“I’m a guy, and I don’t ski. Why are you showing me pictures of a woman skiing?” I wish I could remember the name of the man who said this, because it is a great summary of the customer perspective of personalization. The implication is, he’d be more responsive to offers that featured guys doingContinue reading “The Right Questions for Personalization Success”
Category Archives: Basics
Evolution to Personalization: 3 Maturity Levels
How will you mature your digital marketing? If you expect to excel in your market via superior customer experience, targeting, or personalization, you need a culture of optimization – measuring, improving, and predicting. The strategy of using audience data to improve customer experience and optimize results has become this decade’s gold rush — for marketersContinue reading “Evolution to Personalization: 3 Maturity Levels”
3 Foundations for Personalization
“Personalization” online has its roots in the mid-90’s, when industry leaders such as HP and Wells Fargo had big buttons on their home pages, “PERSONAL” and “COMMERCIAL.” From today’s perspective, that’s pretty lame: those categories represent myriad audiences and personas with very different needs. To meet today’s customer expectations, marketers need to recognize dozens, hundreds,Continue reading “3 Foundations for Personalization”
Geotargeting: Killing App for Personalization
One of the many fantastic benefits of the digital age is staying connected with your life, even when far from home. Geotargeting is a deadly assault on that promise of a digital home-away-from-home. I’ve been travelling for some months, and feeling frustrated. When I ask for [whatever].com, I want the .com version. Not the localContinue reading “Geotargeting: Killing App for Personalization”
3 Automation Questions for Recommendations Solution Providers
A decade ago I watched vendors of site search solutions teach customers new skills: how to manage synonyms and common misspellings, how to identify poorly performing searches and improve them, how to change their content to produce better search results, how to create and manage rules to control search, how to offer the right navigationContinue reading “3 Automation Questions for Recommendations Solution Providers”
Your Personalization Strategy in 3 Questions
What approach to personalization will improve your customer experience? Which of these customer experience improvements contribute to your business goals? How will all the effected parts of the company summon the will and resources to change?
How to Avoid Sinkhole of Personalization
The success of recommender systems has rescued personalization from the scrapheap of technology fantasies. 1:1 was really exciting in the mid-90s, and lots of otherwise stable and rational people threw money and time at it. It didn’t work, and personalization became a four-letter word, one that didn’t shock so much as engender pity for theContinue reading “How to Avoid Sinkhole of Personalization”
Loving/Hating Digital Small-Town Life
“Why, o why, cant’ shopping online be more like going to the corner store, where they know me, know what I buy, and give me personal service?” Online shopping critiques nearly always include this plaintive plea. Sometimes a site is applauded for coming close, some of the time. More often, a site or company isContinue reading “Loving/Hating Digital Small-Town Life”
Personalization Trends in Sydney, Australia
image by freeimageslive.co.uk – aussiestock I got a glimpse of the trends in personalization in Australia, when I participated in a networking event in Sydney yesterday. Conventional wisdom has it that it takes two years for markets and trends emerging in the USA to reach Australia. But based on what I learned at the meeting,Continue reading “Personalization Trends in Sydney, Australia”
The Science of Personalization: Guess, but Test
Not long ago I worked with a stomach-driven organization. A stomach-driven marketing organization starts the day with a guess. Red! Make all the pages red, customers will buy! The team scrambles, the pages are red. No buying? It’s the weather. Lots of buying? It’s the red. Being stomach-driven worked when your competitors were also stomach-driven.Continue reading “The Science of Personalization: Guess, but Test”
On Target 