4 steps-to-personalization

24 Steps to Personalization
Introduction
Personalization is no longer an afterthought for merchants in 2017. Going by numbers,
“The majority of brands report having at least basic personalization in place today, with
85% agreeing or strongly agreeing that their efforts are based on broad segmentation
and simple clustering to execute in individual channels (e.g., search or display), and 83%
indicating the same for use of simple business rules and triggers to execute across digital
channels”.
The new courtship between business and consumers indicated a more delicate brand-
consumer interaction that can fuel business growth or anger consumers with intrusive
and clumsy retargeting. A meaningful personalization is what growth-hungry companies
need in order to gain competitiveness in 2017 and forward.
What is meaningful personalization? The fundamental concept is to establish relevancy.
Recommending products that are catered to a buyer’s interest and do it at scale. Many
companies have been using a lot of tools but still struggling with scaling up
personalization. Meaningful personalization requires, however, not only marketing
technologies to facilitate the process but also to re-architect the analytics practices
companies are using and to change its management approach.
According to Accenture, the path to mature personalization encompasses 5 stages.

Most companies are in stage one or stage two where personalization can hardly be done
at scale, and therefore less customer engagement and loyalty can be translated into
benefits for companies. In this action guide, we will talk about four steps of scaling up
personalization and where each step fits in the maturity model.
Step 1
Use Behavioral Data to Identify Customer Value.
(Selective personalization)
Data analytics is the backbone of personalization. To figure out what each customer is
desiring and how to act on the insights, the first step is to know what their customer
journeys look like. You can group customers with similar shopping behaviors and
construct a few different personas. Then map out the journey based on each persona and
decide on which stage you hope to do personalization. It could be nurturing customers
with content or recommending previously browsed products at a trigger point, depending
on your business needs.
After having a goal in mind, the next step is to gather data and segment them. A plethora
of marketing analytics tools are available to help companies gather data, process data and
visualize results. But there is not a single tool out there can cover analytics from end to
end. You may need at least a couple of tools to gather different data points and decide
what data points in each customer journey stage you want to measure before aggregating
and integrating data in your analytics platform. Here are a list of data sources you can
leverage on:
Internal Data:
• CRM
• Customer Service System
• Transaction Data
• Website Analytics
• Search Engine
• Social Media
• Campaign Sources
External data
• Third-party Data

(For more on selecting data, please check out our “7 Strategies to Adopt A Proactive
Approach Towards Marketing”)
When your data is ready, the next step is to understand the behaviors by segmenting. You
can start with creating eight to 10 behavior based segments and then gradually evolve to
one-to-one marketing. The most cutting-edge technology for segmentation is cluster
analysis. Through statistical modeling, the model can deliver more accurate grouping and
generate more insightful results than traditional segmentation in Excel. Merchants can
combine these small segments and customer journeys to create hundreds of micro-
segments to form the basis of one-to-one marketing.
It sounds daunting to manage hundreds of segments and matching the right content and
offer to very dynamic segments. But with automation technology, it’s not a crazy work as
it sounded. Powered by algorithms that can learn shopper behaviors, automation tools
study and analyze each interaction a customer had with the brand on the site and pull the
most relevant content that matches the shopper’s behavior. For example, If you often
browse devices on Amazon, the banner ads will show Amazon devices to you, but it might
show other products like clothes and kindle books to another visitor. The ads are more
targeted to a customer’s interest when shopping with the brand, consequently reducing
acquisition cost and improving ROI.
Implementation of analytics and automation needs experience and expertise. If you don’t
have an in-house team, vendors such as Windsor Circle, Findify and Nosto can help you
achieve the goal.
Step 2
Plan In Advance to React to Customer Signals
(Selective personalization)
Automation free the marketing team in some way but it doesn’t mean that you can sit
back and wait for conversions automatically to happen. In reality it means campaigns are
always on and it takes an experienced team to manage campaigns. Customers are sending
signals that they are interested in certain products all the time through their browsing
history. The marketing team should be able to pick up the signals by monitoring social,
browsing, search and transaction data in real time and responding quickly.

It requires careful planning and a process of testing and learn. The marketing team needs
to build up a library of trigger content matched to individual signal. If done right, these
personalized messages proved to be three to four times more effective than blast
messages. Here is a general guideline on how to craft a trigger message based on browsing
behavior:
• Keep your tone friendly not intrusive.
• Highlight the product they were browsing
• Show products from related category
• Test the sending time and offer
• Sending the exact email again a few days later if there’s no response to the
first email
Trigger messages can be a variety of content, including images, texts, videos or other
formats that can achieve the most engagement rate. To capture 80 percent of a trigger
message’s value, it takes four to five tests. You could leverage A/B testing or multivariate
testing to test the tone, design, value proposition and CTA to find the winning
combination.
Step 3
Empower a Dedicated Team
The previous two steps, if implemented correctly, can get your organization started and
achieve selective personalization. However, the efforts are not enough to scale up
personalization. To realize the full potential of personalization, drastic changes need to
happen on the managerial level.
Compared with traditional marketing, running personalization requires real-time
monitoring, analysis and messaging. McKinsey & Company discovered that lack of an
efficient managerial structure is where many organizations is stuck. Therefore, unlike
other marketing initiatives, personalization needs its own team. This requires companies
to empower a small and diverse group of carefully selected people, including a campaign
manager, staff from creative, digital media, analytics, operations and IT. A medium sized
company need maybe just one such team that is dedicated full-time to planning and
executing personalization. Bigger companies can have even more teams like this.

Advanced personalizations in the Accenture model involve adopting an operating model
for governance and management to support digital experience. Without a well-managed
team, your digital campaigns will suffer, and it would be almost impossible to expand
personalization to the enterprise level.
On work pace, as your personalization team is scrambling to search for the signals with
the highest potential value, your team can launch one to two new triggers per week at
early stage. When they are gaining more experience, they should launch one to two new
triggers per day.
Step 4
Look for Process and Technologies that Facilitate Real-
Time Monitoring
Now you may have sensed how quickly the personalization team should respond to
incoming data and signals. At this pace, an agile process need to be in place and that’s why
business of all sizes should be out on the look for the right technology and vendor for its e-
commerce. This is especially true for smaller e-commerce businesses that need to
collaborate with a vendor on more than 50 percent of the work.
But this could be a challenge because there are hundreds of tools and vendors out there
and none offers an end-to-end solution. We think a good vendor needs to meet at least
the following criteria:
• The vendor should be strong on predictive analysis, data mining (This is
important especially for companies that don’t have a strong in-house power to do
analytics).
• The vendor should be able to develop and implement personalization that
can act on various devices across all channels and offer a smooth experience.
• The vendor should be able to report on a real-time basis on KPIs that report
on revenue and profit growth.
• The vendor provides trigger messaging testing

Based on the criteria, we compiled a list of six vendors:
1. Barilliance – Visit Website
Barillance is a multi-channel vendor that offers cross channel personalized product
recommendations and behavior triggered emails, as well as real-time on-site
personalization and live social proof notifications.
Brarillance provides a real-time reporting, such as dynamic information about the number
of people on your website or the last purchase of a product. The vendor claims that the
integration will not take more than 5 minutes, and it is done by implementing a static code
on every page of your website.
2. PureClarity – Visit Website
As a vendor, PureClarity supports the majority of e-commerce platforms used today. Its
personalized merchandising product analyses the behavior of users and answers to those
triggers by personalized product recommendations, displaying promotional banners and
product carousels.
The merchandising is real-time and personalized to what the user is browsing at the
moment. You will also have access to a reporting dashboard, where you can see results
and enable automatic email marketing.
3. Bunting – Visit Website
Bunting provides its users with a cross-platform and multi-channel personalization. They
have four different tools focusing on different aspects i.e. website personalization,
product recommendation, email personalization and shopping cart abandonment. Bunting
offers solutions for both e-commerce and non-e-commerce website. The personalization
and reporting done by Bunting is in real-time.
4. Personyze – Visit Website
Personyze offers a wide range of tools, focusing not only to website personalization and
product optimization, but as well A/B testing tools and popup and banner management
tools. The reporting is done in real-time, and Personalyze has a built-in Google Analytics
integration for additional monitoring. Personyze works on different platforms and
through multiple channels, and can be also used for AdWords campaigns.

5. RichRelevance – Visit Website
RichRelevance is an omnichannel personalization solution that works on different
platforms and different devices. The algorithm tracks and responds to the behavior of
users and does the personalization in real-time. You can test different strategies by using
both A/B and multivariate testing. By using their APIs, you can integrate personalized
browse and sort into any application.
6. ChoiceStream – Visit Website
ChoiceSteam offers its users a cross-device personalization and support on different
platforms. The vendor has developed different solutions in accordance to the field,
anything from person, weather and choice customization, to even live feed and
retargeting.
The goal of the tools is to help the analyst identify signals and deliver trigger messages
efficiently. Imagine that all the visuals, copy and templates should be quickly mixed and
matched for different variations. You need the right tool to streamline the process. Here
are six tools that you can start with:
1. Barilliance SaaS Personalization Technology – Visit Website
Barilliance offers a simple integration method called Zero Integration Process, and
all that is needed to do is paste a code into a header section of your website. They
offer four different solutions:
• Cart Abandonment
• Website Personalization
• Product Recommendation
• Live personalization and reporting
2. PureClarity Ecommerce Personalization – Visit Website
This personalization vendor offers different tools depending to the field and the
target you are aiming to achieve:
• Personalized Site Search
• Personalized Merchandising
• Advanced Reporting
3. Bunting – Visit Website
Bunting has different tools incorporated in their platform which can be used for
different purposes:
• Website Personalization Tools

• Product Recommendation Engine
• Email Personalization Software
• Shopping Cart Abandonment
4. Adobe Target – Visit Website
Adobe Target offers different personalization approaches, for both e-commerce
and non-e-commerce websites:
• Targeted recommendations and cross-selling
• A/B and Multivariate testing
• Marketer-driven targeting
• Analytics-enhanced reporting
• Mobile site targeting
5. Google Optimizer 360 – Visit Website
Google Optimizer 360, even though still in a beta phase, has many different
features and capabilities that can completely cover your personalization needs:
• A/B, Multivariate and redirect testing
• Advanced Client-Side Signals
• Analytics Audiences
• Optimize Reports in Analytics
6. Evergage – Visit Website
Evergage offers different personalization solutions depending on the needs of your
company and the field which you are operating in:
• Retail
• Financial Services
• Technology
• Travel and Hospitality
• Media and Entertainment

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