Welcome to Part 2 of the 2024 State of AI and Personalization in Marketing Report!
In Part 1, we covered the insights around the state of AI from our survey of DESelect customers. In Part 2 we cover the insights around personalization.
For this survey, we interviewed current DESelect customers: marketers (85 percent) and marketing consultants (15 percent) with experience on the Salesforce Marketing Cloud marketing automation platform.
To get the most out of this report and your AI and personalization efforts in 2024, we invite you to watch our webinar on demand and refer to Part 1 here.
Key Takeaways - 2024 State of AI and Personalization
2024 State of AI and Personalization Respondents Snapshot
What role does the correct data play when it comes to personalization?
When we asked this question last year, 77 percent of respondents said it was essential to have the right data within Marketing Cloud before deploying it to personalized campaigns, a near identical result to 2023 (78 percent).
Of further note, 19 percent answered that regardless of where data gets stored, it is useless if marketers don’t know how to correctly deploy it. Understanding the technical side of Marketing Cloud is just as essential as the creative side.
What personalization strategies do you use when working with Salesforce Marketing Cloud?
Almost 90 percent of marketers base personalization efforts off of the audience segments they create, with 63 percent creating segments based on behavior.
Forty-eight percent use code to extract or enhance personalization, relying on, for example, AMPscript and SSJS to pull corresponding data into communications.
What are your preferred channels?
Channel usage shows where strategy is actually executed. Unsurprisingly, 96 percent rely on email marketing to reach their audiences, and there’s a 37- point gap with the second-most popular channel, SMS messaging.
Push notifications are in third at a respectable 41 percent, but social media marketing is quite scattered. Marketers prefer Meta platforms, with Facebook (19 percent) and lnstagram (15 percent) taking the top spots. Whatsapp, a combination of SMS and social media, has pulled even with lnstagram, also at 15 percent. Pulling up the rear are Linkedln, X, and TikTok marketing, each used by fewer than 10 percent of marketers.
Knowledge is Power When It Comes to Personalization
While personalization is key to marketers, actually creating personalized communications in Salesforce Marketing Cloud requires heavy technical knowledge. Every ingredient – audience segmentation (SQL), personalization tokens (AMPscript), and more – require coding or data manipulation that goes beyond similar marketing automation platforms.
How technical is your marketing team?
Marketing teams typically have a spread of creative and technical skills across their personnel, and our data backs that up. Of note, only 11 percent of teams lack a technical marketer, indicating reliance on outside teams or services for technical marketing operations.
How many people on your team know SQL?
SQL is the most widely used technical aspect of Marketing Cloud, so it should come as no surprise that the average team using the platform has around four marketers trained on it. Over half (55 percent) of teams have three or fewer SQL experts, while 15 percent have 10 or more. This dynamic indicates that while sprawling enterprise teams and System Integrators have vast resources to fulfill SQL functions, smaller teams are relying on a small number of specialists.
On average, how many people on your team work on each marketing campaign?
Here again, there’s an interesting trend at each extreme – roughly one-third of teams use one or two marketers on each campaign, while nearly one-fifth use 10 or more.
In fact, when you overlay the two datasets together, it appears most teams using Marketing Cloud have a proportional number of SQL experts to overall team size. The question is, are there enough resources across the team so that these experts have enough time to ensure every campaign has the right audience?
On average, how long do you spend each week building segments for personalized campaigns?
There’s not a concrete trend you can pull from here – there’s not really a rhyme or reason given for why the number of hours is spread out so much, given how SQL querying can be a person’s entire job or just one responsibility.
For teams without the right balance of resources, these technical experts spend too much time writing SQL queries – limiting team throughput and often delaying campaign launches.
Do you rely on internal/external technical resources to support your marketing team? (write SQL, AMPScript, SSJS, etc.)
Every marketing team has a unique setup, and there’s a lot of variance when it comes to SFMC technical support. While 59 percent have all technical resources within internal teams, 15 percent rely on external partners and systems integrators (SIs), and 7 percent have a temporary solution in place while internal team members skill up.
Bottom line: Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s advanced technical requirements force teams to invest heavily in resources to create diverse, resonant campaigns and customer journeys.
What percentage of your campaigns involve personalization beyond including the customer's name?
It’s not just personalization itself growing – but also a deeper level of personalization. Over a quarter of marketing teams personalize practically all of their campaigns, on a deeper level than adding a first name to the salutation.
This level of content personalization relies on SQL and AMPscript and includes purchase history, site behavior, and demographic data to better tailor sends to consumer preferences.
Despite the technical hurdle to personalization in Salesforce Marketing Cloud, 93% of marketers expanded how they personalize messages in 2023. The growing trend underscores a near-universal commitment to delivering more tailored and relevant experiences.
What do you think your team lacks when starting with personalization?
Despite an interest in advancing personalization strategies, teams face significant challenges to realization. Most significantly, 41 percent report the aforementioned dilemma – it simply takes too much time for technical marketers to create advanced queries necessary to capture granular customer data. Going beyond a lack of time, 22 percent similarly just don’t have enough internal technical marketers or an agency to create the ideal frequency of personalized campaigns.
There’s a real ROI impact to having the proper resources to create resonant messages.
How is your team going to approach personalization differently in 2024?
An investment in personalization is nice to hear, but what does it actually look like?
When it comes to 2024 strategy planning, 85 percent of marketing teams are altering the types of campaigns they run to maximize the impact of personalization, and 63 percent plan to expand the types of data they collect to broaden the opportunity for future personalization.
Also significant: roughly a quarter of teams plan to adopt a new personalization tool or hire more technical roles to expand addressable bandwidth.
Which of the following are you focusing on to improve personalization in your email communication?
Have you adopted any other technology or tool to improve your personalization?
For 82 percent of respondents, DESelect Segment and/or DESelect Engage are enough to power highly personalized audience segments and messaging cadences. With each adopting powerful Al insights to further enhance impact, the DESelect Marketing Optimization Platform promises even greater personalization opportunities in 2024.
The other 18 percent use DESelect alongside their current tech resources, whether external ISVs or out-of the-box solutions from Marketing Cloud, e.g., Einstein, Dynamic Content Blocks, Personalization Strings.
What most contributes to making new technology harder to adopt?
Even when brands adopt personalization-enhancing technology, there are often barriers to success after the implementation.
For 39 percent of marketers, there is some sort of barrier to user adoption, whether because the tool itself is difficult to use or employees never learn how to use it. For another 22 percent, knowledge of how to use it is limited to a few use cases.
In any of these instances, teams leave money on the table when they cannot wield the full power of personalization.
On a scale of 1 to 5, how successful was adoption of new tools for personalization?
On average, despite any setbacks, marketers give their personalization tools an average rating of 4.1 stars (higher than the 3.7 of marketing Al adoption). A majority (52 percent) rate personalization tech as a 4, with 30 percent saying it exceeds expectations (5/5).
Notably, there is not a single rating below a 3, indicating personalization tech is a safe bet when it comes to ease-of-use and impact to campaign metrics.
Personalization is double-sided – the solution should be flexible enough to fit the needs of the marketing team just as much as it does customers’. As we’ve seen throughout this report, the benefits of tech only come to light if processes truly become more efficient or if there’s a positive impact to costs or revenue. Absent any of these options, tech adoption becomes the simple act of going through the motions.
The 2024 State of Personalization and Perceived Value
Rapid advancements in Al and personalization technology have many marketing leaders wondering where to invest their budgets. While flesh-and blood marketers will always have significant roles to play in campaign creation, DESelect solutions complement the existing human touch to target the right people, with the right message, at the right time.
To learn how DESelect can help you create premium customer experiences that drive revenue, brand loyalty, and ROI, we invite you to schedule a meeting today.
