Know your customers and stay connected. The next important step is getting to know your customers and growing a relationship with them over their lifetime. Companies need an accurate, multi-dimensional understanding of consumers to engage with them in the right way over time. This involves building individual profiles that include web browsing behavior, app usage, video plays, email activity, cross-screen engagement, life events, hobbies, ad interactions and product interests. It’s important to note that this can be achieved within a privacy framework that removes all personally identifiable information (PII) from customer data before it is used.

Consumers’ activity is always changing, online and offline. Your understanding of consumers stays strong only if you can maintain a persistent connection with them over time. Some companies rely on cookies, but they disappear after a few weeks and not all browsers allow them. True personalization requires connecting all online and offline activities to customer profiles and continuously enriching those profiles with every interaction. This enables ongoing conversations with the same customer for years.

Make informed decisions about each interaction. Once you know your consumers, deciding how to interact with them in a way that’s customized to each person is key. Organizations have billions if not trillions of opportunities to interact with customers, where decisions have to be made, often in real-time—and that’s a challenge. For example, if you’re an advertiser, how do you decide which creative to use in your digital ad for customer A, and how should that differ for customer B? After a consumer makes a purchase, what is the most optimal time to send another message and on which channel? When a customer visits a retailer’s website, how can the content be customized according to that customer’s interests upon arriving to the homepage?

The sheer amount of decisions to be made in a very narrow window requires massive scale and machine learning; wait too long to decide on the content of your message and the customer will move on. Technology can automate the decision-making process; ensuring companies have the best conversation with each consumer at the right time.

Measurement is critical. Finally, what good are these efforts if you cannot track how they are working? Closed-loop measurement–a.k.a. the ability to connect every interaction with a customer to online and offline sales–is the best way to measure and optimize personalization efforts. The insights gleaned from this approach should inform future decisions, not to mention help companies understand the impact on their bottom line.

I’ve seen clients cobble together different datasets across multiple solution providers only to end up with a fragmented approach that results in data leakage; the more players in the mix, the less effective your ability to reach, scale and measure will be. One end-to-end integrated solution will always result in the highest performance and provide the greatest benefit.

It’s an exciting time to work in the technology industry and witness the evolution of personalization as companies increasingly try to embrace it. I can’t help imagining a world where everything is personalized for us, the consumers– an inbox that’s no longer clogged with irrelevant emails, visiting a website where content is customized to our interests, or receiving a coupon for a product we’ve just been researching on our smartphones. This new reality is here and the companies that focus on these four key areas of personalization will cross the finish line first.