Consumers have grown accustomed to having their online shopping experiences personalized. To better serve customers and to increase sales, marketers can improve personalization. But are your clients ready to handle this challenge?

Here’s what businesses told Adobe researchers about the level of their personalization efforts:

• Website 86%
• Digital and social ads 77%
• Email 66%
• Mobile app 62%
• Mobile website 62%
• SMS 30%

The Challenges of Personalization

Digging into the details, we see that businesses are serious about making progress in this area. But your clients might run into a few disconnects along the way.

For one thing, personalized marketing can be expensive. SMBs say about 21% of their digital marketing spending is personalized, while larger businesses say 45% of the digital marketing budget is.

Another part of personalization success is connected to how much consumers are willing to share with their favorite businesses. The following percentages of consumers have opted in to receive communications on mobile devices:

• Email 40%
• Test messages 33%
• In-​app notification 37%

Marketers also rely on consumers to share their locations. Millennials (39%) are generally on board with this idea. But most consumers share location data with specific apps for logical reasons. Maps/​GPS apps rule with 80% of consumers who share their location information in order to get directions. And 69% of consumers give their location data to weather apps. On the other hand, only 36% allow social media apps this kind of access and 32% give health/​fitness tracking apps this privileged information. What would change consumers to be more open about sharing location data? 61% say they want to get a deal or learn about events.

Consumers also appreciate the  personalized recommendations brands make to consumers during an online shopping experience. The kinds of recommendations that make the biggest difference to consumers are:

• Based on their favorite 52%
• Recommended for them 50%
• People also bought 45%
• Most popular 40%

How Marketers Can Improve Personalization

While brands believe they’ve personalized their website, only 8% of consumers strongly agree. Consumers report brands could do a better job by having content reflect age (37%), interested/​hobbies (34%), body type (30%) or gender (26%). More than any other consumer group, millennials (42%) say it’s important to see personalized content on a website and 35% of this group also say that personalized content makes them happy about the brand.

To learn more about consumers who respond to text link ads or mobile apps ads, check out the AudienceSCAN profiles available from AdMall by SalesFuel.