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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/
Wanna talk?
[email protected]/psznt
We would love to!
For more information about
With love,The SpringTab Team
our brand feel free to contactPeter Szanto and follow his channel!