Richard Buettner Internet Consultant

With the economic downturn and recent changes in consumer shopping habits, many companies are adopting sales and marketing strategies that reflect a more personalized approach to servicing their customers.

What is Personalisation?

According to Wikipedia Personalization “involves using technology to accommodate the differences between individuals”.

However web personalization is not just technology it is an approach, a marketing tool, and an art. Personalization requires implicitly or explicitly collecting visitor information and leveraging that knowledge in your content delivery framework to manipulate what information you present to your users and how you present it.

It is creating experiences on web sites through interactive media that are unique to individuals or segments of consumers.

Personalisation can be achieved by:

One to one interactions – custom web pages are delivered to individuals based on explicit or inferred inputs. Best and classic example is Amazon.com shows different home pages or recommendations to customers based on previous click stream path and/or purchase behaviour.

One to many – A finite set of Web pages is delivered to customers based on how those customers map to predetermined segments. Virgin Mobile’s Web site asks customers which regional Web site they want to set as their default navigation option. This concept represents the area of segmentation as part of personalization.

Ultimately personalization is about web sites and services giving you what you want, when you want it.

Personalisation also covers terms like ‘(onsite) behavioural marketing’, ‘behavioural or automated merchandising’, ‘conversion optimisation’, ‘content discovery’, ‘landing page optimisation’, ‘revenue optimization’ etc.

What does Personalization mean?

The term “personalization” can be used in different ways:

Product configurators – products can be customized/personalized — for instance engraving a name on an iPod or printing a picture of the beloved one on a mug all the way to designing a personal Nike shoe. Great stuff but not really a personalised web experience.

Personalized websites interfaces – social networks or general social sites allow users to customize the look of their pages. Best example here is Twitter’s background or adding one of the over 44,000 Facebook applications to your profile. For commercial sites this seems not to be very interesting and is not often in use. However when it comes to social shopping where consumers shop in a social networking environment by using the wisdom of crowds, communicate and aggregate information about products, prices, and deals this becomes of huge importance. Again, this does not reflect a personalised approach

Greeting visitors triggered by a login the user receives a personalised salutation such as “Welcome back, Richard.” This involves already a hint of the idea of a data driven relevant experience a website delivers to its visitors. But hmm, still to little

Saved shopping carts – Cart has products stored for an extended period of time,
usually more than 24 hours.

Saved email preferences – marketers ask customers which type of email marketing messages they would like to receive (or how frequently) and communicate with customers accordingly

Registries/wishlists – products are associated and stored with a given customer profile.

Recommendations - right content–right time–right user, the fine art of a personalization strategy. There are different ways and technologies to achieve this but as a principle it’s supposed to be a closed loop approach. Closed loop because the system in use collects data about  the users behaviours and preferences carried out on the website (or also network when it comes to things like behavioural targeting), feeds any kind kind of engine with it, delivers content and learns of the reactions (clicks, purchases, downloads etc.) of the user to deliver more personalised content the next time the visitor enters the site.

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