faulker046

What is the difference between segmentation and personalization? This is the question that came up during one of the webinar on personalization by Optimizely. This blog post is for those who have the same question. Basic definition of Segmentation is  - division into separate parts or sections.  For the purpose of marketing, it is a processing of grouping customer and prospects into similar groups based on various criteria such as demographic, geo, behavioral and psychographics.  You can use one or more of such attributes to define your segment.  The purpose of segmentation is to understand about a group (segment), and develop marketing strategy to better target those segments.  Personalization is providing marketing messages and/or experience that is tailored based on a customer’s needs or preferences.  Personalization can be very basic that can start from simply recognizing the person by name or it can be very complex that includes all sorts of data abou...

1st, 2nd and 3rd Party Data Demystified I have referred to 1st party and 3rd party data in a lot of blog posts. Based on the queries I get, both via email and in the classes I teach, it is time to clarify what various data sources mean. 1st Party Data 1st party data is the data that you (brand/publisher/retailer) have collected about your visitors, customers, shoppers etc. You own the data outright and all the rights to it. You can use it for any purpose you want based on the agreements with your visitors, customers, shoppers etc. as specified in your data collection and use policies. Some examples of 1st party data are: Site registration data – name, email, address, gender etc. Visitors behavior data on your site – time of visits, minutes spent, products looked at, source of visits etc. Shoppers/customers purchase data – products purchased, transaction amounts, coupons used etc. Email data – emails sent, opened, clicked etc. It is most widely used data for the marketing purposes. Gene...

Data is the raw material for developing insights. If the complete data is not available to insights team then you can’t expect the insights to be very valuable. Insights teams will make the best out of what they have available but you will get far better insights if you spend little time with them to understand what they need and help them with these for major roadblocks. Data Sources and Collection – Insights team has identified the data sources required for them to provide great insights, the data is all there either available internally or externally. The big challenges comes when the data teams actually start to figure out how the data will be collected. For  internal data sources  the organizational barriers are the biggest ones that prevent one team for getting access to the data that other team owns. Your team will need your help in navigating those barriers and help the free flow of the data. If external data sources are on their list then your help will be needed to p...