Personalization Done Right

So what are the five steps a company should take to segment its customers and effectively personalize the experiences those customers have on its site?...

1. Track consumers' actions - Determine what customers and prospects searched for, what pages they navigated to, which items they investigated, and which items they put into their shopping cart or purchased. This will enable a business to identify critical "indicators of interest."

2. Leverage search history - Use a customer's search history to display a personalized starting page and offer landing pages that make it easy for the customer to find what she's looking for.

3. Analyze customers by context - Use Google referrals, for example, or search trails or engagement patterns to gather context-based information. Combined with a user's profile information and purchase history, a company can provide highly personalized product recommendations to deliver the ultimate shopping experience.

4. Use individual targeting rules - Algorithmic personalization collects data over time, but merchants with fast-moving inventory or extensive product categories can take advantage of behavioral targeting to determine which products, content, or promotions are shown to which customers.

5. Create rules-based "cross-selling" recommendations - Generate a set of appropriate, defined products to prompt add-on purchases. Query recommendations can be provided in real time, and vendors can repay loyal customers by providing special offers to regular buyers.

Conclusion

Until now, personalizing the individual experience online has been complex and difficult to execute well. But today's personalization technologies enable retailers doing business online to extract commonalities, associations, and cause-and-effect relationships to seamlessly and automatically deliver recommendations and content appropriate to any environment - helping to create loyal customers and boost revenues.