Personalization in Marketing: The Possibilities are EndlessA detailed study about today's personalization

possibilites crafted by the SpringTab team

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Personalization in Marketing: The Possibilities are Endless. An short book by Peter Szanto.

The evolution of tools that analyze the digital footprint of

visitors provides an enormous opportunity for marketers to

increase the relevancy of their ads and create more

engaging content. In this ebook we will introduce the most

popular forms of personalization in marketing, and give

some practical advice on how to apply them.

The digital advertising market is growing rapidly. Companies are

spending around 25 percent of their advertising budget on digital

channels globally, and the rate is very likely to increase in the

future. No other form of advertisement has been able to match

the popularity of web marketing in the recent past.

The vast majority of Fortune 500 companies have an active

digital presence and do social media activities nowadays. But

they are not the only ones taking advantage of the possibilities

provided by the massive amount of the time we spend online.

The growth of internet usage gave a never before seen chance

to smaller companies too. With the help of search engine

marketing and social media activities they could finally reach

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exactly those people, who were interested in their services. And

more importantly; they could afford to contact them.

Dark clouds

The popularity of internet ads grew in pair with the user’s ability

to ignore them. According to Janrain 98% of people are feeling

disturbed by unwanted, irrelevant promotions on the web these

days. The affordability of the new advertising form has also

begun to decline. For example, the cost of a click from a text ad

increased with 40 percent across 9 major industries in just two

years in the US.

Brands are also struggling to reach people organically. More and

more content is published by marketers each day to educate

buyers, and generate demand which, of course, makes it more

difficult to rank well for an informational search query.

It has also become extremely hard, to grab the user’s attention in

social media. On Facebook, for example, the growing amount of

content and other factors, in many cases lowered the chance of a

brand to reach its own fans without paying bellow one percent.

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To make things worse, marketers can only hope for a momentary

advantage over the competition. Keywords or messages of a text

based ad, or a company website can easily be monitored, and in

some cases copied by the competition. Brands can also target

and try to persuade each other’s fanbase in social media.

Thanks to the constantly changing nature of the web, and the

rapid technological advancement, new methods, which make

digital marketing more effective can also surface and spread

rapidly.

This ebook is about one of them. Consider this as your go to

guide to get started in the field or use it to get some clarification

on which route to take.

Personalization

Personalization in online marketing is made possible mainly, by

the fact that the tools, that capture and analyze the user’s digital

footprints have evolved a lot in recent years. Website owners can

significantly alter a visitor’s experience now, based on the data

collected about his or her location, behavior on a website, or

personal preferences.

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While it would be a bit of an overstatement to say that all the

obstacles to internet marketing described above could be

overcome by personalization tactics, they can be particularly

helpful in two areas:

– Using them can help to balance the effects of the advertising

“noise”. Personalized ads can stick out of the crowd and achieve

a higher ROI.

– Personalized messages can increase user engagement. As

it’s quite well known, that it’s much easier to persuade existing

customers to spend more, then it is to convince new ones, the

benefits of a technique, that can keep users happy are obvious.

Of course, there are many other goals personalization can help

to achieve, and endless ways the collected information could

improve the user’s journey. This is a relatively new method.

There’s a lot of room to experiment in this area, and combining

the right tools with creativity could lead to great results.

In the following paragraphs we will show you the most popular

modes of using it and provide some practical advice on how to

get started with personalization for those who are new to this

field.

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Personalization in email marketing campaigns

Email is a great place to start personalization. It is relatively easy

and cost-effective to personalize newsletter campaigns, and you

can see the results immediately. If done correctly, these changes

can have remarkable effects!

A study published in 2014 concluded that personalized

promotional emails on average obtain six times higher revenue

and transaction rates than the traditional ones. The same study

also showed that 70 percent of the brands failed to personalize

their email messages. Even though this rate is probably lower

now, the surprisingly high percentage implies that you can still

outpace many competitors by personalizing your newsletters.

Segmentation

The first thing you will need to do, to make your campaigns more

effective is to divide your list into different groups. You can

segment users in many ways. If you already have a huge

subscriber base it might be a good idea to ask questions about

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your reader’s preferences, and combine the answers with your

buyer personas to create more targeted newsletters.

In this great post about email personalization, the author

demonstrates the effects of a right question with the Paper Style

case study. Paper Style is wedding website, which asked its

customers what they are planning for. The recipients who were

going to get married received different follow-up emails, from the

ones who were only invited to a friend’s wedding. In this case this

one question increased open rate by 244 percent and CTR by

more than 150 percent.

Besides questions you should also take into account, how your

users react to your newsletters. For example, you can

differentiate readers based on the time they are most likely to

open your newsletters. Paying attention to what they are not

doing can also help you, and deleting inactive users will

significantly improve the overall effectiveness of your email

campaigns.

An advanced email marketing software is able to automate most

of the tasks needed to group your readers. For example it’s

possible to create links, which put users into a different list when

clicked on, and in most cases you can also unsubscribe inactive

users automatically.

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Email personalization with behavioral triggers

If you want to go a step further, send emails based on the action

your users took on your website! The most obvious example is a

confirmation letter, but in addition to that, you can send emails, if

they abandoned a shopping cart after signup, or haven’t used

your service for a while.

Search history or the time of visits can also serve as a basis for

behavioral trigger emails. For example, a few days ago while I

was working late, I received an email with tips to make my nights

more productive, and the same site also sent me a mail about

infographic creation, after I had searched for this term.

Another good idea is to inform your readers about similar users

activity. The location based service I subscribed to, for example,

sends me notifications, if new users signed up in my

neighborhood, or if someone is in need of help, close to where I

live.

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As you can see from the cases above, the more information you

collect and put to good use the better your email campaigns will

become.

Retargeting

People rarely make decisions the first time they visit a site. Most

often they compare the prices and services of similar enterprises,

and purchase an item or subscribe only if they are convinced

they found the best offer available.

The time needed to make a decision is influenced by personal

habits and the characteristics of the service they are looking for.

In any case, an advertisement from one of the pages they visited

during the search phase has a high chance of affecting their

decisions.

This form of advertisement could also help to persuade existing

customers on the merits of another purchase, or the renewal of

their subscription.

Retargeting works with the help of cookies. They are small files,

which are saved by the browser when you visit a website. Using

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them allows the ad services to identify the visitors to your site,

and display ads to them while browsing other websites.

Retargeting with the most well-known ad services

Google and Facebook both offer a broad selection of retargeting

options.

In Adwords among other things, you can configure how

frequently your ads are displayed, how long cookies are stored,

or which pages your users need to see to activate the campaign.

While there are other ways to fine tune your campaigns, you can

improve the performance of your ads significantly by using only

these options. For example, if you set up the subpages

appropriately you’ll be able to target users, who added an item to

the cart, but haven’t reached your checkout page. Paying

attention to storage time and frequency, on the other hand,

allows you to reach your visitors at a time when they are most

likely to make a purchase and avoid annoying them afterward.

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You can also target your customers on Facebook based on the

subpages, they visited or the time passed since they left your

site. Similarly to Adwords, refining your targeting options, will

make your campaigns much more effective.

For example, if you create different audiences from the people

who visited the pages that lead to the purchase or subscription,

you can target people with various ads reflecting the stages of

their journey. This way you can send users, who read your

blogposts, but haven’t subscribed to your newsletter back to

content pages. The ones who entered the trial period, could learn

about the advantages of a full membership, buyers interested in

certain items, could see similar products and so on. If you sell a

wide range of goods you can also create multi product ads for

retargeting.

In addition to visitors, the social network lets you display ads to

your email subscribers, fans, and people who share similar

characteristics to any of the listed groups, which provides a great

opportunity to scale your campaign. Showing ads to audiences

that have overlapping demographics, interests or behaviors to

the ones, who completed a purchase on your site, can

significantly increase your chances of success!

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If you want to go a step further you can also reach people who

have shown interest in your products with programmatic

marketing solutions. Most companies offering these services use

psychographic data along with the options I wrote about

previously to increase the effectiveness of your campaigns. They

bid for ad placements automatically and try to evaluate the users

intent based on the information they collected in their databases

throughout their campaigns.

Website Personalization

You probably don’t need to go any further then the next open tab

in your browser if you’re looking for examples of on-site

personalization.

The majority of the most popular web services use

personalization tactics to some degree. Almost everything that is

displayed to you on Facebook is affected by your previous

interactions and preferences. Of course, among the 100.000

factors that define the exact order of the items on your wall, there

are ones, which reflect on other users’ actions, or the freshness

of a post. Still it’s safe to assume that personalization is at a

central stage at a site, which carried out a psychological

experiment in secret to see, what happens when they hide words

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describing negative or positive emotions from the posts of

700.000 users.

It’s lesser known that the other internet giant, Google also uses

personalization, when displaying search results. A company’s

algorithm takes into consideration your location, browser type,

Google + interactions and search history among other factors

when selecting the most relevant and useful results. If you visit a

site regularly it’s link might be placed higher when you search for

a term, that the can be associated with it. You can also find the

reviews of people you added to your circles on Google +, among

the search results. These factors affect around one or two

percent of the queries.

Recommendation engines

Many sites use personalized recommendations to enhance the

visitor’s experience. As you will see, this method can serve

fundamentally different purposes.

On two well-known sites, Amazon and Netflix a very high percent

of the user activity is driven by a recommendation system.

Amazon built its algorithm to battle with the familiarity of brick

and mortar stores. They use behavioral data and compare your

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search and purchase history to other similar user’s decisions to

suggest items that you are most likely to buy.

The goal of the Netflix recommendation system is to come up the

films that you are presumably going to spend the longest time

with and to encourage you to discover more from their thousands

of movies. In order to narrow down the selection for the visitors,

the company developed a very complex tagging system for their

content. The algorithms of Netflix try to find similar viewing

patterns between users, since they are very likely to represent

similar taste, and decide which categories are going to pop up

when you visit the site.

While the systems used by Netflix and Amazon are developed by

hundreds of engineers, it is possible to start to use one without

the resources these sites have, as many e-commerce platforms

offer plugins that personalize the shopping experience.

Content personalization

The contents of a news site or a blog can also be modified using

behavioral data, and there are services, which provide

recommendations based the user’s previous interactions with a

site’s articles, and the trending topics. Our company offers a

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deeper level of content personalization for publishers. We aim to

provide different versions of a website to a visitors based on their

Facebook likes and activities.

We find it very likely that content personalization is going to have

a bigger role in the future, and fewer visitors will see the same

versions of websites.

Website personalization is easier than you think

While it might seem more difficult to personalize a website than

emails, this doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing. Most website

owners could benefit from a certain level of personalization, and

it’s possible that modifying some parts of your site could also

enhance the experience of users significantly.

Many smaller sites have already developed unique applications

to provide a more tailored version of their contents to the visitors.

You can find fashion sites, that offer clothes to their visitors

based on their physical attributes, and the brands they like on

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Facebook, and there are furniture shops which narrow their

selection, after asking a few questions about your preferred style.

Our experiences show that personalization can lead to a 10-50%

uplift in conversion, depending on how well set up the strategy is.

If you have a very large collection of products, or your blog

covers a wide array of topics content personalization will almost

certainly have great results!

Ties between the physical and the virtual

world

Many mobile applications ask your permission to use

geographical data to improve their service. With the growing

popularity of mobile payment methods, it seems, smartphones

are going to play an important role even when shopping in a brick

and mortar store.

POS manufacturers already offer systems, that are able to send

messages to mobile phones, when their owner is close to a

product. To use a system like this, retailers need to place RFID

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tags on some of their goods, since they transmit signals that NFC

capable mobiles will interpret.

While solutions like this are not widespread, it' s not hard to see

the potential of an ad, that people receive, while standing right in

front of the product. The link between smartphones and

purchases could also help retailers to improve their customer

databases, and develop new, and exciting forms of in-store

promotions.

Augmented shopping

Microsoft is also working on solutions that could blur the line

between traditional and digital shopping experiences. Many of

them focus on new ways to use Kinect sensors.

The company originally planned to change the interaction

between machines and users with its voice-, face - and

movement recognition sensors, by turning the human body into a

game controller. Which didn't really work out as intended, but

Kinect have been used in many other areas since then from

medicine to contemporary art.

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There are two fields where brick and mortar stores could benefit

from the recognition capabilities of Kinect. Kiosks or tablets

armed with the sensors could help customers find exactly what

they are looking for in the stores. FaceCake, for example, is

developing an augmented shopping platform, that lets users try

dresses on their own images in real time while providing product

recommendations. The shoppers are also able to compare two

dresses at the same time with this technology, or use it to find

jewellery or makeup to complement their dresses.

Stores can also monitor the interactions and the demographics of

their customers with Microsoft’s sensors. Using it this way could

provide insights into which products are picked up most often,

which areas of a shop are the most popular, or what type of

people visit it regularly.

Digital footprints in brick and mortar stores

Wearables offer even more possibilities for personalized

marketing, than our first two examples as besides geographical

data, they store information about the users well-being and

routines.

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You can also shop with some of them. Nym's bracelets, for example, use the owner's unique cardiac rhythm for identification at the cashier and basically lets you pay with your heartbeat. You can make purchases with Apple Watch too, and this device is also able to offer coupons or display ads based on the location of its owner. The number of techniques marketers or app developers can reach consumers, when they are not using their computers is constantly growing. Fitness or running apps, that tie similar users or let you see the distances your friends covered are great examples of how connecting social data with movement patterns and online activities can benefit users.

It seems that collecting and analyzing the digital footprint of

consumers could be used for lot more than improving online

services.... It can also influence, what people are doing offline.

Connecting the dots

The evolution of tools that provide information about users and

their online activities makes it possible for advertisers to

understand their target group on a deeper level. By using

demographical and behavioral data, they can narrow their

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audience and increase the overall effectiveness of their

campaigns. Website owners apply similar methods to improve

the experience of visitors, and using these methods may also

help the owners of brick and mortar stores.

The personalization techniques described in this post series

could bring great results on their own, but combining them

multiplies the chance of success. The call to action in a

personalized email can lead to a custom-made landing page.

You can convince visitors reached through a remarketing

campaign to sign up on your website,then use the information

obtained this way to personalize their online experience, and

increase the effectiveness of your email campaigns or social

media communication even more.

We hope the examples and solutions we collected will help you

get started with personalization, and find the methods which are

the most suitable for you. There's just one last thing we’d like to

call your attention to.

Personalization can back-fire

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If you live in the EU, you are probably familiar with the cookie

law. In an attempt to protect online privacy and educate users,

member states adopted a law that gave individuals the right to

refuse the use of cookies, and ordered websites to make visitors

aware of them.

Most sites now display a small box that informs visitors about

cookies, and allows them to agree with placing them on their

device. This practice doesn't really help in educating users about

the importance of protecting their privacy online, since most of

them still have no clue what a cookie is, but at the very least it

makes browsing the web a bit more difficult.

Creating laws without understanding how the internet works is a

20 years old tradition. Since marketers and designers building

personalized web services use sensitive data, it's not hard to

envision something far worse than the cookie law. This, of

course, is less likely to happen if personalization could provide a

better experience for visitors in the long run, instead of annoying

them.

Finding balance between personalization and privacy

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Luckily, the majority of internet users understand how

personalization works by now, and most of them believe that it is

a good thing. Yahoo and Ipsos Media CT published a detailed

study of visitors’ expectations based on the answers of 6000

responders, representative of the US online population.

Almost 60 percent of the people asked were aware of the fact

that personalization happens to written material online, and a

similar amount of responders knew that ads are tailored to them.

Even more than that, nearly 80 percent of the responders

expressed a desire for some kind of content personalization

during the survey and more than half of the them also preferred

personalized advertisements to more traditional internet ads.

While two-thirds of the people asked accepted marketers using

behavioral data in exchange for more relevant ads, most people

stated that they would like to have the option to control how their

data is used, and that they also wanted publishers to explain why

a certain content was selected for them.

Michael Smith, a marketing leader at IBM,advises website

owners to understand how customers want to engage before

personalizing their content or advertisements. "Customers expect

something in return for their data...It's easy to become fixated by

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the technology… Be sure you're using it to address a need,"he

told the Guardian in an interview about the new marketing trend.

While a poorly configured retargeting campaign or the overuse of

social data could displease your customers, the majority of

visitors seem to welcome more subtle uses of personalization.

We assume, when you change the way you communicate with

your visitors, that the goal of applying the new methods has the

biggest impact on your chances of success. If you intend to use

personalization for your customers’ benefit, educate yourself

about the best practices and concentrate on providing a great

experience, you will not step over the line.

For further reading we recommend you the following articles: http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/8-personalization-trends-that-are-reinventing-the-buyers-journey http://www.forbes.com/sites/adobe/2014/05/12/why-personalization-is-key-to-the-future-of-marketing/

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© 2018 – Peter Szanto SpringTab.com

peter@in.springtab.com youtube.com/psznt

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CONTACTpeter@springtab.comyoutube.com/psznt

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With love,The SpringTab Team

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