Data is personalization’s oxygen. It’s what enables you to connect with your customers and deliver relevant experiences that keep them coming back.

But what data sources should you focus on capturing, analyzing, and using to power your personalized experiences? Some brands even utilize helper apps to capture that valuable marketing data. The possibilities are nearly endless… but, of course, not all data sources are created equally.

One of the most straight-forward places to capture customer data comes during the account sign-up process. But how do you obtain the data you want without turning customers away (especially on mobile devices)?

As L2 found in their Personalization Report:

One common strategy has been to balance the mandatory data fields when signing up for an account with optional data fields, which the consumer can elect to fill out if they desire.
Across categories, brands require consumers to populate an average of 4.9 fields when signing up for an account (typically email address, zip code, phone number, birthday, gender). In addition, they are providing an average of 1.1 optional fields during the sign-up process. More is not necessarily better—many organizations are paralyzed by the sheer volume of consumer data available to them, both implicit and explicit, and overwhelmed by how to make this data actionable.

That last part—that many organizations are overwhelmed by how to make this data actionable—is the real trick for marketers. For many organizations, collecting the data is the easy part. It’s what you do with it once you have it that poses a challenge.

Our clients use Monetate to deliver personalized experiences every day. Check out a few of our favorite use cases:

• DIRECTV (video + case study)
• Destination XL (video + case study)
• Waitrose (blog post)

For more ecommerce benchmarks and examples of data-driven personalization, download the full L2 personalization report: