Personalization and why it's on the minds of marketers

A few weeks back we were speaking to a couple of smart folks who mentioned a company Monetate that was doing some really cool stuff to optimize landing pages by personalizing these pages to the individual. Curious, I began to snoop around their site and think up some angles for a conversation.

Life took over and I lost the thread of following up with Monetate till today when I clicked over to their blog and saw an interesting post entitled "At Shop.org the word is personalize". Now we prefer the word "tailor" since it seems that tailoring is easier to implement at scale then personalization, but the truth is that all marketing communications delivered digitally will continue to evolve towards personalization. At the root of this movement is the idea that advertising is no longer about distraction, but about relevant engagement. Relevant engagement alters the advertising formula by increasing the importance of the information over the style. Google has always claimed that its text link ads are not ads, but rather complementary pieces of content.

This complementary content is what all ads, retail sites, news sites, et al are evolving their platforms to achieve. For years personalization was a theory, but with the speed and power of our ever evolving technical infrastructure and new agile design frameworks we can make personalization a simple utility to turn on and increase the value of marketing. Shop.org is about online retail, but the same lessons these savvy marketers are preaching will continue to filter across all media and retail experiences.

Thanks for the heads up Monetate folks.

Comments

[Carolyn Gardner]

I was at shop.org as well and there was a lot of buzz around personalization. This was great since I work for Sitebrand and we have a personalization platform that's proving to be the choice for leading IR500 retailers like Danskin, CableOrganizer.com, Computer Geeks etc. As you point out, it's all about creating more relevance online. And since relevance is an extension of targeting which is an extension of segmentation....it's easy to see how personalization brings it all together for optimal results. The optimal results for the visitor are usually related to completing the task they intended to do - i.e. for e-commerce sites, this is usually finding and buying that special whatever. And for the marketer, it's increased conversion, increased cart spends and improved loyalty. If anyone's interested in some real life case studies about personalization, I encourage you to go to: http://www.sitebrand.com/resources/case-studies

Best!
Carolyn Gardner
Director of Customer Experience
Sitebrand