and entice early adopters. Throughout the campaign, we sought to capture leads by centreing the customer journey around search, social, display marketing, and email nurturing. 

The result? Increased awareness across a variety of media, increased brand consideration, and increased purchase intent. 11% pre-ordered a #1, three times the industry benchmark. 

Listen to the talk below from Adobe, about how smart and DEPT® worked together to drive these marketing wins and set the new standard for personalisation at scale. Featuring Praveen Kumar Sadhineni, Lead – CX CoE at Smart Europe and Yash Mody, CTO Global Adobe Alliance at DEPT®

In 2022, smart went fully electric, rebranding as a leader in the EV market. To kick off this new era, they needed to create excitement around the unveiling, generate leads, and then ultimately convert those leads into pre-orders.

At the same time, they invested heavily in e-commerce. While select dealers would remain, they wanted to sell most of the cars online. This shift in architecture added extra complexities across their tech stack. 

With two monumental changes happening simultaneously, smart needed a sophisticated digital marketing strategy and robust technology to support it. Learn more about what strategies we used to help smart transform into D2C. 

There is a tendency in the B2B e-commerce sector to look across to the top B2C brands and play down the applicability of the features and techniques that make their sites market leaders. The idea that stylish sites and flashy features only fit the B2C model, while B2B should focus on the bread and butter options to fit the typically measured and professional tone of voice that many B2B brands use. This is misplaced thinking, based on the division of B2B and B2C. In reality, there are businesses, there are customers, and there is e-commerce. Shopper psychology spans across each; the features that allow B2C brands to excel in the online space are there because they work. Chiefly, personalisation.

Personalisation has always played a role in commerce. In the past, personalisation existed in retail as an in-store assistant, and in industry as a sales rep that would build a relationship with the customer over time, learning their needs, their pain points and how they liked to conduct their business. These approaches have always led to a much improved buying experience; faster, easier and more accurate. But these relationships take time to build; it’s a long term process of listening, learning and responding. And while human-to-human contact is still very much valued, digital technology, data tracking and analysis can bear the load. When implemented well, personalisation can speed up sales cycles and nurture prospects into loyal customers.

Advancements in digital technology have radically cut the time it takes to understand each individual customer and provide a personalised commerce experience.  This technology is widely available, often built in to your content management system; all businesses now have the ability to implement personalisation strategies into their marketing and commerce efforts. This is good news, seeing as smart personalisation engines used to recognise customer intent can lead to an average profit increase of 15%. The flipside to this, is that personalisation has moved from an added benefit of certain businesses to an expected feature across every experience. 33% of consumers abandoned a business relationship last year because of a lack of personalisation. This is a necessity, not a nice to have feature.

Utilising account specific data

When starting to think about how your business can use personalisation in its commerce sales funnel, begin by thinking about how the company can collect data about customers and visitors. It’s important to begin with data capture, as the implementation of features depends on the type of data collected.

For specific customers, data primarily comes through the account creation process: job function; past purchases; which pages they have previously visited on the site; their dwell time; on-site search history, and so on. If the current data collection on account creation is limited, build this out for future customers and consider requesting current users to update their profile with more information upon their next login. Rather than hiding the motive, make it clear that the company will be using the data for an improved, personalised shopping experience. This clarity will boost the numbers opting in to data sharing, as it clearly offers a mutually beneficial exchange.

Putting this in place, electronics manufacturer Omron was able to create a site that adapts to the needs of each visitor. By using information on the job function of each logged in visitor, the Omron site could dynamically adapt and funnel distributors, systems integrators, Omron employees and end users to the appropriate pages. This is a simple solution, using just one piece of data to adapt the site, but it has a major impact, with the ability to scale up personalisation based on further gathered information.

Making use of digitally automatically collected data

Thinking about data capture also means thinking about the information that is automatically collected when a user visits the site, whether logged in or not. Their location data, the search term that brought them to the site, their onsite user journey –  all of this information can inform your personalisation approach. Personalisation based on this information is subtle, possibly unnoticed as the visitor explores the website. They may not recognise the personalised experience, but will come away thinking that the shopping experience was quick and easy.

This also applies to classic customer segmentations, a general grouping based around shared behaviours. Personalisation doesn’t always mean single individuals. These segmentations can be useful when thinking about broader data automatically collected by new visitors to the site, as the depth of information isn’t there to create an individual response. As an example, an electronic parts company could use site search data to establish a segmentation that prominently displays associated purchases to visitors.

With an understanding of how data is collected, your business can begin planning the execution. At this stage, think in terms of what can be done onsite and off-site. While it is easier to control the onsite content and design, focusing solely on the website can see businesses missing out on the opportunity to fine tune their contact with customers through advertising and direct messaging.

Dynamic content

Onsite, dynamic content is a useful tool to make use of. This is content that adapts based on the data that is fed into the CMS, whether it is account data, previous purchases, search terms, and so on. The most obvious use is often found in the leisure and tourism space; if a visitor clicks on a number of pages relating to Italian destinations, the site can adapt the background images on more general pages to show Rome, Venice and Florence. 

In the B2B space, dynamic content can be used to display relevant information, based on what is known of the customer. If they have listed their job function as logistics, they can be shown contextual information on delivery times and options, while a member of the finance team will see more about pricing options and different payment plans.

Accelerating everyday tasks

Speeding up common processes is another use, particularly helpful when looking to keep long term customers engaged. There will be a number of actions that returning customers have to redo with each visit, the most obvious example being adding items to the basket.

This is particularly important for B2B commerce as orders can be large and complex, and customers are more likely to repeat their orders when compared to B2C. Improving reordering was a key feature when developing Brenntag’s new commerce platform, Brenntag Connect.

As a chemical distributor, Brenntag has a strict process when allowing new customers to use their service. Customers are typically placing large, identical orders, leading Brenntag to create an automation service that places repeat orders and provides relevant contextual information when customers need to make an adjustment. This is a clear indicator of why it’s important to remember that personalisation is not fitting to how customers buy, it’s fitting to how customers behave.

Supplying more information to upsell

When customers are returning to reorder from your company, there is an opportunity to upsell existing products and promote new ones. This goes beyond ‘customers who bought X also bought Y’. This form of personalisation should aim to suggest alterations and explain the reasoning, based on the specific customer’s order. Think of it as a digital representation of the sales rep relationship, understanding the developments in a customer’s business and reacting with new solutions.

It can also be developed into a website feature, an interactive problem solving flowchart or chatbot that allows visitors to input their problem or need and see what solutions the company would suggest.

Optimising site speed

Not every on-site personalisation improvement is interactive and clear for customers to see. Adding in predictive loading is one example, a feature that speeds up the load time for each page on your site based on similar customer journeys.

Customers may never realise that the site they visit uses predictive loading, but they will notice if a site is slow to load. Selling needs to be as smooth as possible; slow loading leads to a larger bounce rate. Installing features, like predictive loading, that uses the information gathered when analysing personalisation can ensure the process never stalls.

Off site-actions

Personalisation also applies to actions that the company makes off-site. Email is one area, automated workflows for customers that left the site without checking can bring them back, boosting conversion through reminders and specialised offers. This can similarly be used for surrounding purchases, following the frequency of repeat purchasing or the typical time it takes for a customer to branch out to a new product.

Also consider how the purchasing journey exists across different touchpoints such as apps, social media and face-to-face meetings. Is it easy to bring up the customer profile and optimise their order based on this information? This kind of integration creates a seamless experience, perfect for B2B’s longer, omnichannel purchasing journeys.

Facilitate an easier commerce experience

In each recommendation, the end goal of facilitating a faster, easier, more accurate commerce experience remains the number one priority. By hitting each aim, the business makes each customer more likely to checkout, more likely to return, and more likely to talk to people in their industry about how great purchasing from your business is. These improvements build up, a snowball effect that ultimately results in increased sales and larger, loyal customer base.

As the marketing landscape grows increasingly complex, so does the challenge of acquiring new customers. Our survey indicates a significant shift in strategy, with many brands pivoting from aggressive customer acquisition efforts to a stronger emphasis on customer loyalty and retention.

According to our survey, 64% of brands are investing heavily in loyalty rewards programs, while 62% are focusing on personalised email campaigns. Additionally, 54% of respondents are enhancing their customer service efforts to build and maintain strong relationships with existing customers.

This shift can be attributed to several factors, including rising costs associated with customer acquisition and a more competitive marketplace. With cost-per-click (CPC) rates and cost-per-acquisition (CPA) metrics climbing, it’s more cost-effective to focus on retaining existing customers rather than acquiring new ones.

Additionally, privacy concerns and the phasing out of third-party cookies make digital advertising and data collection more convoluted, prompting marketers to prioritise and nurture known customer profiles over investing in unknown prospects.

The hottest buzzword and topic of internet debate, artificial intelligence continues to be a focal point for many marketing teams—and with a notable increase in investment this year. The focus has primarily been on GenAI for content and creative production, which for many brands is the most immediately available and applicable use case of the technology. 

Our survey found that 78% of marketing teams plan to upgrade or enhance their AI capabilities this year. Of these, 76% are investing in GenAI, followed by 51% in creative production and 46% in data science.

While interest in AI is undeniable, many brands are still in the early discovery and education stages of adoption. According to eMarketer, a majority of marketers recognise AI’s potential but are lagging in full-scale adoption due to concerns over cost, integration, and expertise. The potential of AI to streamline operations, enhance personalisation, and drive creative innovation is clear, but practical implementation remains a challenge.

As algorithms and automation increasingly dominate many marketing processes, unique and personalised content and creative are becoming key differentiators. Producing engaging, high-quality, and distinctly human content is more important than ever.

This year, we saw a noticeable increase in investments in Digital Experience Platforms (DXPs), content marketing, influencer marketing, and AI-driven creative production. 

In contrast, more traditional strategies like programmatic advertising, conversion rate optimization (CRO), retargeting, and organic social media are seeing reduced investment due to their diminishing effectiveness in the face of privacy changes and the deprecation of cookies.

The shift towards content and creative investments underscores the need for brands to forge stronger emotional connections with their audiences. As the effectiveness of targeting through cookies and other third-party data declines, marketers are focusing on creating compelling content and digital experiences that engage users directly and build long-term brand loyalty.

Brands are shifting from aggressive new customer acquisition to enhancing customer loyalty and retention, driven by rising acquisition costs and the need for more predictable ROI. 

Companies are keen to invest in AI, but many lack the resources and skills to integrate it effectively and strategically. And a strong emphasis on authentic, audience-focused content and proven digital channels reflects a desire to connect more deeply with existing audiences amidst evolving privacy concerns and economic uncertainties.

In the short term, these trends suggest a slowdown in new customer growth for brands heavily focused on retention and cautious spending. But to build a robust marketing pipeline that supports long-term growth, businesses must balance these cost-cutting measures with some degree of experimentation. Exploring new channels, refining AI strategies, and optimising across the full funnel are essential steps to remain competitive and adaptable.

As we move forward into 2025, the key to success lies in the balance of embracing innovation while staying true to proven principles of customer engagement and loyalty. With the right strategy and support, marketing teams can thrive amidst uncertainty and drive sustainable growth well into the future—achieving both immediate results and long-term business objectives.

The financial exchange between an online consumer and a retailer depends on banks. However, the experience of that transaction occurs on e-commerce sites, mobile apps, or even on social media platforms. 

Consumers have become accustomed to this process and the seamlessness of these experiences. They’ve grown to expect the same speed, convenience, and personalisation from their banks as they do from their favourite e-commerce sites. 

Moreover, with social platforms like Facebook and Instagram having entered the game, customers have also become accustomed to the rapidly blurring boundaries between browsing and shopping.

To stay competitive, banks need to deliver experiences that match these elevated expectations and focus on experience- and discovery-based interactions.

The best way of doing that is to embrace the growing integration between banking and commerce, a road already being paved by disruptors like fintech companies and open banking initiatives:

• Fintech companies have challenged banks to enhance their digital offering through innovative and user-friendly financial solutions.
• Open banking initiatives have enabled customers to access a wider range of financial products and services from different providers through a single platform. 

If we think about the integration of e-commerce within banking as a spectrum, the most significant investment in that integration that banks could make would be to build their own e-commerce marketplace within their existing platform. 

While this would streamline the behind-the-scenes process of online transactions and eliminate the need for third-party processors, this type of investment represents a massive leap forward for traditional banks. The risk vs. reward factor will likely remain too high for banks to realistically consider in the short term.

Fortunately, there are other types of investments that fall along the middle of the spectrum that are more realistic for banks to explore as a worthwhile experiment.

• Instead of integrating a full-scale marketplace into their platform, for example, banks could create a platform for their customers to redeem their credit card points and loyalty rewards. This simplified marketplace encourages engagement while enhancing the value of existing banking platforms—driving increased spending and loyalty.
• Banks could also double down on consolidating their financial products and evolving their platforms into cohesive digital ecosystems. This would create a centralised place for customers to manage everything from savings accounts and credit cards, to investment and insurance—simplifying financial management while positioning banks as trusted advisors.
• Personalisation poses perhaps the most low-risk/high-reward opportunity of all. By leveraging customer data and insights, banks can offer highly personalised financial advice, portfolio management suggestions, and tailored product recommendations—improving customer relationships in a big way while creating new avenues for cross-selling.