Dive Brief:

• Personalization efforts lead to improvements in key metrics including bounce rates, conversion, and average order value, among others, according to a survey of 504 marketers by VentureBeat released in June.

• Marketers told VentureBeat that finding new customers is their major goal for personalization.

• Yet email remains by far the most popular digital channel for personalization, used by 80% of  marketers worldwide. Social media is a distant second at 42%, while 37% use website landing pages, 36% homepage, and articles and blog posts 31%.

Dive Insight:

The quality of data seems to be improving in this digital and analytics age. But while marketers say they’re interested in finding new customers through personalization, it doesn’t make that much sense — emails and landing pages tend to involve existing customers.

Social media appears to hold some promise, considering its potential to target potential new customers so well. Yet marketers don’t seem to be all that taken with that avenue.

What VentureBeat appears to have uncovered here is another instance of retailers and their marketers having more data, even better data, without any improved abilities to leverage it.

As Brett Wickard, founder of “lean retail” software company FieldStack, has told Retail Dive: “Everybody has data. Using it is the hard part.”