Personalization Documents

What is realtime personalization?

reacting to changing interests or perceptions on-the-fly

Realtime personalization is the ability to modify the response to a user based on a changing perception of the user throughout the interaction as it occurs. A website using realtime personalization should be able to rapidly change information and products presented to a visitor as the system learns more about him or her. Preference-based technologies are most adept at this process. Segmentation, rules-based, and even checkbox approaches can assimilate new data and alter responses while the user is interacting with the site provided all potential responses and alternatives have been accounted for.

How do end user customers benefit from personalization?

making complex websites easy to use

A customer visiting any sort of a business wants ease-of-use, great service, selection and price, enjoys being addressed by name, and appreciates being remembered on a return visit. Name recognition is the most basic form of personalization and is easy to incorporate into almost any system. It also makes repeat visits simple to personalize. However, the greatest benefit of personalization is its ability to make a complex site easy to use by
presenting the information that a particular customer wants to see at the appropriate time.

How does personalization relate to one-to-one (1:1) marketing?

personalization enables the closest computerized approximation of face-to-face buyer-seller interactions

New personalization technologies are making 1:1 marketing possible when there is only one salesperson for thousands — or millions — of simultaneous buyers. One-to-one selling is the traditional method: one car buyer buys from one car seller, one car at a time. Buyer and seller would get to know each other's names, car color and style preferences, and personally discuss price and availability. Personalization technology allows the closest
computerized approximation of this type of buyer-seller interaction.
The one-to-one facet of personalization technology also has many potential applications in both non-sales and offline situations.

How does a business benefit from personalization?

better relationships with individual customers

Personalization's primary benefit is a better relationship with each customer. Name recognition, convenience, and superior service are known factors in customer retention and a well-integrated personalization solution can provide all of these benefits.
A good example would be a music site on which the personalization solution tracks a customer's browsing activity and remembers what music the customer has sampled, purchased, or returned. This information, combined with other aggregate data, allows the system to recommend other music the customer is likely to enjoy. Since the site's selection is too vast to assume the user will browse his or her way
to all items, recommending specific items increases the chances of the customer
finding and buying them. In marketing parlance, personalization delivers on these objectives:
1) converts more browsers to buyers;
2) increases average order size with cross-sell/up-sell recommendations
3) increases frequency of purchases by promoting customer loyalty through learned customer preferences.

What about privacy?

Adherence to ethical standards is not only assumed, but demanded by consumers.

There are as many opinions on this topic as there are people. Personalization provides the advantages of improved service, faster access to preferred information and the comfort of a personal relationship. These benefits are balanced by the possible surrender of data about a user's browsing, searching, and purchase activities.
For example, having an unsolicited clothing catalog arrive at your home with your name on it is considered an invasion of privacy by some while others consider it a service. How the clothing company got your name to put on its catalog is a marketing mystery, the result of your name and address being on a list that was sold to the clothing company. The source of that list could have been a bank, a credit card company, a magazine subscription or many other places. Privacy online has many of the same ramifications as privacy offline: we balance privacy with convenience. An offline example of this sort of exchange is the use of credit cards. We balance centralized monitoring of purchases, risk of fraud or accounting errors and high interest expenses for the convenience of non-cash transactions, international currency exchange and consolidated billing.
Adherence to ethical standards by reputable organizations is not only assumed, but demanded by consumers. Conscientious businesses are responding to consumer concerns about privacy by giving users a chance to choose what type of personal information will be collected and how that information will be used. Personalization technology providers make privacy controls available so that each business can integrate privacy controls into its website appropriately, the standards for which will eventually be established by consumer demands. With current technology, personalization systems allow a visitor to have a highly personalized experience without ever feeling that personal privacy has been breached. This is achieved with anonymous identifiers and the use of aggregated data.

What's involved in implementing personalization on a website?

1) analyze
2) plan
3) implement
4) evaluate

There are four major steps, each of which has multiple parts. Each business considering a personalization solution for its website should:
1) analyze the business and determine the function of the website to the business;
2) plan how personalization will be used to enhance the site;
3) implement the personalization solution by comparing and selecting the best personalization technology provider for the situation; and
4) evaluate the integrated personalization solution for performance, refinement, and return on investment.
Careful initial analysis will ultimately lead to maximum satisfaction with a personalization solution. Basic business objectives of converting browsers to buyers, increasing order size through cross-sell recommendations and customer loyalty can all be enhanced with a comprehensive personalization strategy that covers multiple customer interaction points (touchpoints), including the website, instore kiosks, call centers, and direct marketing efforts. Using personalization to learn about your customers at one touchpoint can be leveraged at another
touchpoint to provide your customers with a seamless personalized experience throughout your organization.
Detailed consideration at this stage will help clarify the potential of each type of personalization. Review of the options provided by various vendors can bring a plan into focus that combines one, two, or more of the four types described in these FAQs.
The cost to implement will be unique in each situation but the earlier personalization is included in the planning stage, the easier the implementation will be. Frequently, the cost to retrofit a non-personalized touchpoint is higher than the cost of designing for personalization from the start. From a webmaster perspective, an effective personalized site starts with a well-defined personalization strategy. A clear strategy leads to a site design that can be implemented in manageable phases. Often a staged approach, beginning with, for example, a simple cross-sell
application at the point of purchase, is the best recipe for success. A logical next phase is to extend the personalization solution into more sophisticated applications, such as a Recommendation Center or Gift Registry. ROI data is usually kept under lock and key but research indicates that the return on investment for rules-based and preference-based personalization strategies over the simpler name-recognition and check box methods justifies the higher implementation costs of the former.
Feedback keeps any strategy on track, so be sure to include in your personalization solution an evaluation system that ties back into the business objectives you established in the analysis phase.