I see it in nearly every new website set of requirements these days… the request for “personalisation of the digital user experience” or something similar.
(Usually just sitting in one line of a very long set of
crafted and prioritised requirements or user stories – hiding in wait to catch-out
the unprepared software or digital agency that has to fully respond with a
costed and carefully caveated proposal in a matter of days)
So what is meant by “personalisation”?
In my experience there are two different types of digital personalisation:
Implicit personalisation
This is where the user experience is changed based upon inferred
and non-personal details cleaned from the user e.g. their referral site, the search
engine term they used, the language of their device, the day and time of their visit
and even the assumed location they are browsing from.
This gleaned information can then be used to serve-up more
tailored marketing messaging & content (text & images) and perhaps more
targeted products that have been previously viewed or purchased by similar
people. The aim is that the website ‘learns’ what assets to serve to improve the
site’s goals (AKA the conversions), typically an ecommerce purchase or a lead
generation form completion.
It can be relatively easy to implement basic implicit
personalisation, either using such functionality already available with a decent
Content Management System (CMS) vendor or from a Conversion Rate Optimisation tool
that can be added subsequently.
Explicit personalisation
This functionality has the same basic aim, to increase the
conversion rate of the digital experience and therefore make more money or
generally get more business. This is also done by serving up the content, data or
features to favourably change the user’s behaviour. However explicit
personalisation does this by utilising data actually known about the customer,
such as: their address data (for more local content), their demographic data
(for more age or gender relevant content) or their previous browsing & purchase
data (for more targeted content).
This form or personalisation, as you can imagine, requires
the digital user experience to have access to some or all of the customers' personal data, perhaps stored in an online account. It therefore typically needs a more complex integration to the source of the customer’s data and secure
handing of potentially personal details.
