The six dimensions of Personalisation success
Master these dimensions, and you'll join the elite group of companies that generate 20 - 30% uplift to total revenue from personalisation
Why most Personalisation programs underdeliver
After over a decade of helping the world’s leading brands build world-class Personalisation capabilities, we see a consistent pattern: companies invest millions in Personalisation technology yet capture only a fraction of the potential value. The problem isn't the technology, it's the lack of a systematic framework for understanding and optimising Personalisation performance.
Through extensive practical application, we've identified six interconnected dimensions that determine Personalisation success. Master these dimensions, and you'll join the elite group of companies that generate 20-30% uplift to total revenue from Personalisation.
The Six Dimensions Framework
Dimension # 1: Channel coverage: where can you Personalise?
Channel coverage is the foundation, it's binary. Either you can Personalise a touch point or you can't. Most organisations have significant blind spots here, focusing one mail and web while ignoring mobile apps, call centres, in-store experiences, or emerging channels like voice assistants.
Quick assessment: List every customer touchpoint in your organisation. Mark each as "Personalised,""Generic," or "Unknown." If more than 50% fall into the latter two categories, you're missing fundamental opportunities.
Immediate actions:
- Map all customer touch points using journey mapping workshops with frontline teams
- Prioritise channels by customer value and interaction frequency
- Identify where you may have latent capability, or only small change required to unlock basic Personalisation
Dimension #2: Customer reach/addressability: who can you recognise?
Having the capability to Personalise means nothing if you can't recognise your customers.This dimension measures the percentage of customers you can identify (and have permission to contact) and thus deliver Personalised experiences to within each channel.
Quick assessment: For each channel, calculate: (Identified Users / Total Users) × 100. Industry leaders achieve 60-80% addressability on digital channels and 40-60% on offline channels. Key call out – they don’t have to be logged in to be recognisable. Set up right, you can be confident in who the customer is if they’ve logged in previously, or have come from a link which includes an identifier.
Immediate actions:
- Maximise cookie persistence
- Maximise indentifier collection and inclusion of indentifiersnis links
- Establish digital data identity graph
- Create value exchanges that lead to greater identification and consent (exclusive content, saved preferences, faster checkout, member discounts etc.)
Dimension #3: Data: what fuel powers your Personalisation engine?
Data is the fuel of Personalisation, but most organisations run on fumes. The sophistication of your Personalisation is directly limited by the breadth anddepth of data you collect and activate.
Quick assessment: Inventory your data assets across four categories:
- Profile (who they are)
- Behavioural (what they do)
- Transactional (what they buy)
- [Ideally] Psychographic (why they buy)
Check 1: If you're missing entire categories, you're Personalising with one hand tied behind your back.
Check 2: make sure these data sets can be readily joined together
Immediate actions:
- Audit data collection across all touch points - you're likely missing a significant % of available signals, including contextual data
- Implement event streaming to capture real-time behavioural data
- Build a unified customer profile that centralises data from all systems
- Create extensive libraries of easy to understand, actionable aggregates or signals from the data that increase the ability of your analyst and marketing teams to build targeting rules and strategies
Dimension #4: Intelligence: how sophisticated is your decision-making?
Intelligence transforms raw data into actionable insights and decisions. This dimension spans from basic rules ("show winter coats to customers in cold climates") to advanced AI that optimises individual customer outcomes in real-time.
Quick assessment: score your current capabilities:
- Basic segmentation (1 point)
- Business rules (2 points)
- Predictive analytics (3 points)
- Real-time decisioning - combining pre-canned intelligence with immediate recent behaviour (4 points)
- ‘AI’ optimisation - continuous optimising models hunting the optimal targeting strategy (5 points)
Most organisations plateau at 2-3 points, leaving significant value uncaptured.
Immediate actions:
- Start with "quick win" predictive models: next best product, churn risk, lifetime value
- Implement A/B testing infrastructure to validate Personalisation hypotheses
- Build a feature store to make customer attributes available for real-time decisions
Dimension #5: Message effectiveness/impact: how much does Personalisation move the needle?
This dimension measures whether your personalised experiences actually drive different behaviour. Many organisations confuse activity with impact, celebrating the deployment of personalised experiences without measuring incremental lift.
Quick assessment: For each personalised experience, can you quantify the incremental impact versus a generic alternative? If not, you're flying blind.
Immediate actions:
- Implement holdout groups for all Personalisation initiatives
- Measure intermediate metrics (engagement) and business outcomes (revenue)
- Test radically different experiences, not just minor variations
- Use dynamic creative optimisation to automatically find winning combinations
Dimension #6: Operation scale: how broadly have you deployed?
The final dimension addresses the gap between pilot and production. Many organisations achieve impressive results in limited tests but struggle to scale across customer segments, product lines, or geographies.
Quick assessment: Calculate: (customers receiving personalised experiences / total customers) × (personalised touchpoints / total touchpoints). Leaders achieve 70%+ coverage.
Immediate actions:
- Move from campaign-based to always-on Personalisation
- Implement modular content systems that enable rapid scaling
- Build centres of excellence to share learnings across teams
- Automate experience deployment through APIs and integration platforms
The Multiplication Effect: why all six dimensions matter
Here's the critical insight most organisations miss: these dimensions multiply rather than add. Your overall Personalisation value equals:
Value = Channel Coverage × Reach ×Data × Intelligence × Impact × Scale
This means a weakness in any single dimension constrains your entire program. A company with sophisticated AI (Intelligence = 9/10) but poor customer recognition (Reach =2/10) will underperform a company with moderate capabilities (all dimensions =5/10) across the board.
Your 90-day action plan
Stop admiring the problem and start capturing value. Here's your roadmap:
Weeks 1 - 2: Assessment
- Score your organisation on all six dimensions
- Identify the 2-3 biggest constraints
- Calculate the value at stake from improvements
Weeks 3 - 6: Quick wins
- Implement one improvement per constraint dimension
- Focus on changes requiring no new technology
- Measure baseline performance for future comparison
Weeks 7 - 12: Scale and iterate
- Expand successful quick wins to broader populations
- Begin planning for systematic improvements
- Build the business case for larger investments
Conclusion: The path forward
Personalisation success isn't about perfection - it's about systematic, relentless improvement across all six dimensions. Organisations that take this comprehensive approach consistently outperform those that chase individual silver bullets.
Start with honest assessment. Identify your constraints. Take action. The companies winning at Personalisation aren't necessarily smarter or better funded - they're simply more systematic in their approach.
Your customers are waiting for experiences that demonstrate you know and value them. Use this framework to deliver on that promise while driving measurable business value. The only question is: which dimension will you improve first?
Ready to transform your Personalisation program? Start by assessing your current state across all six dimensions. The insights you uncover will shape your roadmap to Personalisation excellence.
