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. 

How do you segment financial services customers?

In an earlier post I made it clear that I thought a certain way of segmenting customers has had its day. The method of classifying customers just by their life stage is no longer relevant, with both lifestyles and finances having moved on.

So rather than dwelling on this, I thought it better to look at ways that banks in the future could segment their customers. But to be honest, I couldn’t come up with a single simple way of segmenting financial services customers that made sense in the modern world. Nothing really fitted nicely and any possible model had loads of exceptions to the rules.

And then it struck me... that perhaps there's no longer a few simple segments that fitted all financial services customers. Perhaps this subject is just too complex to put into simple terms... or in other words, perhaps now with the advert of clever data analysis and personalisation, there's no need to segment them into a handful of categories, everyone is in their own segment!

It's therefore my prediction that banks will eventually integrate big data analytics into their CRM systems. This will develop their understanding of who each individual customer is, alongside a record of what products and services they have already got do describe how best to meet their needs.

Some financial services companies may already be on their way to delivering this vision and this should be an interesting space to watch as the use of dig data analysis takes off.

Getting email personalisation wrong

This morning I received an email from the popular discount / voucher service Vouchercloud.

Now I'm sure I would have noticed calling myself 'Louise' when signing up for this service. But a quick check shows that all previous emails they have sent me are addressed to 'Hayden'.

Phew..... For a minute there I got confused. I therefore wonder if anyone else got the same issue.

Perhaps a simple slip, but poor personalisation can't help deliverability or click-through rates.

Google & birthdays - personalisation to make you smile

Today is the 14th of September, my birthday. And when visiting the Google homepage this evening I saw a great 'Google Doodle', that of a birthday present and a cake with a candle in it.

"Oh" I initially thought "it's Google's birthday as well as my own". But then thought back to reports I had read recently about Google's birthday being in January or a range of dates in September including the 15th .... but not the 14th. Had Google got its own birthday wrong? Was a server giving the wrong date and showing the present and cake image a day ahead of time?

No!

Google knows my birthday thanks to a complete profile of me I entered some while back. It would therefore seem that some clever programmer there has created a small bit of personalisation code to display this image when the anniversay of my birth comes around.

Clever, engaging, thoughful and just a little bit all-knowing. Just how I like my search engines.