How much will personalization contribute to my ROI anyway?

Personalization will, hands-down, give you the most bang for your marketing buck. Not only will it open up new ways to boost revenue and conversions, and to acquire and retain customers, but it will help you get more out of your existing marketing spend, too. Abandoned carts, app uninstalls, soaring Customer Acquisition Costs, high bounce rates, declining traffic – these can all be the result of poor or badly targeted user experiences. There are many ways to approach these issues, but the key to actually fixing them is to understand how your users behave, and tailor their experience accordingly.

Table of Contents
  1. The compound effect of personalization on revenue

  2. Personalization can help you drive digital growth from Acquisition to Activation, Retention, and Revenue (AARR)

  3. Personalization with Insider

It’s not an option. It’s the expectation.

All-day, across all channels, users are being served experiences that are precision-targeted to meet their needs and preferences. Some of those experiences might be being served by your competitors. If you’re not personalizing experiences for your visitors, you’re leaving money on the table. Personalization means automatically delivering the most relevant experience to an individual customer at any stage of their journey, on any channel. The possibilities are virtually endless. This is great news for businesses that are already executing a personalization strategy but can make it tricky to evaluate the ROI for your company if you’ve never seen it in action.

Samsung, McDonald’s, Carrefour, Virgin, Toyota are amongst the top brands that can provide the ROI proof you need.

In this blog post, we’ll look at the ROI you can expect to achieve from implementing a personalization program. We’ll explore what’s possible with personalization, and what activities might suit businesses of different sizes and types. We’ll also look at real examples from our customers from various industries – including Samsung, McDonald’s, Carrefour, Virgin, Toyota, and New Balance– to demonstrate how personalization can have a huge impact at every stage of the funnel.

The compound effect of personalization on revenue

The table shows the compound effect of personalization on revenue

Conversion Rate and Average Order Value (AOV) are two metrics that directly impact revenue, and which can be easily increased through personalization. In the above example, which is based on small business in the eCommerce industry, row one represents the company’s baseline, pre-personalization. In the second row, we see that boosting the conversion rate by 10% through personalization results in a 10% uplift in both revenue and Return on Ad Spend (ROAS). If the business then also boosted its Average Order Value (AOV) by 15%, again through personalization, the compound effect of these changes results in a 26.5% uplift in both revenue and ROAS. Although Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) is not directly impacted by the changes in the conversion rate and AOV, by improving the funnel a business will automatically make its ad spend more efficient. By identifying the right audience segments and serving them personalized ads, you can avoid marketing waste, and no longer throw money away by serving ads to users with little to no chance of converting. This will, of course, also have a positive impact on Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC). It’s important to note that these figures can vary from industry to industry, but it is clear to see that implementing a personalization program can have a huge impact on the key metrics and KPIs.

Personalization can help you drive digital growth from Acquisition to Activation, Retention, and Revenue (AARR)

Let’s take a look at where personalization can fit into each stage of the customer lifecycle, and how some of our customers are driving digital growth across the funnel using our Growth Management Platform (GMP).

Acquisition

Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC) can be exorbitant. As we mentioned above, it’s very easy to waste valuable advertising budget by targeting people who will never convert. You can avoid this so-called ‘leaky bucket’ phenomenon by targeting only those users who have a high likelihood of converting. How? By using predictive segments backed by AI and Machine Learning technologies. Predictive segments, powered by AI technology, group users based on their predicted future behaviours (i.e. Likelihood to Purchase, Discount Affinity, Likelihood to Churn). You can target users in these segments at the right time, and in the right advertising channel, to optimize the efficiency of your ad spend. You can even automatically serve personalized advertising content to selected user segments and, if necessary, later retarget those same users with push messaging, emails, and more. This is just one of the many ways in which personalization can help you get more out of your existing marketing budget.

What our customers have to say:

Using AI-backed Predictive Ad Audiences resulted in a 16% increase in ROAS and a conversion rate uplift of 93% for low-cost airline Pegasus. “Insider has been an incredible platform for us so far. From the start, the integration of the platform into our existing web stack was mind-blowingly fast. Insider’s growth team immediately helped us identify the areas we needed to focus on to improve our margins. Plus, I really appreciate their know-how and expertise in the aviation industry, which was later proved to be exceptional with the results that we got. In 2 months, we saw a 16% increase in our ROAS and a conversion uplift of 93%. In the low-cost sector, this is a significant improvement, especially when you’re talking about improvements without any steep discounts or offers.”

Zeynep Nur Kaya, Digital Acquisition and Growth Marketing Specialist

Read more about how Pegasus identified and targeted customers with a high likelihood to purchase.

Activation

Once you’ve got your visitors where you want them – on your app, or website, for example – you want to activate them to overcome the one-time buyer problem. Going forward, you will then need to delight them with meaningful, seamless experiences at every interaction. To do this effectively, you need to understand what they want, and how they behave. There are loads of opportunities to deliver hyper-personalized experiences that will drive conversions, engagement and loyalty across the webmobile webapp, and advertising channels. You can:

  • Offer personalized incentives in real-time (countdown timer coupons, spin the wheel prizes, special deals, etc.)
  • Customize content on the homepage, category page or any other page based on a user’s preferences.
  • Highlight special offers with exit intent overlay to visitors that are about to leave.
  • Encourage cart abandoners to return with 1:1 messaging (web push, carousel app push, etc.)
  • Create a sense of urgency with Social Proof, countdown timers and more.

These are just a few examples.

What our customers have to say:

Omnichannel retail giant Carrefour achieved a 350% uplift in conversion rate by using Web Push Notifications. “Insider has enabled us to implement ideas quickly and effectively, which is essential to our promise of delivering an interactive and responsive brand experience. Also, in the past few months that we have worked with Insider, we have always been able to reach out to them and communicate to resolve any issues that we come across. Insider’s growth consultants suggested groundbreaking ideas to us, like the push-based cart recovery scenario which got us a conversion uplift of 350%. We knew that Insider’s platform is a one-stop solution for all our online activities. Insider is a continuously evolving all-in-one marketing platform that allows us to access the latest technology – a great tool for anyone looking to create impactful customer experiences!”

Michael Chen (陳致傑), eCommerce Manager (電子商務經理)

Find out more about how Carrefour learned about their customers’ behavior and served them with powerful, tailored experiences.

Samsung chose Insider’s GMP to support the launch of its Galaxy Note 9. Using a range of personalization activities, Samsung boosted its conversion rate by up to 275%. “Insider’s global team of growth consultants worked closely with us to carve out a multi-channel marketing strategy during the launch of Galaxy Note 9, one of our flagship devices. Insider helped us deliver highly-tailored experiences across our digital channels and improve our conversion rates significantly, reaching as high as 275%. Galaxy Note 9 contributed to 9% of the total sales on Samsung’s website within 20 days after the device launched globally.”

Barış Gökpınar, Chief Marketing Officer

Find out how Samsung built its high-converting multi-channel experiences.

Toyota used Insider’s GMP to optimize their mobile homepage and increased the number of test drive applications by 166%. “Insider helps us deliver a unique experience to each and every visitor, driving engagement and loyalty. Insider will really help us carry our customer experiences to the next level with their disruptive technologies. Leveraging Insider’s technology to always deliver better customer experiences will continue to be at the heart of our core marketing strategy.”

Barış Erdim,  Marketing Group Manager

Discover how Toyota built seamless personalized experiences at every stage of the customer journey.

Revenue

Personalization can help you increase the value of each visit. By presenting customers with products, offers, and content that you know matches their interests, you smooth the path to conversion. Use personalized content to increase your Average Order Value (AOV), build loyalty, encourage repeat purchases, and more. Here are some of the ways in which personalization can drive growth for your business. You can:

  • Identify users with a high discount affinity and present them with personalized offers.
  • Deliver real-time, targeted content or product recommendations.
  • Offer product comparison widgets and/or gamified experiences.
  • Present visitors with personalized page layouts and navigation.

What our customers have to say:

McDonald’s chose Insider’s GMP to implement simple upsell messaging that resulted in a 12.89% increase in average order value and a 7.64% uplift in their conversion rate. “We were really impressed by the ideas suggested by our Insider consultant team. The campaign was easily implemented using Insider, and we started seeing great results quickly. It’s great to learn more about our audience and their behaviour. We will be working closely with Insider to further build out our customer knowledge through A/B tests and more.”

Marketing Supervisor

Read more about how McDonald’s delivered upsell messaging at exactly the right moment.

Iconic athletic footwear brand New Balance used well-timed promotional banners and pop-ups to create a 556% uplift in conversion rate during Halloween. “We were blown away by the success of our campaign! Using Insider made it so simple to implement the site promotion. As soon as we had the idea, we were able to act quickly without burdening our IT department. We love how much freedom Insider gives teams to test ideas and get things running with ease. The impact of the promotion was huge, and we’re looking forward to working with Insider more to optimize the performance of our site.”

Arkadiusz Kotula,  eCommerce Manager

Find out more about how New Balance quickly and easily implemented its incredibly lucrative campaign.

Retention

Increasing your users’ LTV is a surefire way to boost your bottom line. Delivering highly tailored, delightful experiences to your visitors helps to build long-lasting relationships that will continue to provide value, both to the user and your business. Personalization will help you understand what your users want, enabling you to deliver meaningful experiences that will keep them coming back for more. After all, retaining those users that you’ve acquired and activated is the key to achieving growth. With personalization, you can:

  • Learn about user preferences through surveys to further optimize your customer experience.
  • Enrich your visitor profiles with lead generation, making it easy to keep in touch.
  • Retarget customers with highly personalized messaging that matches their likelihood to convert.
  • Offer personalized incentives to loyal customers to make them feel valued.

What our customers have to say:

Virgin Megastore increased repeat purchases and customer loyalty by learning about its customers and delivering highly personalized experiences throughout the customer journey. “Insider has enabled us to implement ideas quickly and effectively, which is essential to our promise of delivering an interactive and responsive Virgin Megastore experience. Insider is a continuously evolving, all-in-one marketing platform that allows us to access the latest technology. It’s a great tool for anyone looking to increase impactful customer experiences.” 

Almir Smajlovic, eCommerce Manager

Learn more about how Virgin Megastore implemented tailored shopping experiences that foster customer loyalty and return visits.

Weekly news magazine Newsweek used Insider’s GMP to create a 40% uplift in user engagement and reduced its bounce rate by 23%. “The digital publishing landscape is constantly evolving, and your audience’s attention is being pulled in more directions than ever before. To be successful in this highly competitive space, you have to stay at the forefront of digital marketing trends and technology. With Insider, that’s easy. The team is incredibly knowledgeable about industry challenges and how to tackle them, and has a wealth of ideas that are simple to implement, but have a huge impact.” 

Marta Ogórkiewicz,  Product Manager

Find out more about how Newsweek turned visitors into subscribers and increased reader loyalty.

Personalization with Insider

At Insider, we live and breathe personalization every single day. Our continuously evolving Growth Management Platform, backed by AI and Machine Learning technologies, is designed to enable digital marketers to quickly and easily implement a personalization program – with no dependency on their tech teams. But the platform is just one piece of the puzzle. To quickly amplify your digital growth, you also need the know-how. Leveraging the expertise of our Growth Consultant team allows you to tap into years of personalization experience from more than 450 top enterprise brands across all verticals. Working together with our in-house experts, you can minimize trial-and-error and fast-forward to maximizing your ROI.   Interested in learning more about the ROI Insider can deliver for your business? Drop us a line at info@useinsider.com or schedule a demo by visiting useinsider.com.


Srikant is a seasoned product marketing leader with 15+ years of experience in building and marketing SaaS products. As VP of Product Marketing at Insider, Srikant is responsible for Insider's product positioning, GTM and analyst relations. When not working on product marketing projects, Srikant loves exploring the design and engineering of things