How Marketing Personalization Changed Marketing in 2017
A year-in-review look at how marketing personalization shifted in 2017, from Messenger chatbots to predictive tools within reach of smaller teams.
2017 was the year marketing personalization stopped being something only large enterprises with dedicated data teams could pull off, and started becoming table stakes for a much wider range of businesses. A few specific developments explain why.
Chat became a personalization channel, not just a support channel
After Facebook opened its Messenger platform to bots in 2016, 2017 was the year businesses started using it at scale, not just for customer support but as a personalized marketing channel. A chatbot could ask a few questions and immediately tailor its responses and recommendations to the answers, in real time, inside a conversation the customer was already having. It was a new delivery mechanism for personalization, distinct from the email and website personalization that had dominated the previous few years.
Predictive tools moved downmarket
Predictive personalization, using a model to guess what an individual customer is likely to want based on patterns across many customers, had mostly been the domain of large retailers with in-house data science teams. Through 2017, vendors packaged that capability into products smaller ecommerce and marketing teams could deploy without building it themselves, which meant recommendation-style personalization spread well beyond the handful of companies that had pioneered it.
Real-time personalization became more technically realistic
Earlier personalization efforts often ran on a batch schedule: segments updated overnight, and a visitor’s experience the next day reflected what they’d done the day before. During 2017, the infrastructure to personalize in the moment, adjusting what a visitor saw based on what they’d just clicked, moments earlier in the same session, became more accessible outside of the largest platforms. That shift changed what “personalized” meant in practice: not just “tailored to this segment” but “tailored to what you just did.”
Businesses started preparing for a different privacy landscape
The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation had been adopted in 2016 with an enforcement date of May 2018, and by 2017 businesses that operated in or sold to European customers were beginning to reckon with what that meant for personalization built on tracking data. Some of the personalization tactics that had spread freely for years, building profiles from behavioral data without clear consent, were headed toward a much stricter legal environment. Forward-looking teams started auditing their data practices during 2017 rather than waiting for the deadline to force the issue.
The gap between “personalized” and “creepy” got more attention
As personalization tools became more capable and more widely deployed, so did visible public discomfort with how much some brands seemed to know. Stories about ads that felt like they were reading someone’s mind, or personalization that referenced something a customer never knowingly shared, became a recurring topic of conversation. Marketing teams that had previously treated “more personalization” as an unambiguous good started weighing it against how it would land with the person on the receiving end.
What it added up to
By the end of 2017, personalization had shifted from a differentiator that a handful of sophisticated brands used to stand out, into an expectation that a much broader set of customers had come to assume. Businesses that hadn’t started building any personalization capability were noticeably behind, not because the technology had become mandatory, but because customer expectations had quietly moved past what a generic experience could satisfy.
More from the Marketing Analytics archive, everything published in 2017 and the Digital Business Marketing Awards.
