Companies often wrestle with defining marketing personalization before they even attempt it. Whether it’s debating if entering a “Dear {Name}” field is personalized enough, or deciding which business goals generate the most revenue, it’s challenging to set yourself up for success in personalization.

As someone with a background in IT and a mounting frustration with the way marketers blindly send marketing messages, I built a company that bridges the two with personalization. We apply machine learning to our clients’ customer data to personalize their marketing. For this reason, my views on personalization skew to favor predictive analytics and machine learning, but I’m also a firm believer of starting at square one. Here, I’ve established basic steps anyone can follow to get started with personalization successfully.

Step 1: Establish Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

A marketer might think that segmenting email lists will make messages more personalized. Splitting up lists seem logical. But in reality, each new group creates more work.

A good example is when a client of ours, a Fortune 500 travel publication, created 10 separate email lists for 10 different travel newsletters. By separating their categories, they wanted each newsletter to offer a custom experience that would be enticing to the readers. While it may have seemed like a logical strategy, it ended up multiplying their work ten-fold. To alleviate the manual labor segmenting caused, we went to the core goal: the client’s key performance indicators. It turned out that this publisher gained the most value from customers visiting the website, so we worked to automate newsletter content to encourage site visits.

Not every company needs to hit the same key performance indicators. Establishing specific goals as well as key areas to strengthen the return on your investment sets a foundation to improve on manual practices. It’s also important to measure when your personalization practices will result in value.

When the travel publication company set up the automation for their marketing messages, they knew what results would indicate their efforts were successful. Each different goal calls for a unique automation strategy.

Step 2: Keep Obstacles in Mind

There are two kinds of obstacles in personalizing: ones you have control over and ones you don’t.

A great example of an obstacle you have control over is your team’s work load. If your team has more bandwidth, you’re able to take on a more manual personalization system. This could be a software that requires some monitoring and some legwork when gathering results. If you don’t have the resources or the team to commit to in-house personalization, you should opt for a more hands-off, automated type of personalization.

A great example of obstacles you don’t have control over are innovations that have become or are anticipated to become inhibitors to some aspect of digital marketing. For example, algorithmic inboxes are changing the way consumers receive their emails. Gmail already filters emails for dating sites and “free” cruises into your spam box, and most marketing emails are shuffled into the promotions tab. It’s already challenging for a marketer to get a customer to click on an email that’s buried in a “promotions” tab, but it will get even more challenging as Gmail evolves and becomes more algorithm-based to decipher which emails a customer should even receive. This means that if a customer doesn’t interact with your emails, they likely won’t arrive in the customer’s inbox — and should affect the type of marketing you move forward with and how you choose to personalize.

These kinds of factors will help you decide if you should choose a marketing channel different from email or sway which software or service you decide on. Knowledge is power, and when you know the outliers that you’ll potentially be up against, you’ll be better prepared to reach your key goals.

Step 3: Seek and Emulate Examples of Success

Many companies realize they have the most success with their marketing when they reach consumers on a one-to-one level, but they’re not sure how. According to eMarketer, 40 percent of enterprise marketers still list improving segmenting and targeting as a leading priority for 2015. This is a great example of companies that want to personalize, but that stick with outdated practices that return the small lift they’re used to seeing. They risk missing out on the major return larger companies in the same industry are seeing.

To really follow the world leaders in personalization, marketers can choose a role model, emulate their practices and potentially execute on a new technology strategy. The path that a similar business took in seeking technology, implementing it, then executing to meet goals could present an excellent map to follow. For example, Netflix, Target and Walmart use algorithms to optimize the way they target customers, giving them a competitive edge over others in their field. 

In summary, if you or your marketing team can establish key business goals, weigh possible obstacles and choose a “role model” company with a personalization strategy worth emulating, you can set yourself up for the most successful personalization strategy possible.