Why You Should Care About Personalization

“Personalization” is in the news again lately. Last week, Acxiom Digital acquired dynamic targeting company, Kefta.  According to Acxiom’s news release, "Kefta and Acxiom together will finally enable clients to capture the full potential of their digital marketing campaigns through comprehensive personalization and integration across marketing channels”.  Also, Aggregate Knowledge and ChoiceStream each raised money this week. 

I think of these deals as continued validation of the emergence of post-click marketing, a subject I’ve blogged about already.  But, more specifically, it’s validation of the promise of true personalization. Of course, we’ve been hearing about the personalized Web experience for at least the last six years, if not the last decade. But, so far, no one has really delivered it. Because when I say personalization, I don’t mean getting an email with your name on it, or seeing an ad that might interest you because of a keyword you clicked on. And I’m not referring to getting product recommendations based on the past, collective buying behavior of segments, either. Personalization, to me, means seeing products and content that are completely and totally tailored to your immediate tastes, desires and needs.

Let’s step back a bit. The value of demand generation is well understood by most online retailers. This has driven the willingness to pay for effective outbound marketing services to the edge of breakeven in many cases. (Just look at what’s happened with average AdWords CPCs over the last 24 months.) Now, online retailers are looking for the source of incremental revenues, and they’re focusing their attention on the effectiveness of their sites to acquire and retain customers. They also want to drive up average order size.  In other words, they want people to come to their sites, stay there, and buy more stuff.

As we talk to executives at online retail companies, the desire to use personalization to achieve these goals is a common theme, if not a necessity.  In fact, personalization is viewed by many of these folks as the solution to every marketer’s dream of a real-time, one-to-one marketing program that can operate effectively at scale. Based on these conversations and the “personalization buzz” in our market, expect to see more press releases from more companies promising personalization. But be careful how you read these announcements: true personalization isn’t about breaking people into segments of millions of “like-minded” consumers, it’s about delivering a real-time, one-on-one, totally unique experience to each and every visitor, each and every time they visit your site.

Todd Humphrey, CEO