Tools of Personalization

In some ways, big brick and mortar chain stores have it all over mom and pops. They often have better selection. They usually have better prices. And proliferation means they're conveniently located on every corner. But smaller, more intimate establishments do have one major trump card - their ability to provide personalized service. They can get to know their customers and their needs. They can then respond to those needs on a customized, personalized basis. The same type of paradigm holds true on the web. Businesses both large and small have a lot of reach, but often can't respond to customers in the same intimate way. That is, unless they use available tools to find out about their customers' needs and respond to them. Kent Godfrey is in the business of helping other businesses reach out to customers. His company, Andromedia, provides personalization in tracking and analysis software. He says any business can personalize its products or services to the customer. It's just a matter of using what you know and what you can find out.

Learn About True Personalization

There are many sites - My Yahoo! and My Excite among them - that allow a user to come in and design his or her own personalized site. But that is not true personalization, Godfrey argues. He says the site should do the work for the user. "True personalization is when the site itself takes responsibility for the personalization," Godfrey says. "The site uses every bit of information available to it to create the most personally relevant experience possible for that individual. It combines information that the individual is willing to explicitly contribute with information that it can collect from the environment around the individual. It can make certain assumptions and reach certain conclusions and test them out." Don't intrude on a customer's privacy - take advantage of what they're willing to tell you as well as what your site tools tell you. Then, use that information to create a personalized experience for customers who come to your online store. Be clear on what you're collecting and let customers know how it will be used.

Use the Tools of Personalization

The "new" marketing looks an awful lot like the "old" marketing, says Godfrey. It's just that businesses today have a way to get a lot more information on their customers. "We have the ability to look at a whole group of visitors to a website and quickly figure out which ones are real prospects," Godfrey says. "Then we can electronically focus in on just those individuals who are real prospects and tailor our messages to them uniquely as individuals - just as a salesperson would have done in the past. They'd get to know the individual. They'd ask them questions. They'd find out about their unique needs and requirements and then, they'd customize their response to that individual." The only difference is now the Internet marketer can do the process electronically. Tools are now available to allow marketers to collect an unprecedented amount of information on customers. Godfrey recommends small businesses start with analysis and tracking software. That gives them an understanding of who is coming to their site and what they're doing there. They can then take that information and forecast how personalization can improve business efficiency.

Differentiate Personalization Data

There are a few key sources of information that affect personalization: preference data, profile information, transaction data and legacy web navigation data. Preference data is information on an individual's likes and dislikes, Godfrey says. "You do that by asking them to rate things on different types of scales: movie preferences, book preferences, activity preferences," Godfrey says. "Do you like this type of activity or that type of activity better? It develops a preference rating scale or a description for that individual." Then there's profile information, which is the sort of basic info a business gets when a customer registers. You find out their gender, age, where they live, things like that. Also important is transaction data, remembering what a customer has purchased in the past. "You often find that there's a discrepancy between what people say they are and what people demonstrate themselves to be through their actions," Godfrey says. "Reconciling that is an important part in this process because a lot of people will describe themselves as they would want to be, not as they actually are. You want to take the individual's input, but then you also want to observe how they act and see if those two are consistent and if they're not, work on reconciling them." The final piece of the puzzle is legacy data - any information that you may have in your customer records about the individual. "It could be purchase history from the past. It could be demographic information that they've entered in the past," Godfrey says. "You should also track click stream patterns and behaviors, where they came from, where they launched off to and so on." Getting to know your customer will pay off. You can only respond to your customers needs if you know what they are. Using the tools available will help form a picture of your customers. But it's up to you to find a way to serve that customer and grow your bottom line.