Personalization Is a Strategic Process Not a Quick Win
WRITTEN BY
Kudakwashe Mazise
PERSONALIZATION IS A STRATEGIC PROCESS NOT A QUICK WIN
A strategic approach ensures that personalization actually improves conversions and justifies the investment. But where do you start?
we believe that personalization can provide substantial benefits to a website and that significant ROI is possible, even once you factor in potentially significant tech, development and content costs. However, planning is key because personalization engines are not autonomous, and they need humans to make decisions and revisit these decisions over time.
Set goals or you’re set to fail
Personalization optimizes the onsite experience based on onsite and offsite behavior and other customer / prospect data, but without starting with customer insights or some basic customer ‘truths’, you can end-up optimizing the customer journey in a bubble. This provides some significant risks:
Converting low-value customers
Attracting leads which never convert
Increasing engagement, but not conversions
Generating an impractical volume of data
Personalization should start with the setting of goals, because without concrete objectives you cannot define a strategy to meet those objectives. A set of typical objectives for personalization might be:
Acquire more ‘best’ customers
Retain most valuable customers
Acquire leads/customers within a particular sector/target
These are basically marketing objectives nobody can argue with, but personalization is no guarantee you will achieve these.
Define appropriate segments and appropriate segment quantities
To be able to develop a strategy to deliver against your objectives, it is critical that you can identify your best customers and/or new types of customers you want to attract (but don’t have as customers yet). To define best (or ideal target) customers may involve many factors, for example:
Products purchased
Product usage
Location
Demographics
Website/app/device usage
Sector, company type, job title, etc.
Acquisition channel
CRM interaction
Personalization engines can identify and act upon many of the traits which help define your best customers, so the first part of any personalization strategy is to map the personalization engine criteria to those criteria which impact customer value and/or future value (e.g. customers in new sectors or markets you want to attract).