Internet Marketing 101: How to use personalization correctly

"Personalization is about creating relevancy and an effective dialogue," said Ken Treske, Chief Marketing Officer with Dotomi. "When it is done, the 'best practices' really harken to the old retail days when you'd walk into the market and the workers would know what you wanted to buy. The secret sauce of personalization is when the marketer is able to create a dialogue that shifts and manipulates all of the campaign levers to speak to a consumer relevantly."

One thing holding some marketers back from personalization is privacy concerns. Personalization is mistaken quite regularly for behavioral targeting, which mines personal information and then uses that information to better marketing campaigns.

"You can do personalization without needing to collect data from across the Internet. You have your customers and your prospects who you collect information from," said Treske. "Behavioral Targeting collects behaviors from hundreds of websites and thousands of consumers to give a general profile. Personalization is looking at the interactions that go on between the brand and the consumer."

The first step, Treske says, is to create a unified profile of the consumer to inform the marketer.

"It isn't just about the data," Treske said. "It is about understanding brand relevancy and the consumer's interest. There may be ten to twenty attributes that drive relevancy but those things may be different for each marketer. First, you have to understand your brand and what it is about your brand that engages the consumer."

Once you've collected that profile information, marketers need to think about data driving the message - this means having many content variations for a singular message hook of an offer, a headline or an image. These variations should be driven by the consumer's profile.

"By doing that your creative focuses on assembling the different assets which are put together in real time. It's absolutely important to have a variety of creative and the key, from there, is to have a vendor who can take that variety and push the right message to the right consumer," said Treske.

Another part of personalization is giving the consumer a 'face to name' feeling. Expedia CruiseShipCenters found that adding an agent's face and name on their consumer messages helped increase click through rates by more than 20% because the consumer felt a connection to the company. The information also helped to create a 'lifecycle' of messages including pre-sale and post sale correspondence, including consumer reviews after they returned from a trip. The company also saw open rates increase by just over 5%.

Using this type of personalization, sales agents can create custom landing pages, newsletters and correspondence with their contact information and pictures. This way the consumer can identify not only who the company is but a specific person within your company that they can 'connect with' when they are ready to purchase, ask a question or sign up for another vacation.

"We are seeing more interest in the client base and more vendors realizing that they need [to address] privacy concerns as well," said Treske. "Dotomi displays banner ads to consumers and gives the consumer information about why they are seeing certain ads and then allows the consumer to determine when or how they are contacted in the future."

Tags: Dotomi, Expedia CruiseShipCenters, online advertising, online marketing, personalization, personalized advertising