4 STEPS TO PERSONALIZATION

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Introduction Personalization is no longer an afterthought for merchants in 2017. Going by numbers, "The majority of brands report having at least basic personalization in place today, with 85% agreeing or strongly agreeing that their efforts are based on broad segmentation and simple clustering to execute in individual channels (e.g., search or display), and 83% indicating the same for use of simple business rules and triggers to execute across digital channels". The new courtship between business and consumers indicated a more delicate brandconsumer interaction that can fuel business growth or anger consumers with intrusive and clumsy retargeting. A meaningful personalization is what growth-hungry companies need in order to gain competitiveness in 2017 and forward. What is meaningful personalization? The fundamental concept is to establish relevancy. Recommending products that are catered to a buyer's interest and do it at scale. Many companies have been using a lot of tools but still struggling with scaling up personalization. Meaningful personalization requires, however, not only marketing technologies to facilitate the process but also to re-architect the analytics practices companies are using and to change its management approach. According to Accenture, the path to mature personalization encompasses 5 stages. 3 4 Steps to PersonalizationMost companies are in stage one or stage two where personalization can hardly be done at scale, and therefore less customer engagement and loyalty can be translated into benefits for companies. In this action guide, we will talk about four steps of scaling up personalization and where each step fits in the maturity model. Step 1 Use Behavioral Data to Identify Customer Value. (Selective personalization) Data analytics is the backbone of personalization. To figure out what each customer is desiring and how to act on the insights, the first step is to know what their customer journeys look like. You can group customers with similar shopping behaviors and construct a few different personas. Then map out the journey based on each persona and decide on which stage you hope to do personalization. It could be nurturing customers with content or recommending previously browsed products at a trigger point, depending on your business needs. After having a goal in mind, the next step is to gather data and segment them. A plethora of marketing analytics tools are available to help companies gather data, process data and visualize results. But there is not a single tool out there can cover analytics from end to end. You may need at least a couple of tools to gather different data points and decide what data points in each customer journey stage you want to measure before aggregating and integrating data in your analytics platform. Here are a list of data sources you can leverage on: Internal Data: • CRM • Customer Service System • Transaction Data • Website Analytics • Search Engine • Social Media • Campaign Sources External data • Third-party Data 4 4 Steps to Personalization(For more on selecting data, please check out our "7 Strategies to Adopt A Proactive Approach Towards Marketing") When your data is ready, the next step is to understand the behaviors by segmenting. You can start with creating eight to 10 behavior based segments and then gradually evolve to one-to-one marketing. The most cutting-edge technology for segmentation is cluster analysis. Through statistical modeling, the model can deliver more accurate grouping and generate more insightful results than traditional segmentation in Excel. Merchants can combine these small segments and customer journeys to create hundreds of microsegments to form the basis of one-to-one marketing. It sounds daunting to manage hundreds of segments and matching the right content and offer to very dynamic segments. But with automation technology, it's not a crazy work as it sounded. Powered by algorithms that can learn shopper behaviors, automation tools study and analyze each interaction a customer had with the brand on the site and pull the most relevant content that matches the shopper's behavior. For example, If you often browse devices on Amazon, the banner ads will show Amazon devices to you, but it might show other products like clothes and kindle books to another visitor. The ads are more targeted to a customer's interest when shopping with the brand, consequently reducing acquisition cost and improving ROI. Implementation of analytics and automation needs experience and expertise. If you don't have an in-house team, vendors such as Windsor Circle, Findify and Nosto can help you achieve the goal. Step 2 Plan In Advance to React to Customer Signals (Selective personalization) Automation free the marketing team in some way but it doesn't mean that you can sit back and wait for conversions automatically to happen. In reality it means campaigns are always on and it takes an experienced team to manage campaigns. Customers are sending signals that they are interested in certain products all the time through their browsing history. The marketing team should be able to pick up the signals by monitoring social, browsing, search and transaction data in real time and responding quickly. 5 4 Steps to PersonalizationIt requires careful planning and a process of testing and learn. The marketing team needs to build up a library of trigger content matched to individual signal. If done right, these personalized messages proved to be three to four times more effective than blast messages. Here is a general guideline on how to craft a trigger message based on browsing behavior: • Keep your tone friendly not intrusive. • Highlight the product they were browsing • Show products from related category • Test the sending time and offer • Sending the exact email again a few days later if there's no response to the first email Trigger messages can be a variety of content, including images, texts, videos or other formats that can achieve the most engagement rate. To capture 80 percent of a trigger message's value, it takes four to five tests. You could leverage A/B testing or multivariate testing to test the tone, design, value proposition and CTA to find the winning combination. Step 3 Empower a Dedicated Team The previous two steps, if implemented correctly, can get your organization started and achieve selective personalization. However, the efforts are not enough to scale up personalization. To realize the full potential of personalization, drastic changes need to happen on the managerial level. Compared with traditional marketing, running personalization requires real-time monitoring, analysis and messaging. McKinsey & Company discovered that lack of an efficient managerial structure is where many organizations is stuck. Therefore, unlike other marketing initiatives, personalization needs its own team. This requires companies to empower a small and diverse group of carefully selected people, including a campaign manager, staff from creative, digital media, analytics, operations and IT. A medium sized company need maybe just one such team that is dedicated full-time to planning and executing personalization. Bigger companies can have even more teams like this. 6 4 Steps to PersonalizationAdvanced personalizations in the Accenture model involve adopting an operating model for governance and management to support digital experience. Without a well-managed team, your digital campaigns will suffer, and it would be almost impossible to expand personalization to the enterprise level. On work pace, as your personalization team is scrambling to search for the signals with the highest potential value, your team can launch one to two new triggers per week at early stage. When they are gaining more experience, they should launch one to two new triggers per day. Step 4 Look for Process and Technologies that Facilitate RealTime Monitoring Now you may have sensed how quickly the personalization team should respond to incoming data and signals. At this pace, an agile process need to be in place and that's why business of all sizes should be out on the look for the right technology and vendor for its ecommerce. This is especially true for smaller e-commerce businesses that need to collaborate with a vendor on more than 50 percent of the work. But this could be a challenge because there are hundreds of tools and vendors out there and none offers an end-to-end solution. We think a good vendor needs to meet at least the following criteria: • The vendor should be strong on predictive analysis, data mining (This is important especially for companies that don't have a strong in-house power to do analytics). • The vendor should be able to develop and implement personalization that can act on various devices across all channels and offer a smooth experience. • The vendor should be able to report on a real-time basis on KPIs that report on revenue and profit growth. • The vendor provides trigger messaging testing 7 4 Steps to PersonalizationBased on the criteria, we compiled a list of six vendors: 1. Barilliance – Visit Website Barillance is a multi-channel vendor that offers cross channel personalized product recommendations and behavior triggered emails, as well as real-time on-site personalization and live social proof notifications. Brarillance provides a real-time reporting, such as dynamic information about the number of people on your website or the last purchase of a product. The vendor claims that the integration will not take more than 5 minutes, and it is done by implementing a static code on every page of your website. 2. PureClarity – Visit Website As a vendor, PureClarity supports the majority of e-commerce platforms used today. Its personalized merchandising product analyses the behavior of users and answers to those triggers by personalized product recommendations, displaying promotional banners and product carousels. The merchandising is real-time and personalized to what the user is browsing at the moment. You will also have access to a reporting dashboard, where you can see results and enable automatic email marketing. 3. Bunting – Visit Website Bunting provides its users with a cross-platform and multi-channel personalization. They have four different tools focusing on different aspects i.e. website personalization, product recommendation, email personalization and shopping cart abandonment. Bunting offers solutions for both e-commerce and non-e-commerce website. The personalization and reporting done by Bunting is in real-time. 4. Personyze – Visit Website Personyze offers a wide range of tools, focusing not only to website personalization and product optimization, but as well A/B testing tools and popup and banner management tools. The reporting is done in real-time, and Personalyze has a built-in Google Analytics integration for additional monitoring. Personyze works on different platforms and through multiple channels, and can be also used for AdWords campaigns. 8 4 Steps to Personalization5. RichRelevance – Visit Website RichRelevance is an omnichannel personalization solution that works on different platforms and different devices. The algorithm tracks and responds to the behavior of users and does the personalization in real-time. You can test different strategies by using both A/B and multivariate testing. By using their APIs, you can integrate personalized browse and sort into any application. 6. ChoiceStream – Visit Website ChoiceSteam offers its users a cross-device personalization and support on different platforms. The vendor has developed different solutions in accordance to the field, anything from person, weather and choice customization, to even live feed and retargeting. The goal of the tools is to help the analyst identify signals and deliver trigger messages efficiently. Imagine that all the visuals, copy and templates should be quickly mixed and matched for different variations. You need the right tool to streamline the process. Here are six tools that you can start with: 1. Barilliance SaaS Personalization Technology – Visit Website Barilliance offers a simple integration method called Zero Integration Process, and all that is needed to do is paste a code into a header section of your website. They offer four different solutions: • Cart Abandonment • Website Personalization • Product Recommendation • Live personalization and reporting 2. PureClarity Ecommerce Personalization – Visit Website This personalization vendor offers different tools depending to the field and the target you are aiming to achieve: • Personalized Site Search • Personalized Merchandising • Advanced Reporting 3. Bunting – Visit Website Bunting has different tools incorporated in their platform which can be used for different purposes: • Website Personalization Tools 9 4 Steps to Personalization• Product Recommendation Engine • Email Personalization Software • Shopping Cart Abandonment 4. Adobe Target – Visit Website Adobe Target offers different personalization approaches, for both e-commerce and non-e-commerce websites: • Targeted recommendations and cross-selling • A/B and Multivariate testing • Marketer-driven targeting • Analytics-enhanced reporting • Mobile site targeting 5. Google Optimizer 360 – Visit Website Google Optimizer 360, even though still in a beta phase, has many different features and capabilities that can completely cover your personalization needs: • A/B, Multivariate and redirect testing • Advanced Client-Side Signals • Analytics Audiences • Optimize Reports in Analytics 6. Evergage – Visit Website Evergage offers different personalization solutions depending on the needs of your company and the field which you are operating in: • Retail • Financial Services • Technology • Travel and Hospitality • Media and Entertainment 10 4 Steps to PersonalizationAbout CommerceBlend CommerceBlend is an exclusive e-commerce community for directors, managers, CEOs and CMOs. Our mission is to connect ecommerce merchants with opportunities and resources that propel online revenue growth. We are also a learning and support network that gains ground in all aspects of the digital realm. • To learn more about CommerceBlend Visit Website • Join our community for free and enjoy all the membership benefits! Join