Getting buy-in for Website Personalisation

Techniques to encourage more use of personalisation

The topic of web personalisation continues to be a priority for Ecommerce marketers.  In addition to this Forrester says that personalisation is now the top priority for 55% of retailers.

However, website personalisation comes in many different formats; it could be about better use of a CMS to change user experiences on the fly; it could be product recommendations; it could be linking your CRM database with the website.

The key is that whatever format you are doing it in, it’s a big driver for e-commerce in 2014 and beyond.

However, the big question is, are you in a position as a business to maximise the effectiveness of web personalisation? I wanted to just put down in this blog a few things I think are critical from a company structural perspective to ensure that you can get the most from this exciting technique.

Ownership

Let’s start by looking at the most important element who owns web personalisation within your business? Or maybe we take a step further back than that and ask: does one single person own it?

To some it will seem obvious that the area needs to be controlled by one single person, but unfortunately I’ve seen many occasions where this is not the case and inevitably the end result is simply that:

• Very few website personalisation campaigns are actually implemented
• In some cases nothing happens and website personalisation remains nothing more than a concept.

I’m actually less concerned with the ultimate owner of the subject more that there is an owner, but if you asked my opinion on the best people to own it (and as it’s my blog let’s pretend you did ask… ) I would make good cases for it to sit under either:

• Customer Experience’ (if you don’t have that role, you should!).
• E-commerce Director - ultimately responsible for the website experience and journeys.

Web personalisation is about changing the user's experience on the website to make it as personal as possible, so it has to be owned by people that understand what the core journeys are and how the site is used.

Why? Because we are not talking about randomly changing pieces of content to see the impact, we are strategically changing how the website will work going forward and the impact this will have on the user experience of the site.

Change management – aka test, test, test...

For me the next big issue to be addressed around company structure is how quickly you can make changes and what form of changes. Any changes you propose to make to the site should be tested before they become permanent on the site, that should be a given, but often isn’t.

• Verify you have a testing tool that will make it easy to ‘test’ the element you want to personalise, thus proving it’s adding incremental revenue to the site,

Doesn’t matter so much what the tool is (could be built into your CMS, could be a standalone MVT tool) it’s just key that you are able to test the proposed change, by the segments or audiences that should be seeing them, so that when you make it a permanent feature of the site you are confident they are worthwhile.

Think long term, once you know the change is going to work...

• Make sure you have a WCM/CMS capable of implementing/managing the types of website personalisation you are testing.

Often the level of complication that goes into detailed tests or the complexities of the segments you’ve applied are not able to be replicated by your internal systems. So before you embark on any significant tests or changes do ensure you can ultimately push these forward onto the live site.

If you are finding that the changes you can make are very limited because of your infrastructure, then why not do the occasional test that you know is not possible on the live site, just to show the potential revenue benefits to then ultimately help you put forward a business case to get the infrastructure updated.

Consult the rest of the business

Whilst I’ve said right up front that a single owner is critical for the success of web personalisation, that doesn’t mean you should be ignoring the rest of the business and working as a silo. You need to work closely with a number of different departments and ensure they understand (and support) the initiatives you are attempting through web personalisation.

As a minimum you should involve:

• Content - Vitally important you have their buy-in, they will need to help with a lot of the changes but more importantly they will understand the overall style of content on the site. The key thing to remember is that although you are making changes to specific segments, in the majority of cases you are only changing part of a page, so any changes have to be made so they still fit the overall look and feel of the website.
• Marketing - Web personalisation should work alongside all other marketing initiatives, it’s key to understand what is happening across all channels and reflecting that. It’s important to remember the customer journey and overall experience doesn’t start on the website. It actually starts before they get to you, as it is affected by how they find you (e.g. do they reach your site through viewing a banner, reading PPC text, or details of the organic search)

Also think about involving...

• Product, Customer Service, IT, CRM... all have an invaluable understanding of your customers and your service and/or products. Consider the potential benefits from an upstream flow of information based on the learnings from testing website personalisation, this may help reduce costs (e.g. change of imagery, product ranges, copy, design)

Credibility / Backing

One concern even if someone owns website personalisation and has the systems in place to utilise it, is whether it will get the backing to make things happen. You need senior buy in to push forward any new initiatives and web personalisation is no different. In some cases a Head of Customer Experience is at the level that they have the power and budget to push web personalisation but in most cases they are not, therefore it’s key the owner gets a sponsor at the highest level.

Ultimately to do web personalisation properly is not going to be a small investment and to try and do it on the cheap will likely lessen the impact and potentially stop it happening.

Give it the right investment and the pay back will be massive. You are customising your website to fit better with individuals as they arrive on site, how can that not improve results?

4 Key Takeaways for customising your website

So to conclude, focus on four key things:
1. Get a central owner
2. Ensure you can make changes to the website that you want to
3. Consult others and ensure it’s in line with other channels
4. Get senior buy in and invest properly

Thanks to Garry Lee for sharing his advice and opinions in this post. Garry Lee has worked in online analytics for over 10 years. He began client side using the original WebTrends products and has spent the past 9 years with RedEye focusing on online behavioural services and segmentation. During this time Garry produced the first UK results from analytic driven behavioural email, led industry setting analysis tracking technologies and launched a leading media attribution system – Media Mix. Garry is a professional member of the Web Analytics Association. You can follow him on Twitter or connect on LinkedIn.