Our 6-city One-to-One Tour is over and it was a resounding success. But don’t take it from us: over 250 ecommerce marketing professionals attended the events in the US and UK to better understand how to individually engage with shoppers to supercharge the customer experience. From coast to coast we spoke with marketers and heard first-hand many of the challenges they face as they build out their personalization strategy – and we learned a lot along the way! If you weren’t able attend, don’t fret, we won’t let you miss out on all the great learnings.

Between Forrester’s presentation on the pitfalls and opportunities for personalization, real-life customer case studies and our very own David Brussin’s perspective on the personalization paradox, here are 3 takeaways to help you as you tackle the path to personalization.

1. Segmentation and targeting are good for specific purposes, but they create gaps for personalizing the customer experience.

Personalization has historically been driven by segmentation, but segmentation alone doesn’t deliver a unique, individualized experience for the customer. And it doesn’t scale. Single data points are often used to personalize the entire customer journey, but knowing one thing about the customer doesn’t mean you know everything about the customer. True 1-to-1 personalization revolves around an individualization strategy – engaging customers in real-time by listening, capturing, measuring, assessing and addressing intent across every touchpoint.

2. Personalization done right doesn’t look like personalization, it just looks like a good customer experience.

Consumers have more buying options than ever before and expect their online experiences to be tailored to their specific need and preferences. But you can only personalize an experience for a consumer you recognize. Personalized experiences are powered by customer data. Collecting the data is the easy part; it’s what you do with it once you have it that poses a challenge. If a personalized experience doesn’t provide a value to the customer journey, it’s a waste of your time and resources.

3. One-to-one is not about individual creative. It’s not about individual experiences. One-to-one is about individual decisions.

As marketers we are constantly thinking about lots of different personas when we set out on a quest to build creative, but ultimately, the output is the same for everyone. Sure, there are a lot of examples where that’s not true, but the majority of the experiences that we create are served to every customer. Applying new technology such as artificial intelligence to your marketing allows you to be more human by scaling your ability to make decisions based on everything you know about a shopper, improving your interaction with them and helping them feel understood on an individual basis.