Has personalisation passed its sell by date?

Has personalisation passed its sell by date?Is marketing personalisation soon to be a thing of the past? We weigh up the facts.Let's play a game. Count the number of emails from brands who have updated you on their new COVID-19 protocol, or better yet, offered you their...Contents

Let's play a game.

Count the number of emails from brands who have updated you on their new COVID-19 protocol, or better yet, offered you their support throughout ‘these difficult and unprecedented times’. Next, subtract the number of emails that have come from brands you regularly interact with, or have subscribed to, or have very recently purchased something from.

What do you get? That’s right, a complete sense
of bewilderment.

With the virus outbreak opening the floodgates to generic
and outdated comms (and potentially a large uptick in GDPR-related enquiries), the overhanging question of marketing personalisation’s relevance and effectiveness has veered into view once again.Some of you may remember towards the end of last year when Gartner – one of the most widely trusted voices in the worlds of tech, communications and beyond – painted a bleak picture of the future for many marketing managers. A lot of marketing managers who, before then, felt confident in the knowledge that they had things sussed.Smearing the lens of many a “2020 vision” statement, their research found that four out of five marketers planned to completely stop investing in personalisation by 2025.Many of those polled felt that the returns gained were simply not a sufficient counterweight to the time, effort, talent and skill needed to manage customer data and properly use it as part of a detailed personalisation strategy.