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What is the ROI of website personalization?

Author's avatar By Dave Chaffey 11 Dec, 2017
Essential Essential topic

Chart of the Day: Ecommerce businesses share their ROI from personalization for the Retail, Travel and Financial services sectors

There are now many options for website personalization tools, but we know from our member research that many businesses have yet to implementation personalization for different reasons.

I'm sharing these figures from a new research report since it may help as part of putting together a business case for investment in a tool. In the report, Personalization is defined as:

"the ability to interact with each individual, at any moment, across touch points based on everything known about them, and includes testing, segmentation, and individualization approaches". 

The first chart shows that across all three sectors reported, the vast majority - between 70 and 70% - do report a positive ROI. I was surprised that the proportion of businesses who don't or can't wasn't higher since many smaller businesses haven't fully implemented personalization. This perhaps reflects the larger businesses surveyed.

The second chart shows how travel and hospitality respondents reported receiving the highest return on their personalization investment, with 18 percent of respondents seeing 3x their investment (compared to 13 percent for retail and only 8 percent for financial services). In general, financial services self-report as the least mature in personalization implementation, with only six percent of respondents, noting their organization has an advanced personalization strategy in place.

The report also shows a link between profitability and a documented personalization strategy. According to the data, more than 70 percent of those who experienced profitability increases in the last 12 months have a documented personalization strategy, compared to fewer than 20 percent for those with decreased profitability.

Author's avatar

By Dave Chaffey

Digital strategist Dr Dave Chaffey is co-founder and Content Director of online marketing training platform and publisher Smart Insights. 'Dr Dave' is known for his strategic, but practical, data-driven advice. He has trained and consulted with many business of all sizes in most sectors. These include large international B2B and B2C brands including 3M, BP, Barclaycard, Dell, Confused.com, HSBC, Mercedes-Benz, Microsoft, M&G Investment, Rentokil Initial, O2, Royal Canin (Mars Group) plus many smaller businesses. Dave is editor of the templates, guides and courses in our digital marketing resource library used by our Business members to plan, manage and optimize their marketing. Free members can access our free sample templates here. Dave is also keynote speaker, trainer and consultant who is author of 5 bestselling books on digital marketing including Digital Marketing Excellence and Digital Marketing: Strategy, Implementation and Practice. In 2004 he was recognised by the Chartered Institute of Marketing as one of 50 marketing ‘gurus’ worldwide who have helped shape the future of marketing. My personal site, DaveChaffey.com, lists my latest Digital marketing and E-commerce books and support materials including a digital marketing glossary. Please connect on LinkedIn to receive updates or ask me a question.

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