With a rapidly growing number of customers expecting their communication experiences to be tailored to their specific needs and wants, it’s more important than ever for companies to segment and personalize their marketing efforts. What used to be the exception in the customer experience is fast becoming the norm, and personalized experiences are critical to building a loyal base.

Marketers and advertisers are striving to deliver personalization so they can meet a variety of business objectives. Initially used by direct marketers to tailor messaging for their outbound campaigns, personalization is now being widely adopted in e-mail marketing, e-commerce, search marketing, social marketing, digital advertising, and customer communications. While it has taken a while for the concept to develop, personalization has finally become a mainstream practice. There are numerous market forces driving this new wave of interest, focus, and investment, including:

The promise of personalization—delivering the right content to the right person, in the preferred channel, at the right time, in the right context—is understandably attractive to marketers and advertisers. These market forces make this promise within reach, but organizational challenges like cross-departmental data sharing and tying that data to specific individuals persist. Businesses need to overcome these issues before they can derive and deliver value with personalization. Additionally, while many consumers expect personalized experiences with the companies they do business with, they also want more control over the collection and use of their personal information. Marketers, advertisers, technology providers, and service providers must strike a balance between automation and user control as they build the next generation of experiences for customers that increasingly leverage big data to provide greater context, relevance, and effectiveness.