Take this little test: IM your Website marketing manager or IT manager and ask him how long until your site can recognize your customers by name when they are logged in. Then ask how long after that it will be before you can display offers or promotions tailored to your customers on the site, assuming you know who they are.
How did your experiment go over? Surprised at the answer?
Most of today’s online experiences lack personal relevance. In many cases the hurdles are not technical: Site templates have become off limits except during redesigns. And while this will not change tomorrow, there is a wave of personalized and relevant messaging coming to the transactional world, and the time to plan for incorporating personalization is now. So take a good look at both your site personalization capabilities as well as the flexibility of your site design to handle variable content. Within another year, at most, the competitive bar for variable site content will start rising dramatically.
A variety of converging factors are driving this trend:
1) Wider availability of data through Web services. More and more companies are moving to hosted customer databases. These products are well suited to collecting large amounts of data, performing some magic, and exposing small amounts of highly relevant or personalized data back to customer-facing applications. The maturity of the Web services field has made it easy to get these relevant data quickly and without necessarily importing the data back into Website systems.
2) A growing recognition among midmarket companies of the power of retention. Many companies appear to be comfortable with their customer acquisition efforts. Search engine marketing, affiliate marketing, comparison engines, and increasingly targeted offline media provide a steady flow of new customers. Now the dialogue is increasingly around retention (partly because competitors’ acquisition efforts have also improved). This focus leads to increased data capture, more-intense analysis, more segmentation, and a need for more relevancy in everyday interactions with customers.
3) Better tools from the Website applications. Most enterprise and hosted Website systems provide dynamic content capabilities. Most aren’t used. But there is an upswing in interest from companies around increased relevance. Companies are looking for an edge over close competitors, and more and more companies are looking to event-based messaging or loyalty programs to promote desired behavior or respond to behavioral opportunities.
The amazing part of this whole movement is that the largest online merchant has been doing this successfully for many years. Amazon.com’s competitive advantage, besides its rock-solid reputation in operations, rests on its highly adaptable and relevant site merchandising. So it’s not as though this is an emerging technology. The main difference between 1997 and now is the availability of tools and technologies for the average company.
The lesson here is to understand what’s ahead and be ready for the next wave of online experiences, where good design, quality images, rich content, and intuitive navigation are joined by personalization, relevance, and dynamic calls to action as the minimum acceptable standard.
Michael Greenberg is vice president of marketing for Loyalty Lab, a San Francisco-based developer of customer loyalty programs for the retail industry, and writes a monthly column for CHIEF MARKETER.
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