The Consumer Perspective: Findings from Movable Ink's 2022 Audience of One Report

Consumers have spoken. Year after year they have been clambering for better digital experiences, ones that are personalized to their every need. It’s a big digital world out there, and if you aren’t creating data-driven personalization, Movable Ink’s new consumer report Audience of One: Getting Personalization Right proves that you could be losing customers to your competitors. 

For the second year in a row–and after broadening the scope of last year’s Audience of One consumer survey to include the US, Canada, UK, and Ireland–consumers have once again cried out for more tailored marketing. They want personalization across channels and most customers will only remain loyal to the brands that build these kinds of experiences. 

With another year of economic uncertainty for consumers as well as marketers, brands need to hone in on the data and technology that provides exactly what its customers want. In this year’s survey, 61% of consumers said that they will make purchases from brands that personalize customer interactions. Even more (68%) will likely remain loyal to the companies that build a relationship with them as a person, not a segmented set of fixed assumptions. 

Now that consumers have fully adopted a hybrid shopping experience with heavy emphasis on digital channels, they are looking for websites, mobile apps, and emails that shrink the internet into just what is important to them.

Why create data-driven personalization?

Even as marketing budgets have risen to 9.5% of total company revenue in 2022, CMOs still have less money to spend than in the pre-pandemic days. Now with the slow roil of a possible recession, CMOs and marketing executives are bracing for another wave of negative macroeconomic factors. When the market sours, customer-centricity and strategic retention planning can help sophisticated marketers weather the storm. 

In order to future-proof your digital marketing strategy, marketers need to maximize the resources they have on hand and many have a wealth of zero- and first-party data at their fingertips. These complete customer profiles could be transformed into human-centric, omni-channel marketing that emphasizes an individual’s wants and needs at all touchpoints. 

In a lean environment marketing executives need to demonstrate a commitment to marketing technology that both moves brands closer to human-centric strategies and that drive efficiencies at the same time - to augment for missing headcount or other expensive resources.

Personalize Every Digital Marketing Channel

The 2022 Audience of One report both makes the case for personalizing every interaction with your customers and shows what happens when marketers underinvest. 

More than half of consumers said they were likely to make a purchase if emails were personalized to their preferences. Almost half said the same for mobile apps–the key being consistency and variety. It’s not enough for marketers to just personalize discounts or abandoned cart campaigns, or send a consumer a trigger message about a product or service they recently purchased. Not every marketing message needs to sell. The consumer survey reinforces that relationships aren’t built transactionally, they develop when a brand proves that it cares about more than a customer’s next purchase.

Whatever your personalization strategy, make sure it’s consistent across channels. The quickest way to lose a customer is by sending incorrect personalization or messages that say one thing on mobile and another on email. Almost 40% of consumers said that irrelevant content was one of the top two reasons consumers unsubscribed or opted out of marketing communications from a brand. 

A Global Outlook on Marketing Personalization

Last year’s Audience of One report focused solely on the United States and Canada. What the survey found was a North American consumer base searching for more sophisticated customer experiences that were personalized to their unique needs. This year Movable Ink went global, surveying consumers in the United Kingdom and Ireland.

UK and Ireland consumers share the desire for personalized marketing with their North American counterparts, especially if it's done right and marketers deliver value for the data that consumers share. There are similarities on both continents, such as a consumer’s willingness to recommend companies they trust and the fact that trust starts with relationship building. 

There are small differences, though. Consumers in the UK and Ireland are more worried about their data being sold to third parties, they are less willing to share some personal information such as their birthday with brands, and they are more willing to share their email. But those differences are on the margins. The survey makes it clear that consumers in the UK, Ireland, US, and Canada all want personalized brand experiences. 

Conclusion

This was only a preview of the information consumers shared in Movable Ink’s survey. As you read the report, you will begin to form a picture of a consumer-base that understands the power of their data, wants value delivered in return, and is wary of marketers misusing their information. 

Especially in the age of data privacy, marketers walk a tightrope of delivering customer-centric, data-driven personalization that builds trust and creates more loyal customers. At the same time, consumers are far more aware of what they share with brands and what they get in return. The wild west of third-party data tracking and invasive advertising is over. It’s time to get strategic with the data your customers give you and the quid pro quo of the experience they expect in return.