PPB May 2020

remembers every detail of every encounter that a customer or potential customer has had with the company. It knows what products they’ve purchased and which products they’ve passed on. It knows if the visitor is an impulse buyer or a tough customer who takes a long time to study features and options at multiple sites before making a purchase or business decision. It also keeps track of every piece of information the customer has shared about themselves with your company, whether that’s via the website itself, email opens-and-clicks, phone conversations with company representatives, face-to-face encounters that have been chronicled, the ads the visitor clicks on or even the company links they bookmark in their browsers. Plus, web personalization constantly tracks the tiniest bit of data associated with customers and that can come in handy for the company. Through web personalization, a company knows the customer’s country, time zone, the kind of computer they are using, what time they usually open emails and even the screen resolution of their device. In fact, Adobe Target, a leading provider of website personalization services, tracks 33 categories of data associated with each customer it keeps tabs on for its clients. That includes profile data that companies buy from third parties or data that other companies have captured. Armed with this continually updated data stream, a top web personalization service can really charm a customer, if used creatively. A promotional products website powered by personalization, for example, can greet every visiting customer by first name, wish them a happy birthday and suggest a new product offering in their favorite color. Plus, it can dynamically restructure the company’s homepage on the fly, switching to images and text it thinks the customer prefers and serving up personalized product suggestions. A personalized website also has the ability to make any page of your website do the same back flips to impress. For example, a personalized website can also unveil special offers explicitly reserved for your V.I.P. customers the same way a Las Vegas casino comps a room for high rollers. Plus, the best services also enable a business to zoom in and out on personalization. Sometimes, you may want to personalize a website for an individual visitor. Other times, you may want to personalize it based on a general customer profile. The best web personalization services also enable marketers to update the way a website individualizes a customer visit in terms of the images shown, promotions offered and coupons sent, without being forced to go to your company’s IT services department to make such updates. And the most comprehensive web personalization services also enable promotional products businesses to reach out to a customer beyond the website. Such beyond-the-site offers include personalized coupons via email, emailed enticements that turn an abandoned shopping cart into a purchase and ad offers that pop-up on other websites that your customers visit. As you’ve probably guessed, many website personalization services are also infused with artificial intelligence (AI), which enables the service to learn, over time, what strategies are working best with each customer. AI-driven web personalization also enables marketers to set a personalization goal for each customer’s visit and then let the AI figure out the best way to implement that goal. “The best AI machines literally let you tell them your strategy,” says Raj Balasundaram, senior vice president, artificial intelligence at Emarsys, a website personalization services provider. “For example, setting a sliding scale to indicate how aggressively you want to discount an item for a particular campaign, and then letting it do the rest,” he says. “Self-learning systems—which most AI-branded tools should also be— have to learn on their own, creating, reacting to and defining rules that aren’t explicitly told to them by humans. On top of all that, these processes will all occur within a matter of milliseconds.” Lisa Kalscheur, chief marketing officer at Monetate, another website personalization services provider, says, “Combined with AI-driven insights and recommendations, personalization can have a significant impact across a customer journey.” Moreover, bringing personalization onboard your website can often involve minimal changes. A number of website personalization services, for example, only require you to embed a few snippets of code in your webpages so that its software can track what’s happening on your website and then make personalization changes accordingly. Joe Dysart is an internet speaker and business consultant based in Manhattan. joe@customtechadvisor.com TECH TALK 54 | MAY 2020 | THINK