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Personalization on the Web
By Joy Busse, CEO & President - Busse Design USA
April 1999
Many marketers think that Personalization is the key to building customer loyalty and a one-to-one relationship on the Web, we tend to agree. However, true personalization takes an inordinate effort and we'd like to make sure that if you choose to embark on such activities on your web site that you consider the about Personalization.
What are your goals for creating Personalization on your web site? Is it to sell a product, build a community, increase traffic or all of the above? If you are in the E-Commerce biz--personalization will be worth it to achieve all the aforementioned goals. If you are not in the E-Commerce biz but want to increase traffic in order to lure advertisers, Personalization can help build traffic as evidenced in the Portal model.
However, more times than not, Personalization is of higher value to our E-Commerce clients because the cost of maintaining a state-of-the-art Personalization program is a "must have" when trying to engage a customer for the purposes of selling products. It is of lesser importance to those clients who are not E-Commerce merchants or Portal site clients because of the costs involved in staffing, etc. to Personalization programs.
THE PROS
Personalization can:
- increase traffic
- build loyalty
- help communicate directly to your customer
- garner valuable customer profile information
- allow you to target more directly to your customer's needs
- differentiate you from your competition
THE CONS
Stale information can drive your loyal customer away! Misdirected data can drive your customers away!!
'Nuf said.
Personalization when working at it's best, is bringing up data from your databases and is giving the customer exactly what he/she is looking for. This requires an excellent query plan and a superb database manager to maintain.
Another key factor that comes into play with regard to maintaining a one-to-one relationship via Personalization is Marketing.
- Who is going to direct the data to the individual customer groups?
- Who is going to create fresh content to remind the visitor that each time they log-on to your site, there is going to be sufficient data to substantiate their visit?
- Who is going to create a campaign for Personalization editorial content?
- Who is going to create and maintain the schedule?
- What skills must this person possess besides writing? Project Management? HTML?
- How do the teams from IT and Marketing interface on the Personalization project? And what about the Database Manager?
- Who will manage the promotions on the site? You can't have a "happening" dynamic site without some sort of constant promotion even if it's as simple as an eNewsletter giveaway.
We are advocates of building community online. We believe it's the key to a successful web site (married with great UI and easy-to-use navigation) but we also want our clients to be prepared for the staffing requirements to create a successful plan to make customers loyal by feeding them great, ever-changing content--personalization or otherwise.
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