Does your website really need “personalisation”?

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.