• by Jess Nelson , December 14, 2015

Personalization has been the email marketing buzz term of 2015 and will likely take an even larger role in the contextual marketing realm next year, according to a new Forrester study released today. Ninety-one percent of marketers surveyed in the report state they are prioritizing personalization to improving customer experiences in 2016.

The Forrester report was commissioned by SAP Hybris to analyze the juxtaposing perspectives of 200 marketers and 1200 consumers on how successful brands are with personalized marketing.

Two-thirds of marketers consider their personalization efforts to be either "very good" or "excellent," but consumers may have a different opinion. Although a majority of marketers consider their personalized marketing successful, 40% of consumers surveyed responded that most promotions don’t deliver anything of interest to them.

An additional 44% of consumers state they receive too many promotions and 37% delete most email offers without ever reading them.

This discrepancy is likely due to the fact that marketers use an average of 15 siloed data sources instead of one holistic and integrated data source, according to the Forrester report. With data scattered across various sources, only 48% of marketers admit to the ability to leverage customer behavior-based data. An even smaller percentage of marketers (16%) responded that they are able to capture customer data and deliver marketing across channels in real-time.

“Consumers today are bombarded with more marketing messages across more channels than ever before, and the vast majority of these communications are irrelevant,” states Charles Nicholls, SVP product strategy, marketing solutions at SAP Hybris. “For this reason, it’s paramount that organizations are able to break through the noise and engage with customers on a one-to-one basis.”

A majority of marketers (70%) who do have a single-customer database state that the data they collect is "very useful" in creating a single view of the customer. Marketers are also 16%-30% more likely to incorporate real-time marketing across channels if they have a single customer database.

Personalization will continue to be an integral component to email marketing, as two-thirds of consumers state that their decision to make a purchase is impacted by personalized promotional offers, per Forrester.