Personalization Techniques:
Creating and retaining a competitive advantage is crucial. By capitalizing on its relationship with each of its customers, an organization can Personalize Techniques to differentiate itself in the mind of each person and achieve unprecedented levels of loyalty. Experts agree that personalization model is an ideal way to achieve this level of differentiation on the web. Jupiter Research estimates that 35% of organizations they recently surveyed will invest in personalization strategies during 2004.
"Personalization is first and foremost a business strategy, and is an attempt to counter-balance the anonymity that typically characterizes interactions between consumers and large businesses, especially over the Internet" says a recent DataMonitor report on global personalization technologies. Personalization strategies are designed to influence the five most important user behaviors on the web site:
- Repeat visits and intervals between visits
- Registration rates and log-on rates
- Identification of user communities
- Conversion rate and cart abandonment
- Utilization rates
Some analysts suggest that these metrics are driven more by usability than personalization. This rationale, however, implies that Personalization Techniques converts every visitor to a web site wants the same content, information, features and applications. Such an assumption ignores the experience of countless web sites that facilitate multiple types of user interactions and transactions.
How then should an organization think about personalizing its web site? "We recommend personalizing to segments of the population that have been fine tuned through the use of business intelligence and data warehousing tools," says Gene Alvarez, vice president of e-business strategies at META Group.
Personalization Strategies: Pushing and Pulling Users to Influence Behavior
There are two key personalization strategies and techniques. The push approach proactively recommends information and access to applications and features to the user. The pull approach relies on the user to request information, applications and features such as "personal lists and bookmarks" and "alerts." If you only use push strategies, you run the risk of inaccurate targeting. On the other hand, relying only on pull strategies will place undue burden on your visitors and may convince them to avoid your site. To create competitive advantage, you must enlist both strategies and the techniques that enable them.
Personalization Techniques and Solutions:
There are many personalization techniques - we have described four of the most useful below. By effectively combining multiple techniques, organizations can impact key operating metrics. Most importantly, as techniques are deployed, care should be given to gathering only relevant information from users and protecting the privacy of all user data. Categorizing content and offers by context allows users to benefit from the relevancy of the personalized offers targeted to them, while organization benefit from the time and cost savings of a one-to-several approach.
