Are the myths about deploying web personalisation tools holding you back?
Personalization has been causing major ripples in the digital ocean for many years. Most notably, Amazon pioneered and leveraged the technique in their successful quest for retail domination. Now, they enjoy 30% of their revenue alone through their skilful use of personalized product recommendations. Similarly, whether choosing a movie on Netflix, or flicking through your social media news feed, you'll find personalized content served at every turn.
The benefits are indisputable. Research by Forrester found personalization to be the top priority for 55% of retailers. Similarly, it was found to be this year's top digital priority for B2C marketers. An effective personalization strategy is now widely recognised as essential to reaching the top global levels of conversion.
And it's not just the marketers who agree. Another interesting survey revealed that 83% of consumers themselves want to receive a personalized cross-channel experience.
Yet,…
Website visitors do not want obvious personalisation as much as they would like to believe something is personal
The chances are you have received an email addressed to “Dear [First Name]” or similar? Email marketers appear to forget to include our actual names from time to time. It is annoying and we all laugh at it, realising that the company involved has failed to populate its database properly or set up its email software correctly. However, do we care? Are we bothered if the personalisation of emails is poorly carried out?
Ask professional marketers and there’s a good chance that they’ll tell you that personalisation is essential. Indeed, according to a report from Monetate, 94% of businesses believe that proper personalisation is “critical” to success. Meanwhile, less than one in every six firms felt that they were getting a return…
How does personalisation increase conversion rates?
In our experience, effective content personalization increases conversion rates, boosts lead generation and cuts cost per lead. It might be intuitive to believe a personalized message is more effective than a one-size-fits-all message, but intuition isn’t the driving force here – what does the data show?
We have now served millions of personal content recommendations, and the evidence now shows an increase of 20%-30% in conversion rates, across all on existing traffic and content. Behind these numbers, there are several cool scientific reasons why this works so effectively.
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New research from 300 online retailers shows the impact of different types of personalized product recommendations on conversion rates and other Ecommerce KPIs
We're all familiar with the Amazon personalized product recommendations after many years of seeing and responding to them, but since this well-known whitepaper from the Amazon team explaining the thinking behind the 'collaborative filtering' aka Product recommendations on Amazon [PDF], it's rare for Amazon to share the impact of product recommendations on their results.
Recent research on Personalized Product recommendations from Barilliance sheds light on the impact of personalized recommendations based on an analysis of results from their clients. Barilliance analyzed revenue source data from over 300 eCommerce sites worldwide which use the Barilliance product recommendation engine.
Here are some of the main learnings from the research which highlight the potential gains from implementing personalized product recommendations. Hopefully some of these results are useful for benchmarking the relative importance of personalized recommendations with your site:
Percentage…
A book review of Age of Context: Mobile, Sensors, Data and the Future of Privacy by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel
This book provides a summary of current thinking in providing effective customer experiences to support commercial goals. It's not a "how to" guide, but summarises current thinking which should inform digital strategies. So what exactly is context marketing? Essentially, it’s about combining insight about customers and prospects combined with personalisation to deliver the right content to the right audience of users at the exactly the right time to satisfy the users requirements and as Hubspot states:
'A decade ago, making personal connections with people on your website was no more than a pipe dream — the technology simply wasn’t available. Today, we have the technology to truly deliver the right message to the right person at exactly the right time. It will fundamentally change…
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.
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The art of rules based personalisation and how to make it work
You are charged with promoting an array of content and promotions within shifting parameters and evolving conditions.
"Rules based personalisation is an effective way to re-engage with customers through your website. It empowers marketers to get the most value from their content. Personalisation decreases bounce rates and increases conversion. Providing relevant and engaging content through personalisation rules is a powerful tool in the marketer’s arsenal, you need to know how to use it".
My first post, A practical guide to website personalisation gave you an outline of the three central types of personalisation: Digital Body Language, Digital Fingerprint and Marketing Automation.
In my last post Using a Digital Relevancy Map to create more personalised website experiences. we covered the process of researching and preparing for personas and user journeys. It is now time…
Personalisation 101 - how to increase customer engagement and conversion rates by "Sense and Respond" to Digital Body Language
In this post I hope to give a practical guide to website personalisation, to show you how to improve customer engagement and increase your conversion rates. Apart from the well-known Amazon example, many other types of business are now seeing the benefits of personalisation.
easyJet increased their conversion rate enormously through personalisation. During the easyJet January sale 2012, they delivered a personalised home page to each of their 2.5 million customers and converted five sales per second. (They used the Sitecore Customer Engagement Platform).
John Lewis said that their personalised site was a key factor in increasing Christmas sales by 27.9%. Personalisation is important to business and customer alike and no doubt you have already seen it feature high up in the…
One of our aims at Smart Insights is to make marketers aware of the many software tools that can be used to take advantage of the unique communications benefits of digital media.
Ultimately, these software tools should help customers too. Website personalization or behavioural targeting tools are an interesting class of tools since they can benefit both companies and customers, yet there are privacy concerns about how the data is collected is used.
This category of website personalization and behavioural targeting tools is also interesting since everyone still quotes the Amazon personalized recommendation "collaborative filtering" technique - read paper describing the algorithm. Most are still wowed by the accuracy of the technique (apart from when buying gifts for others...), but it doesn't seem to give rise to too many privacy complaints.
Magiq dynamic website personalization software
When I bumped into Malcolm Duckett at the last Econsultancy Masterclass presenting Magiq I was…
When, as marketers, we discuss personalised web communications everyone always talks about Amazon "€œCustomers who bought X also bought Y"€, yet this is old technology dating back 10+ years. Here is an update on the options from one of the leading providers.
So to catch up on the latest on web recommendation options, I was keen to talk to Frank Lord, Regional VP, EMEA for ATG, one of the best known providers of software for personalised web messaging to find out about the latest approaches different companies are using to deliver more relevant web communications to their audiences.
For me, the most exciting development is on-demand web services such from the acquisition by ATG of eStara which appears to give a lower-cost entry point for personalised recommendations and another…
