Three years ago, researchers from Stanford and the University of Chicago teamed up with a test prep software company, sending out 68,000 emails to accounting students for an experiment. Half the emails had generic subject lines; the others included students’ first names. The latter group had 20% higher open rates, just from personalized subject lines, the easiest, lowest-hanging fruit in the realm of personalized marketing.

Just imagine the business results that more sophisticated personalized marketing technologies can generate. Savvy marketers understand that and as a result, personalization has never been more popular.

And as in any hot market, there are thousands of technology vendors purporting to help. There are even more misconceptions about how to make the most of these technologies.

What True Personalized Marketing Calls For

Evaluating personalization technology, here’s one thing to keep in mind: personalization should not be bolted onto an existing messaging strategy. Different technologies don’t communicate — nor were they designed to. This results in siloed data, half-baked personalization and wasted money. Deploying true personalized marketing requires a holistic omnichannel customer profile.

Sailthru’s User Profiles encompass a customer’s basic information like name, location and email address, as well as their interests and behaviors. In other words, nearly all the data Sailthru retains about people. Real people, not members of segments or demographic groups.

To get there, marketers need a connected solution. That enables them to easily pull a list of, say, all the customers who made a purchase in the last month. Marketers using bolt-ons can also acquire that information… but only after filling out an IT ticket. By the time that query is fulfilled, the information may not even be useful.

If you treat personalization as a bolt-on, you’ll always be playing catch up.

To learn more about connected solutions, and why they’re lightyears ahead of using multiple point solutions, download A Marketer’s Guide to Evaluating Personalization Technology.

To learn more about why Marigold Engage by Marigold Engage by Sailthru, the connected solution for you, click here for a demo.