February 11th, 2008 at 10:22 am

That’s the best set of points I have read to date on the subject. In my world (as a marketing communications consultant) it is my job to aid companies in making their marketing initiatives quantifiable. All too often, marketers forget that the sole purpose of marketing is to create opportunity for sales and to ultimately take those opportunities and apply then to the bottom line. But without ‘personal interaction’ within the marketing and sales cycles, to many the goal of how to make something personal becomes a nebulous grey area in the grand scheme of their marketing plan.

My question for you is this. Could you give an example of personalization both from an outward ‘customer’ viewpoint (what they see) as well as a technical one (the how-do-they-do-that perspective)? It would be fascinating to learn how one implements and manages personalization—and how it then equates to the ultimate goal of conversion.

Thanks!

February 13th, 2008 at 12:27 am

I have been in sales for just over 5 years now.

Almost in my 2nd year of online sales. Prior to this was print/magazine and event sales.

I have always dealth with national companies and mostly in canada.

Reading over what you said about your CEO, CFO, VP Sales and how they’re all over you about how you spend your dollars. How come Canadian corporate companies always say they dont have any money (and I know, Canada is a small market) but when the Toyotas, P&Gs, Nikes, Rogers etc etc etc reports are released show revenues/profits that skyrocketed!!?? And now, with online they’re saying (they being either the HQ or their agency) no $ for online or the company is not doing online advertising when everywhere in the news it shows an increase in internet usage/biz in 2008?!

I dont work for myspace, facebook, msn, yahoo, google or youtube but I know that our site is working effectively. For the top notch corporate clients that have signed up, they’ve been very happy with the results in our 7+ years of existence. It has taken alot of hours to make them understand how we do business and show what we can do for them, giving them quality visibility with massive numbers, in a niche site.

Im going to leave it at that for now because I could go on forever about this and how confusing it is to me sometimes how people react to buying online media. If you have already written something about this somewhere, please send me a link, i’d be more than happy to read it.

thanks

February 13th, 2008 at 6:01 pm

Hi Scott,

Okay - personalization from an outward perspective and how do they do that!?

Let’s start with the ‘outward perspective’.

A piece of web content that was personalized (web page, landing page, etc.) would pick up on some of the visitor’s attributes and then dynamically change the content within the page to reflect that knowledge. So an easy and simplistic example would be understanding that the visitor is from New York City and ensuring the graphics within the page were of the statue of liberty. A more advanced example of this would be understanding that the visitor found you through Google using the search term “red pants” and then showed imagery, or used text, conveying red pants. You can get a lot more sophisticated with multiple conditions. For visitors from Canada, arriving between 12:00pm and 1:00pm (we’ll say they arrived at 12:31pm), you could have a promotional special that claimed “Lunch time special only - free shipping to Canada - only 29 minutes remaining. Act now!”. You can get very specific on these conditions so it’s somewhat like Adwords…the more granular you are the smaller the audience becomes but the more compelling the experience is hence the higher the conversion will be!

Okay - next question. How do you do that? There are a handful of services available. Most of these are focused primarily on black-box optimization techniques. You can get these solutions from vendors like Omniture or Axciom. The downside to their solution is both price (expensive) and usability (hard to explain black box results). They work and if you are a customer of theirs I suggest you investigate further. The solution from Sitebrand has optimization capabilties but is more targeted for the Marketer that wants to have full control of their campaign. And it’s much more affordable. Essentially, you carve our some content spaces on your web page and then you create campaigns for each content space. When the visitors arrive and their attributes or behaviours match the trigger rules, the dynamic content is loaded in these content spaces resulting in a personalized experience. Sitebrand’s solution is available as a service and their pricing is based on your traffic. This means you don’t need your IT guys involved.

Let me know if I can help out more.

February 13th, 2008 at 6:15 pm

Hi Guy

Holy smokes can I relate. Then again, I’m showing my age by being able to relate. You raise an amazing point and one I’ve lived over and over again both as a Marketing executive and as a solution provider. I’ve seen both sides of the coin.

Okay - let’s talk about the perspective of the Marketing executive. As a whole, my budget is approved annually and has monthly or quarterly reviews of my spend verses budgeted. As long as I’m underbudget then all is well. Of course, the next question becomes “What has our Marketing investment resulted in?”. That’s where dashboards come in so that you can connect campaigns to leads to pipeline opportunities to actual closed sales and revenues. Most marketers have awful dashboards. So, with no dashboards, it comes down to the Executive’s influence on the exec team and on some obvious campaign results which can easily be discerned as successful. However, each Marketing executive knows, deep down inside, that not all of their programs succeed and that it’s often difficult to measure the results as directly attributable to your efforts. Hence, we need secret weapons to make us more effective and more measurable. That’s where a Sitebrand solution comes in. For one thing, everything is measurable and that’s powerful. For another, I can modestly reduce my approved online spend and redirect some of it to personalization. Assuming the conversion rates go up (they will) then the net impact is all good; no budget impact and increased sales. Said another way - they all have budget it just comes down to how well that budget is working. Check out the webinar we just did because we talk exactly about this.

https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/800969994

Okay - let’s talk about the perspective as a vendor of solutions. The bottom line is always speaking to the marketer’s pain. Anyone who can call me and ask me some simple questions that resonate with my pains will have my attention. I am measured by revenues and simply stated anything you can do to make me more successful is good — as long as it fits within my budget. If it doesn’t fit within the budget then you need to reduce the risk for me in a big, big way. If you can’t do that and you simply want me to trust you, without you or I having a preexisting relationship, then I’m not going to be engaging with you. But - offer me a solution that solves my pains and can be made to fit within my budget and then I’m there. So the question I would ask you is how do you qualify your opportunities? Are you speaking to the pains? Are you asking open ended questions so that they reveal their situation or are you jumping into your value proposition immediately?

As for Canadian companies….well….hmmmm….must be very careful here (disclosure: I am Canadian, but have worked internationally multiple times)…Marketing isn’t as valued in the executive ranks because it’s not as understood or appreciated. You can see that in the tv or radio content played on air. It’s very different than the US. In my experience, you actually have far more success if you approach a CEO, CFO or COO and speak to their pains. Remember, it’s all about making your dollar go further. These C-level executives understand balance sheets and if you can make them more without spending more, or you can make them more for a modest investment, then they’ll want to hear about it. Caution - their pain points will be different than a marketers hence you need to be able to speak to their issues and translate back to how online marketing can be their answer.

Let’s talk some more about this if you want. I can go on and on with this stuff.

D.