5 Elements to Getting Personal Online

My street, my state, my email address (ugh!), how much I paid last month, what I bought, what I did not buy – these are all personal traits of mine that anyone I have done business with knows about me.  Yet very few of them ever use the information to effectively sell me something else.

Yes, I get junk mail in my mailbox – the one on the street and the one on my desk, but they don’t leverage the power of the personalized experience.  They are using a simple formula of 1-2% of a zillion mails that go out will generate business – not very personal.  Why don’t companies use my information effectively, the likely reason is companies have not invested in the appropriate infrastructure to use the personal information they have.  What do they (you) need to start to leverage the power of personalization?

Developing a customer (1) profile is the first foundational element required to successfully launch an online personalized experience.  Every business knows something about their customer – at a minimum you have gathered a street address to send your product or an invoice.  Addresses provide great geographical information and are a great starting point for a profile.  But addresses are only a starting point (remember we can send a zillion mails) – here is a short list of other elements that can be used to help expand your customer profile:

Once your profile is created it will grow rapidly.  Start with 10 – 15 elements and then leverage feedback from your merchandising team to add elements incrementally.

The level of personalization will also be dictated by the (2) frequency of customer visits.  If a customer visits your site daily to read email versus monthly to pay a bill versus once a year to purchase holiday gifts the experience should recognize this frequency and maximize messaging and promotions based on this frequency.  Visit frequency is an oft overlooked element that can be placed in the profile which can greatly improve results.

Just because I bought a children’s movie from Amazon once does not mean every time I go to Amazon I want other children’s movie…especially if I visit it frequently and I have not purchased another children’s movie in over two years.

You must put the power in the hands of the people who can make your site sell.  This is not IT.  IT implements the infrastructure (the how) and the business uses that infrastructure to effectively sell.  The business must control what, where and when content is displayed to the customer (who sees it).  Utilizing the profile I discussed earlier the business would then leverage a (3) content management system, a (4) personalization engine and a (5) catalog to provide personalized content each time a customer visits the site.  These three infrastructure items work hand-in-hand to ensure the customer is seeing the best price you can offer, for the product they need, with the messaging and imagery you know is best for that particular customer.

The content management system (CMS) allows the business team to manage the content and image assets that would be displayed.  This eliminates the need to have IT resources change a word on the page or the wording within a promotion.  CMSs can perform many other functions…more on that in another blog.

The catalog provides all product information and pricing.  This should be limited to product details, specifications, pricing, discounts, images, categorizations etc.  The promotional content and promotional imagery should be stored within the CMS, because it will change more frequently then the image of the product or the description of the product.

The personalization engine is the brain of the infrastructure.  It allows the business to define what content is displayed based on the information contained in the customer’s profile.   So, if a customer spent $250 (profile element) on their last visit and they live in the northeast (profile element) and they bought a snow blower from you last year (profile element) then you may want to offer them a discount on snow blower attachments and not offer them shovels at all…get it!  If they bought that snow blower 5 years ago, then the offer would be different…it may be time for a new snow blower.

Personalized content drives sales.  Use what you know about your customer to build a personal relationship.