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...

Struggling to drive conversions?  The issue might be with customer experience. After having worked with several brands, big and small, I can assure you that you don't have to make sweeping changes to drive better results. Many times even small changes and little bit process can lead to happy customers and big impacts. In this post I have complied 11 tips that you can use today. If you need help then don't hesitate to reach out to me. Easy to fill forms  – How many times have you come across a form field where you don’t remember what the field was about?  Many designers/developers use the default text in the form filed as the filed label. Once you tab into that field, the default text is gone and now you can’t figure out what that field was about.  That is a very bad design which will likely cause customer frustration and kill conversions. No more unnecessary form field formatting and validations - Other than Captcha validation, you are likely using form field valida...

I am a big believer in targeting and personalization and have written extensively about it in this blog. However, targeting and personalization is not “set it and forget it” strategy. It needs to be continually tested to make sure that it is working and driving value. Sometimes you have to test and see if “no-personalization” will yield better results than personalization. To make my point, let’s take an example: I get a weekly promotional email from a prominent marketing company. They personalize the email subject line (good so far). Here are few subject lines How [XYZ Company] Should Kickoff New Clients  Ensure that [XYZ Company] delivers great PPC campaign The rules of online branding that [XYZ Company] needs to know Note: Instead of [XYZ Company] they use the name of the company I used to work with. However there is an issue with the way they do personalization. Do you see the issue? The issue is that they use the name of the company I USED TO WORK FOR . I left that c...

Today I came across an article by Isaac Weisberg, titled Unintended Consequences of Targeting: Less Information, Less Serendipity – Part I . In this article Isaac argues that online personalization limits the exposure of information to the individuals. I agree that current personalization practices are very limited though it is more of an issue with the marketers engaged in personalization than with the technology. ( Note: Retargeting , Behavioral Targeting , on-site recommendations, customized emails etc. are all different forms of personalization). So it is not Personalization that limits the flow of information but it is the people engaged in Personalization. The purpose of personalization is to provide information that is relevant to an individual and in order to do so you will eliminate a lot of information that the person is not likely to be interested in. However that does not mean that the person cannot be exposed to new information with the personalization. The issue is tha...