McKinsey says marketing personalization delivers 5-8x the ROI on marketing spend, lifting sales by 10% or more. So why aren’t more companies doing it? It’s not a tech issue, it’s a people problem.

Tech is easy now. The real thing holding companies of any size back from gaining the benefits of personalized messaging… is people.

Doing marketing personalization right means creating a lot of copy and content to meet audience needs. That copy needs approval. In companies large and small, this means:

? Stakeholders who want to have the last word on every piece of copy that goes out the door…

? Endless revision cycles that mean one email takes 3 months to write and approve…

? Having to start the entire sequence again because the product has changed since the first draft, wasting months of work…

No one wants to be responsible for failure. So what’s the solution? TESTING. ?

Here’s a simple 1-2-3 for how to implement this:

1. Create a personalization experience without committee approval.
2. Test the personalization with a small but significant segment.
3. If it performs better than your baseline, then expand the audience sample size.

All the Benefits, A Fraction of the Risk

If personalization doesn’t deliver, it only affects the small segment.

Let’s say you give your marketing team free reign to quickly create personalized content, then deploy it for 10% of your total audience. And let’s say the test yields a significant 20% lift in responses. You can confidently expand the test to your entire audience and see a similar result. You’ve just turned 100% of your expected revenue into 120%! Major win!

But let’s say your test doesn’t go so well. If your segment doesn’t respond well to personalization for some reason, your test might yield lower results. For example’s sake, let’s go with a major failure where you lost 50% of potential sales than the baseline. Sounds awful, right?

Well, since your segment was only 10% of your total audience, that 50% is really just 5% of your total potential revenue. Even in a worst case scenario, the test yields 95% of your potential profits as normal.

Even if the test is a failure, the potential upside far outweighs the risk.

The result? Risk-averse stakeholders can gain the benefits of implementing automation without significantly affecting the bottom line. If the test works, they’re then able to make a data-informed decision, instead of one driven by fear.

Use Testing to Speed Implementation

This hypothetical testing scenario is great, but how does it apply to your team? It’s effectively an argument to have fewer rounds of committee review and more structured testing with your messaging. Now, obviously, you need to maintain brand standards and quality.

At the end of the day, your organization needs to serve its users and customers. Your management team probably brings exceptional insight and experience.

But data is better than intuition alone.

The opportunity cost is too high. You shouldn’t ignore content-heavy marketing strategies like personalization due to lengthy review processes. Apply segmented testing to reduce risk, win internal stakeholders, and enjoy a major upside.