• by Karl Greenberg , August 18, 2014

Salesforce ExactTarget Marketing Cloud has new data via a joint study with Forrester Research. The new work looks at how personalized communication affects loyalty and retention, and where marketers are spending money to keep up with their customers’ own expectations on how brands should reach out to them. 

Forty-eight percent of marketers queried reported that they face challenges in personalizing each customer interaction, and 42% of marketers reported they face challenges with analyzing  customer interaction data. 

The study, “Refresh Your Approach to 1:1 Marketing,” via Forrester Consulting on behalf of ExactTarget Marketing Cloud, reports that over three-quarters of digital marketers feel loyalty is affected directly by how well they do personalization.

Marketers also see value in predictive intelligence, with 86% reporting they use broad segmentation and simple clustering for personalized marketing. About half concede personalizing each customer interaction is the challenge because of the mindset of always-connected customers. And about 42% also say analyzing the constant flow of customer interaction data is difficult.

Said Woodson Martin, CMO of ExactTarget, in a statement, "Today’s hyper-connected consumer requires companies to create personalized experiences and deliver value at each touch point to increase brand loyalty and drive sales." 

The study says marketers will spend more money on tolls falling into four predictive and data analytic buckets. Nearly 60% of marketers say they will increase spending in site optimization. A little over half say they will increase spending in real-time interaction management. Fifty-one of marketers say they plan to increase spending in predictive algorithms and the same percentage has guided selling as a spend target. 

Even with these beefed-up marketing and research tools, customers hold the reins because as social technology becomes more sophisticated, their expectations follow suit, per the report. "They have instantaneous access to information across multiple devices and want to interact with brands on their terms — across channels and whenever they want.”

"Watching TV on mobile" photo from Shutterstock.