Personalization is neither a new term nor a new concept. I remember when one of the original enterprise content management solution providers, a company called Vignette (remember them?), set out in 1995 to “make Web publishing easier and more personalized.” More personalized? The vast majority of companies in the world at that time didn’t even have a website, never mind a personalized one!
But you have to applaud the vision. They had the right idea. It’s only been in recent years, however, that Web personalization has even become feasible for most companies. And now, 20 years later, it’s not only feasible, but the degree to which personalization can be done – with entirely unique experiences delivered with millisecond response times to single individuals among hundreds of thousands of concurrent website visitors – goes far beyond what the Vignette founders ever envisioned.
Why personalization? Relevance. Relevance is the name of the game. The more relevant you can make your communications with your customers and prospects, the more likely you’ll get them to take your desired actions (buy, sign up, download, call, etc.). You need to understand what motivates them, so you can take your best guess at what’s relevant to them.
Figuring out what might be relevant starts with an understanding of the wants and needs of your target audiences. We marketers like to group our audiences into segments or personas and put clever labels on them like “Millennial Technophiles,” “Fashion-Forward Moms,” “Adventurous Empty Nesters,” etc. This type of segmentation is core to marketing, not to mention personalization. In fact, customer experience research from Aberdeen shows that 95% of best-in-class organizations are able to deliver consistent messages to customers across multiple channels, versus only 56% of all others. Effective segmentation is critical to achieving such targeted communication.
One-to-one marketing takes segment-based marketing further. It assumes you can identify the wants and needs of an individual, not just the group or groups he/she may belong to. When you know an individual’s preferences and unique attributes, you greatly increase your odds of delivering the most relevant information and, hence, engaging that person.
Isn’t that what a good salesperson does, you ask? Absolutely.
A good salesperson listens intently to what the prospect says, picks up on buying signals, takes the conversation where the prospect wants it to go, responds with relevant advice and counsel, directs the prospect to relevant resources needed to make a buying decision, and resolves questions and concerns with relevant information. It’s all about relevance!
Wouldn’t it be amazing if your website could do these things? Well, actually, it can. That’s what today’s generation of personalization –Personalization 3.0, if you will – is all about.
It’s time the corporate website starts acting like one of the smartest salespeople in the company, instead of one of the dumbest.
By employing the tenets of Personalization 3.0, marketers can help build sites that can access all available information about each visitor and that continuously learn – building up knowledge about visitors as they traverse the site. Aberdeen research shows that, on average, buyers who end up as closed-won opportunities experience eight to ten marketing touches – so having an online presence that can support these interactions in a relevant and customized fashion is critical.
In order for your website to act like a top-performing salesperson, it should adhere to certain Personalization 3.0 tenets including:
Real-time – Just as effective salespeople need to react and adjust to buyer needs instantaneously to help advance a deal, effective sites must also be responsive in real time, serving up helpful, relevant information based on browsing behavior while the visitor is still on the site – not the next time they visit.
Individualized – Salespeople need to adjust their advice and recommendations based on the buyer’s persona, industry and sales cycle stage. Similarly, websites need to recommend content uniquely suited to the behavior, preferences and history of each individual.
Iterative – Good sales reps try different approaches with different prospects. And when they find an approach doesn’t work, they reassess and try anew. Similarly, A/B testing on a website should be used to see what experience performs best for return visitors from a particular location vs. first-time visitors arriving from AdWords vs. blog readers who favor a particular category, etc.
When it’s real-time, individualized and iterative, a site can dynamically adapt the experience for each visitor – no matter where they are or what device they’re on – and anticipate and deliver the most relevant content to advance the conversation and lead to a conversion faster.
Of course, for Personalization 3.0 to take hold, its supporting technology must be easy to deploy, use and integrate. Most importantly, a personalization system has to be easy for the marketer to set up and operate – so marketers, themselves, can dream up the next campaign, launch it, test it, iterate on it and optimize the results. It also needs built-in intelligence to automate the process of delivering personalized content. It’s completely unreasonable to have to invest a lot of time operating a system or to rely on IT and data scientists for an effective and agile personalization program. Marketing must be empowered to make it all happen.
With Personalization 3.0, we are finally delivering on a 20-year-old promise to improve digital marketing by focusing on the needs of individuals, rather than the masses. What’s more, marketing is taking a page out of the sales playbook to make it happen. Relevance is at the heart of successful selling. We just have to equip our websites to “sell” as well as, if not better than, our best salespeople.
About the Author: Andy Zimmerman is chief marketing officer for Evergage, which delivers real-time personalization to more than 500 million Web visitors. A frequent speaker at leading industry events, Andy has more than 20 years of experience helping software companies launch products, drive demand, improve sales productivity and develop revenue-generating content marketing programs. You can follow Andy on Twitter at @AHZimmerman or @Evergage.
