Keynote: Ancestry.com’s Sea-Change Move to Personalized Messaging

Karen PetersonVP, Relationship Marketing

Ancestry’s Move to Personalized Messaging

About Ancestry• Ancestry is the world's largest online family

history resource

• More than 2 million worldwide subscribers

• 16 billion global historical records

• Over 70 million family trees containing over

6 billion profiles

• Over 1 million in our DNA database2

Integrated Campaigns

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One-time use assets

Short-term gains

Not fully aligned with customer

expectations

Personalization Strategy

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“Marketing isn’t campaigns.It’s a systematic process to deliver the right experience to the right customer at

the right time in the right place(s).”

Programmatic Personalization

• Enables personalization to scale

• Delivers higher return on efforts

• Increases lifetime value throughout the customer lifecycle

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Personalization Vision

Partially-differentiated

marketing

Segmented marketing

PersonalizedMarketing

Behaviors

CommPref

Models/Profiles

Demo

User Status

Onsite Activity

Deliberate evolution

Broad, high impact high volume campaigns

Personalized programs•Abandon•Nurture | Education•Cross-sell•Engagement•Onboarding

Limited Targeting Highly targeted

Volu

me

• Behaviors• Explicit preferences

• Member status• Relationship• Demographics• Inferred preferences

Today Future2012

What we learned . . .8

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Obstacles

• Processes

• Performance visibility

• Prioritization

• Customer data accessibility

• Real-time targeting

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Invest smartly

• “Right” time v. real time

• 1:1 v. micro-segmentation

• Drive technology innovations with strong business cases

• Embrace a variety of triggers

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Iterate, iterate, iterate

• Email is the perfect launchpad

• Get things in market – don’t wait for perfection

• Embrace manual batches to prove success

• Document faithfully

Abandon Cart Program | Initial Launch

• One email instead of a series

• Daily send through a manual batch

• Tested near real-time send through one-off ‘hack’

• Hold out group to assess lift

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Identify metrics that matter

• Understand your baseline

• Develop assumptions and hypotheses upfront and then test

• Use data to help predict behaviors

Personalization at Ancestry Today

• Over 20 automated programs across 5 geographies promoting 9 products• Email primary• Multi-channel extension• Created internal advocates• Focused area of investment

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Iterate

Keys to Personalization • Focus on customer first• Invest smartly• Iterate, iterate, iterate• Identify metrics that matter

Thank youKaren Petersonkapeterson@ancestry.com