Personalizing: Port 80: Docks: communities

Form lasting and loyal relationships with customers by profiling individualized content, information, offerings and services. As it has been stated many times before, it is more profitable and easier to sell to existing customers.

Learn more about customers -- learn and understand the why and how they prefer to do business with your organization. This type of customer information is key to success in business today and into the future.

Web personalization coupled with tracking provides you with a powerful tool to monitor the performance of your Web site -- what works, what doesn't. Personalization can help your find out what makes your audience "click."

Building Site Loyalty

E-marketers hope to keep you coming back. They'll try to do this through personalization - and at the same time building your loyalty to their site.

No Place Like the Home Page for the Holidays
by Steve Larsen
E-Commerce Times Special Report

Celebrate Somebody

Make a personalized gift book with individual entries and graphics composed and created by participating family members, friends and associates.

The Use of Technology to Add Value to the Consumer

Does your company have an "e-strategy", or is their web page for show only? Does your web site add value for your customers?

The study by Deloitte & Touche states that the leaders in the industry "have mastered the fundamentals of superior customer service, especially involving order fulfillment and customer service call centers/e-mail centers/chat centers."

In particular, the study reports that the leaders "use technology to add value for consumers cost-effectively, enabling Web site personalization in real time, multi-channel customer information and relationship management, shipment track/trace, mass customization of products and services, automated upselling/cross-selling, personalized promotion, easily navigated information/education, and entertainment."

Make no mistake about it: Knowing the value of your data and having the ability to enhance your customer communications will surely determine your future success in this venue.

Overall, people are trusting much more in themselves and taking more control over their lives. The amount of traffic sites like eBay or MySimon are attracting shows just how much control people are looking for. They want to shop for bargains and decide who they're buying from, and the Internet provides an infrastructure to do this in a way that wasn't possible ten years ago. Like it or not, consumers are in control. Yankelovich calls this "self-invention" and defines it as consumers customizing their own experiences, creating their own unique solutions, and again, driving the marketplace.

A recent study from FollowUp.Net found that only 14 percent of e-commerce companies are using attitudinal data gathered from their sites to segment customers... pretty lame. And while a lot of people are paying lip-service to personalization and customer data-mining, few are actually using that data to do more than serve up new products. What we need to be doing is using the tools available and the knowledge we can glean to create products and services that make people's lives better, more streamlined, and more fun. We can only do that if we know what they want.

The web has shifted the balance of power away from companies and to consumers... and consumers seem to be responding in all aspects of commerce. It's time that we all woke up and realized this is happening by shifting our focus away from the short-term "what do you want to sell today" attitude that's been around for so long and get in touch with what consumers are actually looking for... and then working with our clients and their customers to actually deliver.

Every time someone figures out a way to connect a device to the Internet, it seems the device is also used to deliver advertising.

Take the recent announcement that elevators in office buildings will soon be showing news and entertainment content — along with advertising. This was followed by the news that ATMs will be upgraded and connected to the Internet to display movie trailers and other advertisements.

Talk about new media! When banks and elevators become online media, it opens a vast range of targeting opportunities. ...

Whether these new media use anonymous profiling, applications such as elevator traffic, or individual personalization, it's clear we'll soon be seeing more and more opportunities to target consumers in public places.

Nowadays, companies track everything. They know what size you are, what types of clothes you wear, where you live, how many purchases you make, and how you pay for all of it. E-tailers are building your profile "on-the-fly". They say they're doing this to give you value, make your shopping experience more enjoyable, and to give you convenience. Then they send you dozens of e-mails with specials, coupons, and new product offerings. Are you prepared for the wave of personalization!

The road map is clear. To make online advertising and e-commerce work, you have to reach the people who are most inclined to buy your product.

So how do you get there? One method is rules-based personalization, a technology under which a cookie recording the surfer's preferences is stored on his or her computer. The cookie acquires knowledge of these preferences through tracking the person's movements on the web and from profiles he or she has filled out. Some of the leading vendors of rules-based personalization software are BroadVision, IBM, InterWorld, and Vignette.

The largest, most critical question, which should inform all the others, is hardly being asked at all: Have we optimized our content so that it is a major contributor to sales and relationships?

The increasing demands for personalization and relevance put more pressure on marketers to have a coherent, well-defined content strategy. However, most organizations still struggle with the basics of structuring and organizing a site, to the extent that they are distracted, or just plain exhausted, when it comes time to consider a site's optimization.

Gathering data is a crucial part of any successful web business. In the first place, data about visitor and customer behavior forms the rudimentary foundation of understanding return on investment.

But data can also be used to improve the customer's experience. The data can be collected incrementally over time, constantly improving the experience of interacting with a web business. This process continually increases the value that you can provide to customers, and optimizes the profitability of your relationship with each customer. Because the process is gradual, it is sometimes called creeping personalization.

Resources for Personalization

The idea of personalizing web and email content is becoming well accepted because most of us already personalize the person-to-person communications that we use every day. However, planning a personalized web site has proven to be more of a challenge than many marketers had imagined.

Content Personalization

In researching email management solutions recently, I ran across a company called GuestTrack.com. The company can handle email newsletter management, but its focus is really on content personalization.

Content personalization works off of information gathered from your customers. For example, many sites have forms that people fill out when they register to become a member. They might indicate they're interested in fishing, advertising, and MP3s. GuestTrack works with this information to serve custom content based on those preferences.

Negative Spins On Personalization/customization

E-marketers being compared to Darth Vader?!? Does that make the privacy advocates Jedi's?

Which is it? Personalization is good, giving each customer the individualized treatment they deserve. Personalization is bad, infringing on our privacy and allowing companies to invade our privacy.

Here's a simple principle that separates good from bad: Enlightened companies remember information for customers, not about them. ...

Far too many companies confuse personalization or 1to1 relationships with supercharged, highly targeted advertising. If your end game is increasing the response on your ads, and you are using technology for the wrong purpose, then the odds are increasing that technology will betray you.

I belong to a DVD rental club. Now, I get at least 1 email every day trying to get me to buy DVD's of movies that they "suppose" I'll enjoy. Will all this personalized "junk" mail be deleted like we toss the snail junk mail? Or do we for some reason all of a sudden appreciate the attention? Do we just like getting email??? This article questions personalized emails, since only 4% of the top 50 e-tailers are using it.

Percentage of top 50 e-merchants that personalize email: 4%

Is it really that hard to personalize emails once that person has signed up or registered at your site? I don't think so. So how come only four percent bother to do it?

At a time when everyone is bowing at the altar of personalization, relationships and permission marketing, it's sobering to see how little progress has really been made in some key areas.

Personalize carefully: Even though I almost always buy bread there, the people at Murray's don't assume that I want to buy the same thing every time. They recognize me, but (in classic New York fashion) treat me with a degree of distance and respect.
In a rush to implement personalization, many web businesses take liberties with the information they gather about their customers. Just because I once bought a book in Spanish for my niece, for example, doesn't mean that I want to be hit with promotions for novelas every time I come to the site (or be addressed in Spanish). Personalization needs to build slowly, like any good relationship.

What if the consumer expects personalization/customization and it's not offered?

Consumers find a wide variety of sites that use personalization and customization. So many, in fact, that they now expect the sites they visit to use this technology – which means they are disappointed when they don't find these features. It's time to look around and experience the web as your audience does so you'll know what they're accustomed to. Then consider enhancing your site with some of these loyalty-building techniques.

As expectations about web site capabilities rise, there is a greater likelihood that last year's popular and successful web site can quickly lose audience to others that have added easy-to-use, interactive customization and personalization features.

To see how easy customization can be, take a look at the My Design section at Barbie.com, where you can point-and-click your way to creating a custom "friend of Barbie" – from choosing hair and eye color to naming her and assigning her personality characteristics. You can buy the doll you've created, or you can save her profile and change it later! Then, mass customization techniques are used to produce and ship the doll.

As consumers experience this level of customization more frequently, they begin to assume that since the technology is available, all sites should be able to offer this convenience.

Direct Marketing Strategies

Direct marketing isn't bad. It's rude.

Any marketing that doesn't start something or continue something with a customer is worse than a waste. It's an interruption, and it's rude.

That something is a conversation. In real markets, conversations happen face to face, on the phone or by email. They involve purchases, but only as part of an ongoing process by which buyers and sellers actually relate to each other.

But direct marketing is rude in its assumptions, its methods and its underlying concepts. It treats markets not as places where conversations happen, but as "targets" for messages that enjoy almost negligible demand. It regards waste (95% and up) as a virtue and conversation as a sin -- unless it starts and ends with a purchase order.

Personalization may help direct marketing shape its "targets," sharpen its messages and reduce its waste; but all of those purposes continue to abstract and dehumanize the customer. The better goal is to blow up the assumptions on which direct marketing is built and start over. And to be an accessory to the process by which customers deliver poisonous clues to business practices that need to die.

DoubleClick - Customization Tool or Privacy Invasion?

The Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) described DoubleClick's tracking and profiling system as one which plants a cookie when a user visits one of the sites in the DoubleClick network, and added that most users don't know the cookie is in operation. The group contends this allows DoubleClick to recognize an individual computer when the user visits the same site again or another site within DoubleClick's network, allowing the customization of content and advertisements based on prior visits.

Online Profiling and Personalization

The privacy advocates argue that enacting a new, Internet-specific law controlling the use of consumer information is the only way to effectively police the practice. "The idea of self-regulation was always implausible and has been allowed to fail in practice far too often in recent years," Junkbusters President Jason Catlett said.

The Direct Marketing Association, however, argues that online profiling can be beneficial to consumers as well as Internet companies, if the data is used appropriately. "The use of third-party ad servers and navigational data is beneficial to the individual's Internet experience, by enabling customization and personalization of the Internet experience," DMA Senior Vice President of Government Affairs Jerry Cerasale said.

Personalization vs Customization

Most of the time when you request something different from the standard offering, such as a restaurant offering (Burger King's "have it your way", "hold the pickle and light on the mayo") it is considered customization. When you have an interactive conversation with another person, it is personalization.

The concept of personalizing for customers is certainly not new. But the web elevates it to a near art form. The web is the perfect marketing environment for precision marketing, because individuals can be uniquely identified, and a message can be tailored specifically to them.

Techniques

Profiling

The FTC may determine that new laws are necessary to protect users from such tactics, which take information about consumers' online surfing habits and incorporate the data as part of a company's marketing strategy.

CPEX Gets Personal - Wired, November 15, 1999

Tech industry leaders work to develop a new standard for gathering personal data on the Net. Even privacy advocates agree it's a good idea.

Techniques: The 3 I's of Personalization are:

Interest - Provide interesting information that is tailored to the individual's interest so they will explore your web site & examine how they can use your product.

Interacting - Engage each individual with a variety of interactive experiences that lead an individual to discover how they will benefit from your products.

Involement - Encourage people to share their personal opinions and experiences to create a loyal community of customers who will help promote your products.

Timing is key, but understanding when and what questions to ask will gain the trust of its customer. Therefore trust and respect must be reciprocated to its customer.

The link below is a decent article of a Q & A with Cliff Allen, author of the Internet World Guide to One-to-One Marketing.

http://websitejournal.netscape.com/interview/101398_allen.html

One section of this site I found helpful is the Seven rules of personalization planning

According to CyberAtlas, a majority of Internet users want information that is tailored to their needs and are willing to provide information about their preferences to receive personalized advertisements if they are given notice and choice, according to a survey by Privacy & American Business. The survey, which was conducted by Opinion Research and underwritten by a grant from DoubleClick, Inc., explored Internet users' willingness to provide individualized data or have it acquired from other sources in return for personalized messages when notice and "opt out" choice were provided.

Profile Sharing

One truly amazing aspect of the web is the ability to create a web "site" that is actually composed of content served by several servers belonging to different companies. Such as inserting banner ads, co-branding logos into pages, and outsourced e-commerce applications. Time is nigh when these will be considered very basic web site integration. Web marketers should start dreaming up ways to use the new profile sharing technologies that become available next year.

http://gt.clickz.com/cgi-bin/gt/en/pm/pm.html?article=1038

Tracking Users
What Marketers Really Want to Know
By Dan R. Greening at Web Techniques

Marketers don't want to measure raw hits on a Web site. Increasingly, they want to categorize visitors and measure the significant things those visitors do on the site. Many want to track the effectiveness of promotions in real time and make adjustments instantly. They often want to take data about Web activity offline, combine it with their traditional data, mine it, and report on it. They want to improve advertising effectiveness, visitor loyalty, purchase rates, cross-sells, and up-sells. All this is fueling demand for a new generation of Web-site analysis tools that represent visitor behavior in terms that marketers understand.

iLux® SuiteTM 2000 is the complete e-marketing software solution. It includes a Web site analysis tool that shows who visitors are, how they got to the site, what content interests them, and what they purchase or don't purchase. iLux® creates a profile of each visitor, including their browsing habits and product interests. iLux® can also combine Web site data with online forms, call center records, and other business databases, giving you an integrated and comprehensive view of your customers.

Using this rich data set, you can market the right product to the right person. iLux® SuiteTM 2000 includes a campaign tool that allows marketers to design, schedule, and deliver targeted advertising campaigns via HTML e-mails, dynamic banners and pop-up billboards. Detailed ROI reports accompany every campaign. iLux® also brings marketing functions to offline sales channels,including direct mail for catalogs and promotions for telesales and retail sales.

With iLux®, you can learn about your Web site visitors, create market segments, launch targeted marketing campaigns, and measure the results. Learn how to convert shoppers into buyers and keep them coming back.

models

resources

PERSONALIZE OR PERISH! Within a year, 90% of all online merchants will use Web personalization to build customer loyalty and increase online sales. Don't be left behind! Andromedia will host a free teleweb seminar to show how successful e-commerce sites gain competitive advantage by marketing one-to-one on the Web.


systems and processes on the Web


Customhouse concepts and buzzwords	Charthouse trends and currents	Boardwalk people and communities
Lighthouse information and research	Shoreline issues and policies	Docks systems and processes


search \| sitemap \| help
Ricci Green \| Digital Wares \| Gizmos, Inc. CyberSea Inn\| Port 80

modified: May 21, 2000 by Douglas Anderson \| toLearn.net http://RicciStreet.net/port80/docks/personalizing.htm

Personalizing and Customizing

Positive Spins On Personalization / Customization

Benefits of personalization