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Accenture has just published a great piece of research on web site personalisation. It includes some surprising results....
The crux of the article is:
+ Your users WANT to personalise your site in their own way (ie, select the content that they view)
+ Most sites aren't delivering useful personalisation ('Hello Mr x' at the top of your homepage doesn't cut it any more)
+ If you get it right, your users will love you for it. They'll part with valuable stuff like their personal details, and they will return to your site more often and recommend it to their friends (ie the rewards are huge!)
Accenture's survey basically tells us that personalisation pays....big time.
So why isn't everyone doing it?
Most organisations find personalisation very difficult because:
+ Automated personalisation software still doesn't deliver on it's promise.
+ As the amount of site content grows, the sheer number of permutations and combinations makes manual personalisation near impossible.
+ In order to do personalisation properly, you also need to understand exactly why your customers visit your site and what kind of content personalisation would be suitable....
The good news is that Squiz can help!
When faced with this kind of personalisation project, here's how we usually approach it:
In phase 1 we....
1. Research your search logs - both intrasite and external. This gives us an idea of the keywords people are using to look for your content.
2. Define a limited number of tags (the fewer the better) that your editors can use to tag content as it's entered into your site.
3. Define a scoring system out of 10 for those tags so editors can rate how relevant the content is to the specific ta....eg, an article about racing cars might score 10 for cars but only 5 for racing.
4. Give users the opportunity to subscribe to a 'my page' style service that delivers personalised content, based on an 'interest profile' that they create and maintain (ie, enable them to create their own homepage).
5. When these users visit your site, score their activity on the content rating scale mentioned above (with their permission).
6. When these users hit a defined threshold for a certain topic (say 100 points), offer them the opportunity to populate their homepage with the 'related' content that you have generated within your site.
7. Further, use this permission-based scoring profile as the basis for content preferences when sending targetted bulk email campaigns.
....In this way you can easily serve personalised content to users dynamically via your site when users are browsing, and also through email activity. Once the system is built, it is cheap and efficient to maintain - the scoring system means that it is CMS-generated and not a manual task.... And in practise this means that as time goes by you build an extremely valuable picture of your site subscribers (something that most advertisers would die for!).
MySource Matrix has all the tools you need for doing this. You can even compile the data it gives you and feed it back to your CRM system...!
We LOVE personalisation!
If you'd like to find out more then drop us a line....
The crux of the article is:
+ Your users WANT to personalise your site in their own way (ie, select the content that they view)
+ Most sites aren't delivering useful personalisation ('Hello Mr x' at the top of your homepage doesn't cut it any more)
+ If you get it right, your users will love you for it. They'll part with valuable stuff like their personal details, and they will return to your site more often and recommend it to their friends (ie the rewards are huge!)
Accenture's survey basically tells us that personalisation pays....big time.
So why isn't everyone doing it?
Most organisations find personalisation very difficult because:
+ Automated personalisation software still doesn't deliver on it's promise.
+ As the amount of site content grows, the sheer number of permutations and combinations makes manual personalisation near impossible.
+ In order to do personalisation properly, you also need to understand exactly why your customers visit your site and what kind of content personalisation would be suitable....
The good news is that Squiz can help!
When faced with this kind of personalisation project, here's how we usually approach it:
In phase 1 we....
1. Research your search logs - both intrasite and external. This gives us an idea of the keywords people are using to look for your content.
2. Define a limited number of tags (the fewer the better) that your editors can use to tag content as it's entered into your site.
3. Define a scoring system out of 10 for those tags so editors can rate how relevant the content is to the specific ta....eg, an article about racing cars might score 10 for cars but only 5 for racing.
4. Give users the opportunity to subscribe to a 'my page' style service that delivers personalised content, based on an 'interest profile' that they create and maintain (ie, enable them to create their own homepage).
5. When these users visit your site, score their activity on the content rating scale mentioned above (with their permission).
6. When these users hit a defined threshold for a certain topic (say 100 points), offer them the opportunity to populate their homepage with the 'related' content that you have generated within your site.
7. Further, use this permission-based scoring profile as the basis for content preferences when sending targetted bulk email campaigns.
....In this way you can easily serve personalised content to users dynamically via your site when users are browsing, and also through email activity. Once the system is built, it is cheap and efficient to maintain - the scoring system means that it is CMS-generated and not a manual task.... And in practise this means that as time goes by you build an extremely valuable picture of your site subscribers (something that most advertisers would die for!).
MySource Matrix has all the tools you need for doing this. You can even compile the data it gives you and feed it back to your CRM system...!
We LOVE personalisation!
If you'd like to find out more then drop us a line....
Author: Stephen Morgan
Published: 26 Jun 2006 2:40pm
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