Acquia’s Personalization Maturity Model for Driving Engagement

Personalization isn’t a new concept, yet many marketing teams are still seeking to understand where to start and how best to leverage it within their company. 

One-to-one customer experiences is often associated with personalization, but in reality there are varying degrees of personalization. If you try to jump right to one-to-one customer experiences then you’ll quickly become overwhelmed. It’s best to start small, gather insights and continuously optimize over time. As an example, if you had never run a marathon before, you would likely start out with a shorter race before preparing for a full-length marathon — in other words, you'd follow the crawl, walk, and run approach. 

Personalization is not any different. As with any achievable goal, there are small steps you can take that will build up to your objective. There are a number of approaches to creating personal experiences for your audience, and one-to-one personalization does not necessarily have to be your primary framework. Every company’s level of personalization needs will be unique, and not all organizations have the internal structures and processes in place that are conducive to one-to-one personalization. 

Making a customer feel like the content you provide is relevant to their unique situation is what personalization is all about. Yet, many customers share a common set of characteristics that can help to define your personalization strategy. So, as you start out with personalization, focus on segmenting customers into groups based on similar needs and creating experiences around those needs. You’ll gain valuable insights and can optimize your marketing and content strategy based on those broad customer segments. 

Acquia’s new Personalization Maturity Model is a great tool to help you define realistic personalization goals. This Maturity Model is designed to help you realistically assess your personalization goals based on several factors that will be unique to your company, such as the following: 

• Goals – What are you trying to achieve with personalization and do you have multiple goals or a single goal such as conversion?

• Channels – Is your organization seeking to reach an audience across multiple channels or to focus on one primary channel such as a website?

• Resources – Do you have a team dedicated to personalization full-time or will this be managed part-time by a single resource?

• Organizational Collaboration – Has senior leadership approved personalization as a key initiative with a cross-collaborative team or is one department owning this initiative?

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We encourage teams to take an in-depth assessment of their organizations, including the internal structure, the resources available and the level of commitment, to set realistic goals for personalization. Teams do not need to strive for a omni-channel, predictive, one-to-one personalization strategy if this is not the level of personalization your organization currently requires. Instead, it is important to find the level that’s right for your company and set achievable objectives that can be built upon over time.

We’re here to partner with organizations in their personalization efforts. Through our defined strategy services, Acquia can help you identify and plan a set of personalization use cases based on your desired customer experience. For current customers of Acquia, please reach out to your account manager for further detail. New customers who wish to learn further or request a demo, you can contact our team here.