I have read a very interesting article about Website-Personalization on GetElastic's Ecommerce blog. As you probably know, there are many large Ecommerce websites that utilized advanced optimization strategies in order to personalize their website for each visitor/customer. The best example of such sites are Amazon and eBay eCommerce websites.
Maximize Leads
Most of the websites on the Internet shows every visitor the same page. In order to maximize leads and transactions, the best strategy will be to track and analyze customers behavior and shopping habits. After that you get that valuable data, you can use it on the server and serve different pages to each customer and customer. This strategy is called "Personalization" or "Dynamic Content Targeting" . Amazon is a classic example on how a retailer gathers it visitors/members personal shopping habits & interests and customize the appearance of its website according to the collected data. After that, it shows different products advertisements on its home pages, product overview pages and even uses it for its email campaigns.There are 4 key elements in personalization systems:
- Identifying your website visitor
- Retrieve visitor/member profile
- Select the content that matches visitor's preferences
key element of a Personalization system via ibm.com
Amazon Website's Content Personalization
I have been shopping in Amazon store for many years, and I remember getting special product's offering from Amazon by mail, shortly after purchasing products and even weeks or months after that. The products are based on my shopping habits and are personalized to perfectly match my interests.Of course there are positive and negative sides to this. First of all, I feel like someone is 'following' me, and I ask myself, what if I want to buy a product anonymously, that I want nobody to know about it? - For some people Privacy really matters. The positive side is that it really enhances the user experience. Instead of browsing and watching hundreds of different products banners, reviews, articles pages that are not of an interest, being able to personalize each page is a great advantage for many people. Websites like Amazon have so much information packed their home page, and because their are so many products to choose from, Personalization can be a 'life saver' in terms of browsing experience.
When I come to Amazon, most of the time I want to buy Books. There is a little chance that I will buy a music CD on Amazon.com, if haven't done it in the past 5 years when I first registered. Using the valuable assets of the home page to show me new music CDs, will not served me at all and Amazon knows that. So instead of showing me new music CDs banners, it shows me new and popular books about programming, Analytics and Photography, my three top interests.
Amazon personalizes its content also by following the way customers sorts their product results (Sort-By). At Amazon.com you can sort products by popularity, price low to high, price high to low, discount high to low, discount low to high, name A-Z, name Z-A.
Which Customer Will You Engage First?
Now let's assume that a customer have decided to sort the product by Price (low to high) instead of high to low, what this decision reflects?Customer searching to buy cheap products, don't want to spend lots of money on specific products, especially if they have chosen "Discount Low to High" to sort the products. If for example you have two confused customers (assuming that there are browsing the website more then 30 minutes) browsing through your website and only one Live chat operator available at a given time, to which customer you will engage with a live chat window. Would you engage the customer who have chosen to sort the prices by "low to high" or "high to low"? - I guess the answer will be "High to low" (assuming that we are talking about products that their prices are around the same value plus or minus). The reason for that, is that you can earn more by helping the customer who want to spend more money on high quality products.
Optimize Marketing Strategies
We gave just a simple example. Amazon does that by taking hundreds and maybe thousands of variables into account. That means that it utilizes segmentation to create a precise segment that will help it decide which products to display to un-registered visitors and current Amazon members. Of course it is much easier when you can track each members browsing behavior. This is the reason why most ecommerce websites requires registration before making any transaction or adding products to the cart. It is the reason why any large supermarket wants you to get a member's card and use it to shop its store. It will give you discounts and try to convince you that you should get that prestige member card. That card for offline stores is equal to registering on ecommerce websites. The store owner that can track and analyze you shopping habits and better understand and optimize its marketing strategies.Yes, marketers want to know anything about you and your shopping habits. Personalization make the marketing job much more effective and saves lots of money for any company. By saying "saving money", I mean that a business can lower its advertising expenses by a large margin, because it can target its advertising campaigns, for a specific market segment, instead of a much broader segment. Furthermore, the advertising campaign will be more effective and will greatly improve ROI and total revenue.
This is only a tip of the ice of what Personalizaiotn can do for any kind of business, whether it is an online retailer or offline retailer. Amazon is a great example for that, and because we are talking big numbers here, any change, even a tiny change, can lead to high profit.
