Category: Personalization

Bound’s Guide to ESTO Eats

Welcome to Austin! We’re so glad that you’re here.  In a city of amazing food options, we know you have a lot to choose from.  We wanted to share our favorite spots to help make your trip even more memorable.  Enjoy! When you land: Taylor recommends: Juiceland at Gate 7 As you hop off the… Read More

The post Bound’s Guide to ESTO Eats appeared first on Bound.

Welcome to Austin! We’re so glad that you’re here.  In a city of amazing food options, we know you have a lot to choose from.  We wanted to share our favorite spots to help make your trip even more memorable.  Enjoy!

When you land:

Taylor recommends: Juiceland at Gate 7

As you hop off the airplane into the jetbridge, you may be surprised by the 100+ degree Texas heat. Start hydrating ASAP by hopping over to Juiceland located at Gate 7. On the other side of the airport, but would love some juice? They have Juiceland kiosks with fresh juices thoughout the airport. My favorite smoothies are the Wondershowen (add cacoa for a kick), Morning Sunshine and Peachy Green. If you’re more in the mood for juice, I recommend the watermelon, beet, and sea salt combination found in the Recovery Punch.

For breakfast:

MC recommends: 1886 Cafe and Bakery

Check out the historic (and haunted!) Driskill Hotel and then grab breakfast or lunch at the delicious 1886 Cafe and Bakery. If you don’t want the decadence of a Texas Pecan Waffle (but really, why would you not?), the omelettes and sandwiches are all fantastic. If you’d rather check out the Driskill a bit later, the Driskill Bar serves pretty delicious cocktails and will give you a taste of historic Texas.

Ali recommends: Easy Tiger Bakery

This is also a late night favorite with an amazing beer garden, but their fresh baked pastries and coffee make for a perfect breakfast.  Buy a cookie or baguette to snack on later!

For lunch:

Matt recommends: TLV (at Fareground Food Hall)

A relatively new addition to the Fareground Food Hall, TLV serves excellent Israeli street food. Fresh veggies, delicious hummus and pitas. Literally all of their lunch & dinner options are good, and they have some tasty pastries and interesting filled donuts.

Jared recommends: Burger Bar

You might be thinking, “It sure looks like they wanted to maximize restaurant space in this hotel by renting out part of this exterior utility closet and I bet these burgers and shakes are average at best.” Well, you might be right on the real estate and efficient use of space front, but the burgers and shakes are slightly above average. I would wander down to Hopdoddy’s on South Congress if you want to level up your burger game, but for convenience and quality you are set here.

For an afternoon break:

Adriana recommends: Halcyon

Halcyon is a fun little spot to grab coffee, a cocktail, or a quick snack. There’s a ton of comfy couches and they usually have a small band or guitarist playing in the corner. The best thing to order is the build your own Smores. They actually bring out a tiny miniature campfire, sticks, and all the fixings so you can make your own delicious dessert.

Ali recommends: The Central Library

This is pretty much my new favorite place in town since it opened – I would live here, if I could. Their rooftop patio is a fun way to see the city and their Cookbook café has the greatest french toast ever, along with a lot of other great snacks. It’s a half-mile from the JW Marriott and a great place to have some quiet time after a full day of conferencing!

For dinner:

Jessica recommends: Moonshine Grill

All the cocktails are delicious but it’s definitely worth trying the Apple Pie or Strawberry moonshine. The food is a Texas twist on comfort. I’d recommend the Chicken & Waffles, Green Chile Macaroni, or the Hill Country BBQ Baby Back Ribs.

Jared recommends: Coopers BBQ

It’s good Texas BBQ, and it’s right next to your hotel. You don’t want to be far from your bed in a dark room with A/C when the meat sweats hit.

Ali recommends: La Condesa

Modern Mexican that pairs bright, fresh ingredients with amazing drinks and desserts.   Treat yourself to the guacamole trio, ceviche and some mezcal.

For an after dinner drink:

Jared recommends: Elephant Room

Good things always happen at bars below ground level. Chimay is on tap. Duke Silver will probably grace you with his presence.

When you’re heading home (and already planning your next visit!):

Ali recommends: Ruta Maya at Gate 28

Ruta Maya will always hold a special place in my heart as the quirky coffee house across the street from my college where I attended my first (and only) poetry slam contest. Thankfully, they opened up a beautiful coffee shop that is my favorite spot to grab a pre-flight coffee. They also serve a variety of fancy and fun chocolate bars that I like to pick up as a treat for the person I’m visiting, if I can keep myself from enjoying it on the way there.

Taylor recommends: Tacodeli at Gate 24

Nothing says hello (or goodbye) Austin like a breakfast taco. Filled with your favorite breakfast foods, Tacodeli tacos are the best in town. Try the Otto, Vaquero, or Migas. If you’re feeling adventurous, ask for papas on your taco. Nothing says breakfast like delicious mashed potatoes with eggs and bacon.

The post Bound’s Guide to ESTO Eats appeared first on Bound.

What Marketers Can Learn about Customer Acquisition from the 2019 Internet Trends Report

Mary Meeker’s renowned annual Internet Trends decks have been providing industry insights (and watercooler conversations amongst us data heads) since 1995. This year the Bond Capital founder released a staggering 333 slides, with a wealth of data around ecommerce and retail in general — including hints of possible market saturation and slowing growth. What caught…

The post What Marketers Can Learn about Customer Acquisition from the 2019 Internet Trends Report appeared first on Monetate.

Mary Meeker’s renowned annual Internet Trends decks have been providing industry insights (and watercooler conversations amongst us data heads) since 1995. This year the Bond Capital founder released a staggering 333 slides, with a wealth of data around ecommerce and retail in general — including hints of possible market saturation and slowing growth.

What caught my attention in the 2019 report was the corresponding rise in audience acquisition and online advertising spend. This rising reliance on paid audience generation has some major blind spots that are potentially detrimental to the efficiency and yield of huge percentages of marketing budgets.

I’m going to highlight the trends in the report that jumped out at me, alongside some exclusive findings from Monetate’s own data science team, in order to demonstrate the importance of a customer acquisition strategy that marries the prioritization of onsite experiences with targeted advertising growth.

Ecommerce sales are up but growth is slowing

The trend numbers on U.S. ecommerce validate the feelings of a lot of leading retailers out there. While total year-over-year sales are increasing (12.4 percent in 2019), the growth rate has fallen sharply in recent years (17 percent in Q4 2017).

Likewise, it’s no surprise to retailers that although ecommerce continues to grow year-over-year in the double digits, physical retail is moving at a snail’s pace. This places huge importance on growing the ecommerce segment, but there’s a risk (as I’ll dive into next) in focusing primarily on audience acquisition budget growth to do this.

To put this in more context, a 2 percent increase on a nearly $800 billion retail industry (excluding food service, motor vehicles, auto parts, gas stations and fuel) represents a slightly lower total dollar value than 12.4 percent of the nearly $140 billion ecommerce industry. It would be very impactful on the industry if the five-percentage-point-decline trend continued in ecommerce growth.

Increased audience acquisition spending with diminishing returns 

It should come as no surprise, then, that one area enjoying enormous growth is online advertising spend. Meeker’s report cites phenomenal 22 percent YoY growth in digital advertising spend for 2019, following 21 percent growth in 2018, with significant increases in mobile allocation also.

While Google and Facebook have a clear lead here, other platforms like Twitter, Pinterest, and Snapchat are also growing quickly. Much of this is due to the intelligence of online advertising channels; each channel brings with it highly targeted machine learning strategies all designed to optimize for conversion.

However, this channel sophistication corresponds with increased competition as sectors mature their digital strategies. Combine this with increasing advertising costs, and you end up with a higher cost-per-acquisition that isn’t fixable through copy and CTA optimization.

Shifting marketers’ focus from volume to experience

At first, this data appears to paint a bleak picture for retail and ecommerce: a saturated market where the cost of bringing in new audiences is growing while overall growth is slowing. However, there is a huge opportunity for savvy marketers to focus on designing (and measuring) owned property experiences that improve acquisition cost metrics. And I mean going beyond the table stakes of testing and segmenting paid inbound audiences.

Where’s my proof? Monetate recently analyzed over a million sessions across hundreds of ecommerce brands and found that a series of consistent, pervasive personalized experiences can improve the efficacy of increasingly expensive acquisition channels.

The data showed that when visitors were served not just an optimized experience upon landing on site, but a continued series of personalized experiences over their additional pageviews, then there was a dramatic improvement in conversion rate. 

In fact, just three personalized pageviews increased the conversion rate compared to a single pageview by 100 percent. And add-to-carts increased by 74 percent.

The findings get even more dramatic as the volume of pageviews increases. Moving to 10 personalized pageviews increased conversion by a staggering 1,859 percent compared to a single personalized pageview.

Of course, we wanted to make sure this was a direct result of the personalization and not simply because visitors’ conversions grow naturally as their pageviews increase. With a control example of non-personalized pageviews, we saw that while conversion rate does grow over time, it is very different growth from the personalized experiences:

Increasing yield from paid channels

This data becomes even more valuable when we looked at the impact a series of personalized sessions had on referral channels. And Facebook referral data gave us a really compelling case for strategic personalization.

In our data set, Facebook was the lowest performer at a 1 percent conversion rate compared to an overall average of 1.7 percent. Our data then showed a “tipping point” where a series of personalized pages after a Facebook referral led to dramatic changes: on average between the 7th and 8th personalized pageviews, conversion rates were 5X better and Facebook went from being the lowest performing channel in the set to the highest. 

This tells us is that there is not only a massive opportunity to grow the yield of acquisition channels through sustained personalization, but also what could initially be thought of as a low-performing channel may in fact simply be an unoptimized top-performer.

Key takeaways for marketers in ecommerce and retail

If the trends in Mary Meeker’s 2019 report continue, there are signs that ecommerce growth may be beginning to stagnate — through market saturation, increased competition, and/or economic reasons. And with huge pressure to make up physical retail losses in the ecommerce space, marketers are naturally going to be hyper-focused on customer acquisition and digital advertising spend. 

The huge opportunity area is in leveraging holistic, comprehensive personalization to increase paid channel yield at a far higher rate than simply (or primarily) upping the amount of dollars being spent on acquisition. Marketers should be personalizing beyond key site pages and thinking of personalization as a pervasive, consistent strategy that increases value.

Liam Moroney is the Sr. Director of Growth Marketing at Monetate.

The post What Marketers Can Learn about Customer Acquisition from the 2019 Internet Trends Report appeared first on Monetate.

The future of media and entertainment: Tackling digital transformation through experimentation

Media and the ways we engage with it are constantly evolving. The way we discover new media, the way we…Read blog postabout:The future of media and entertainment: Tackling digital transformation through experimentation
The post The future of media an…

Media and the ways we engage with it are constantly evolving. The way we discover new media, the way we...Read blog postabout:The future of media and entertainment: Tackling digital transformation through experimentation

The post The future of media and entertainment: Tackling digital transformation through experimentation appeared first on WiderFunnel Conversion Optimization.

Deliver Personalized Recommendations The Amazon-&-Netflix Way!

2019 is the year when personalization took concrete steps to break out from ‘hype’ and found its calling in marketing deployments across B2B and B2C with equal vigor. Even you, dear reader, inadvertently have been a part of personalization experiments every time you login to Netflix to binge upon that web series you finally found […]

The post Deliver Personalized Recommendations The Amazon-&-Netflix Way! appeared first on Blog.

2019 is the year when personalization took concrete steps to break out from ‘hype’ and found its calling in marketing deployments across B2B and B2C with equal vigor. Even you, dear reader, inadvertently have been a part of personalization experiments every time you login to Netflix to binge upon that web series you finally found time for. So how do you emulate their personalization recommendation models at scale? This article attempts to decode how two of the biggest internet behemoths, Netflix and Amazon approach personalization from a revenue lens.

The Universe of Personalized Recommendations

Netflix’s Secret Formula To Personalize Customer Experience

Everything Netflix does is driven by data and powered by smart AI algorithms. The company is always brainstorming, and testing ideas to ensure that whatever is disseminated on its platform matches the exact thought process of its users. And, its efforts are pretty much evident. 

Let’s understand how it’s personalization mechanism is doing wonders for Netflix and what can we learn from the online video streaming giant. 

1. The Use of A/B Tests

No one understands the technique of A/B testing better than Netflix. As per Todd Yellin, Vice President Product, Netflix, the company runs about 250 A/B tests every year. Each of these tests presents two different versions of experiences to users to see how they react and respond to the suggested changes. On an average, Netflix chooses around 100,000 users to test its hypothesis. One of the reasons why no two people have the same experience on its platform.

Following an empirical approach here, Netflix ensures that whatever is shown on the platform (content, images, and videos) is driven by actual data collected from the A/B tests it runs and not based on one person’s opinion. 

Netflix’s landing cards are a perfect example to quote here. Landing cards are typically images or video teaser visible to a user browsing through the Netflix’s category of recommendations. Now how can these cards make a difference? The concept is pretty simple. Images as well as videos have a greater impact on the minds of customers than the content (meaning words) drafted around them. People are more likely to watch a video if they are shown images or teaser that are attractive and compelling. 

A/B testing these landing cards allows the platform to understand the psychology of its customers, further using the gathered data to personalize their experience in the most effective way possible. 

Netflix Content Recommendation

2. The Use of AI to Power Recommendation Engine

Similar to Amazon, Netflix too is vested much in using AI and machine learning to power up its recommendation engines. The company uses customer viewing data, search history, rating data as well as time, date and the kind of device a user uses to predict what should be recommended to them. Statistics show that, Netflix in 2014 used 76,897 “altgenres” or unique ways to determine the type of movies and shows it should recommend to each of its users to not only personalize their experience but also make them come back for more.  

Further, the company also uses customer data to create unique homepages for each of its users. It shows content it believes would best match the interest of its users as well as enhance their overall experience with the platform.

Netflix Personalized View

The crux – strong recommendations powered by AI and machine learning not only allow you to provide your users with a personalized experience they’ll love, but also reduce your churn rate significantly.

3. The Use of Right Content at the Right Time

Set aside algorithms to fuel recommendations, content has the prowess to make or break the overall experience and relationship of a user with your platform. And, Netflix understands this very well!

The online video streaming giant uses content to map the success or failure of its recommendations on the basis of how users are liking or disliking them. For example, if a user is vested much in watching horror movies like The Ritual, The Babysitter or Apostle, Netflix would recommend similar movies to keep the user hooked to its platform. It cannot outright recommend comedy movies which, looking at the user’s browsing data, seems like a very vague suggest.

In addition to this, Netflix also uses time as a strong variable to recommend shows to its customers. Meaning, the platform will suggest shorter programs or the ones you’re halfway through when you log in late at night instead of recommending shows with longer durations.

What we understand here is that displaying the right content at the right time can not only help increase customer engagement on your platform but also enhance the user experience significantly.

Amazon’s Comprehensive Product Recommendation System

Amazon’s transformation journey began in 2010 when it started recommending products to its customers through its “Customers who bought” widget. This gave them a huge leap back then and is still doing wonders for the ecommerce giant. As per the company, nearly 35% of its sales comes from such personalized recommendations, even today! And, nearly 56% of them are likely to turn into repeat buyers as well.  

Its attempt to personalize a customer’s shopping experience didn’t just stop there. Amazon has made some remarkable personalization advancements in the last couple of years with the help of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and predictive analytics.

Here’s what to learn from Amazon personalization efforts.

1. The Use of AI and Deep Learning Technique

Login to your Amazon account and you’ll see that the platform always has something new to recommend, which, agree or not, matches perfectly your interest. How does it do that? The answer is Deep Learning!

An extended arm of AI and machine learning, deep learning uses algorithms to naturally understand human behavior and deliver results accordingly. In Amazon’s context, deep learning helps the platform analyze which product(s) a customer is likely to buy next, further recommending the same to them while they’re there on the site or when they login again. Here, the technology takes into consideration the products and product pages a customer has viewed, bought, rated, and reviewed.

2. The Use of Product Recommendation Analogy

One thing that the company teaches us (and as evident from the stats mentioned above) is that recommendations have the prowess to skyrocket sales. 

Adding a sophisticated recommendation engine powered by AI gives Amazon the ability to leverage ‘discovery’ – showing people items they are most likely to buy (basis their on-site behavior data) and also shed light on items they are probably unlikely to discover on their own. Website personalization plays a crucial role here.

personalized dress recommendations on Amazon

3. The Use of ‘One-Size-Does-Not-Fit-All’ Approach

Another thing to learn from Amazon is its unique ability to indulge with each of its customers on a personal level. Meaning, every time a customer lands on the ecommerce giant’s site, they’re greeted with a homepage that seems especially designed for them. These changes aren’t a one-time affair, but something that happens on an everyday level and on the basis of a customer’s real-time behavior on the platform. With this, Amazon constantly delivers a personalized experience with relevant, recommended items that keeps users coming back for more.

Amazon Homepage

Amazon hasn’t just changed the way customers shop, it has spoilt them for an experience that is distinctive and personalized. Pretty much evident from the fact that 57% of customers claim that Amazon offers them more product information, their features and quality, which enhances their overall shopping experience. 

The Hunger To Evolve

With over a thousand companies competing in the online marketplace, one thing that makes Amazon and Netflix the companies to get inspired from their constant hunger to evolve. From behavioral targeting to deep learning, content personalization to conversion rate optimization, there’s nothing that the two giants haven’t explored and used to their advantage. Learning from their experience and the way they’ve dived deep into the concept of personalization can help you grow exponentially and carve a niche for yourself in today’s customer-driven market. 

The post Deliver Personalized Recommendations The Amazon-&-Netflix Way! appeared first on Blog.

Time to Get Personal

As a destination marketer, one of your main challenges is turning your website visitors into destination visitors. Before a visitor comes to your destination they compare you their other options. During this research phase, you tailor your ads to match their interests, you utilize search engine marketing tools to make sure your advertising and social… Read More

The post Time to Get Personal appeared first on Bound.

As a destination marketer, one of your main challenges is turning your website visitors into destination visitors. Before a visitor comes to your destination they compare you their other options. During this research phase, you tailor your ads to match their interests, you utilize search engine marketing tools to make sure your advertising and social content is targeted to their search results, and you hope these visitors click through to your site to consume and engage with the top content you’ve created.

But what are the best practices in turning these online visitors into destination visitors?

Leading destination marketers from Explore Branson, Elkhart County, Indiana, and Visit Williamsburg believe website personalization is a cost effective way to turn their website visitors into destination visitors. In Time to Get Personal, these three destinations highlight some of the ways Bound’s personalization solution has helped them stand out amongst their peers and convert their online visitors into destination visitors. Some of their results include the following:

  • Explore Branson has seen a 560% increase in e-newsletter sign-ups by using a personalized pop-up targeted to different website audiences.
  • Elkhart County, Indiana used Bound’s A/B testing capabilities to increase travel guide conversions by 253%.
  • Visit Williamsburg used Bound to maximize the value of their paid media campaigns. ince targeting paid media visitors to the website with personalized landing pages, they have seen a 41% increase in time on site.

Read more in this report to learn how these destinations got these results and to see if now is the right time for you to explore personalization for your destination’s website.

Related Posts

The post Time to Get Personal appeared first on Bound.

Who’s Hiring in January 2019?

Here are our picks: Website Optimization Specialist – In Atlanta, SunTrust is looking for a specialist to be responsible for “developing and executing business strategies, processes and policies to enhance the sales and service experiences intrinsic to SunTrust’s digital spaces.” A/B Testing & Personalization Analyst – Join Barnes & Noble’s Optimization team in New York […]

The post Who’s Hiring in January 2019? appeared first on Brooks Bell.

Here are our picks:

Website Optimization Specialist – In Atlanta, SunTrust is looking for a specialist to be responsible for “developing and executing business strategies, processes and policies to enhance the sales and service experiences intrinsic to SunTrust’s digital spaces.”

A/B Testing & Personalization Analyst – Join Barnes & Noble’s Optimization team in New York to “improve bn.com’s content, design, and usability for customers and to create unique experiences based on customers’ preferences and behaviors.”

Director-Digital Product Analytics & Testing –  Join the Enterprise Digital and Analytics team at American Express in New York.  They are looking for a leader to “provide value to the online card shopping experiences within the Global Consumer and Commercial businesses through customer data and measurement, insights through analytics techniques and experimentation.”

Marketing Manager, International Conversion – Ancestry is looking for a candidate to join their Conversion Marketing team in San Francisco.  This person is “responsible for improving and optimizing the user experience at each step in the conversion funnel with the end goal of maximizing revenue from visitors in each of Ancestry’s key global markets.”

Marketing Manager, A/B Testing & Optimization – Join AuthO’s Growth Team in “driving improvement in key engagement metrics and customer experience throughout the customer lifecycle.”

Director of B2B Marketing, Demand Generation – Join Vimeo’s B2B marketing team in New York to “scale qualified lead acquisition, build and continuously optimize digital marketing, account-based marketing (ABM), email automation, social, and event-based marketing channels.”

Sr. Analyst, eCommerce Direct to Consumer Analytics – Newell Brands is looking for a senior analyst in Hoboken, New Jersey, to drive “sustainable growth online through the best-in-class use of data and analytics.”

Digital Marketing Leader – Website Optimization – Join GE Healthcare in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin to “develop a rigorous testing and experimentation framework, and conceive, scope and implement experimentation initiatives to improve the website user experience and drive conversion rate optimization.”

Manager, Marketing Planning, Test & Analysis – Express is looking for an individual to lead the testing and optimization program in Columbus, Ohio, “starting with A/B & multivariate testing taking us into experience optimization and eventually personalization.”

 

Looking for a job or to fill a position?  Give us a shout and we’ll help spread the word in our next careers blog post.

 

The post Who’s Hiring in January 2019? appeared first on Brooks Bell.

Free Guide: How to Strategize & Execute Profitable Personalization Campaigns

When I speak with our clients, it often strikes me how many of them feel overwhelmed by the very idea of personalization. Our imagination, often fueled by the marketing teams of various software companies, creates a perfect world where personalization enables every interaction to be completely custom for every individual. In this dreamland, artificial intelligence […]

The post Free Guide: How to Strategize & Execute Profitable Personalization Campaigns appeared first on Brooks Bell.

When I speak with our clients, it often strikes me how many of them feel overwhelmed by the very idea of personalization.

Our imagination, often fueled by the marketing teams of various software companies, creates a perfect world where personalization enables every interaction to be completely custom for every individual. In this dreamland, artificial intelligence and machine learning solve all our problems. All you have to do is buy a new piece of software, turn it on, and…BOOM: 1:1 personalization.

As a data scientist, I’ll let you in on a little secret: that software only provides the technological capability for personalization. Even further, the algorithms found within these tools simply assign a probability to each potential experience that maximizes the desired outcome, given the data they have access to. Suffice to say, they’re not as intelligent as you are led to believe.

If you caught our first post in this series, you already know that we define personalization a bit more broadly, as any differentiated experience that is delivered to a user based on known data about that user. This means personalization exists on a spectrum: it can be one-to-many, one-to-few, or one-to-one.

And while there are many tools that enable you to do personalization from a technical standpoint, they don’t solve for one of the main sources of anxiety around personalization: strategy

Most personalization campaigns fail because of a lack of a strategy that defines who, where and how to personalize. So I’ve put together a free downloadable guide to help you do just that. This seven-page guide is packed full of guidelines, templates and best practices to strategize and launch a successful personalization campaign, including:

  • Major considerations and things to keep in mind when developing your personalization strategy.
  • More than 30 data-driven questions about your customers to identify campaign opportunities.
  • A template for organizing and planning your personalization campaigns.
  • Guidelines for determining whether to deliver your campaigns via rule-based targeting or algorithmic targeting.

Free Download: Plan & Launch Profitable Personalization Campaigns.

The post Free Guide: How to Strategize & Execute Profitable Personalization Campaigns appeared first on Brooks Bell.

Built to Wow: An Introduction to Launching Personalization At Your Company

The promise of personalization is enticing: a complete 1-to-1 experience for every customer, driven by every detail and data point about that person: who they are, their interests, needs and history. Their customer experience is completely optimized to deliver the right content at the right time, influencing brand engagement, purchase activity and “wow”-worthy customer experiences. […]

The post Built to Wow: An Introduction to Launching Personalization At Your Company appeared first on Brooks Bell.

The promise of personalization is enticing: a complete 1-to-1 experience for every customer, driven by every detail and data point about that person: who they are, their interests, needs and history. Their customer experience is completely optimized to deliver the right content at the right time, influencing brand engagement, purchase activity and “wow”-worthy customer experiences.

For years, this vision has been a pipedream among marketers, product managers and customer experience professionals. Many clients come to us wanting to “do personalization” but face significant challenges in doing so.

Part of this is due to the fact that “personalization” is so ill-defined.

At Brooks Bell, we define personalization as any experience that is delivered to a user based on known data about that person. By that definition, personalization exists on a spectrum: it can be one-to-few, one-to-many, or one-to-one. In the digital environment, product recommendations, customized search results and even segmented experiences are all considered examples of personalization.

But while many companies are already implementing these experiences, there’s still an overwhelming sense that many brands have yet to arrive in terms of personalization.

Got a bunch of burning questions about personalization? Submit them using the form below.

We’ll use this information to make sure we cover these topics in our upcoming posts.

A 2018 study of 300 marketers by Evergage and Researchscape International found that 98% of respondents believe personalization helps advance customer relationships, but only 12% were “very” or “extremely” satisfied with the level of personalization in their marketing efforts.

This is because (not unlike experimentation) personalization is a business strategy that should evolve in order to deliver long-term value. And while it’s true that many brands already have the ability to do personalization, they’ve also found that elevating and scaling a personalization program is difficult, costly and, frankly, can feel pretty darn impossible.

So, how to do this? In addition to the fundamentals for a standard optimization program, there are three critical working components that need to be established for personalization:

  • Technology: you need top-notch tools to centralize user profiles and deliver personalized experiences;
  • Data: personalization requires a clean, unified view of relevant customer attributes, and
  • Strategy: you need research and planning to purposefully and effectively launch, scale and benefit from personalization.

In the coming weeks, we’re going to break down personalization further by each of these components. We’ll outline the best practices, advice, strategies and tips to go from scrappy to smart when it comes to introducing and scaling personalization at your organization.

Struggling to execute a scalable personalization strategy? We can help. Contact us to schedule a free 30-minute consultation.

The post Built to Wow: An Introduction to Launching Personalization At Your Company appeared first on Brooks Bell.

Why Personalization Matters As Explained By Your Thanksgiving Feast

It’s the night before Thanksgiving, and you’re still trying to plan the menu. While you are thrilled that some rarely-seen relatives have decided to journey to your home for the holiday, they’ve also presented you with a culinary challenge. You realize that with only one turkey, and room on the table for only a few… Read More

The post Why Personalization Matters As Explained By Your Thanksgiving Feast appeared first on Bound.

It’s the night before Thanksgiving, and you’re still trying to plan the menu. While you are thrilled that some rarely-seen relatives have decided to journey to your home for the holiday, they’ve also presented you with a culinary challenge. You realize that with only one turkey, and room on the table for only a few side dishes, you won’t be able to give everyone the perfect Thanksgiving feast.

You decide to try and tackle the turkey first since it’s the centerpiece of Thanksgiving. Uncle Bob has requested a fried turkey this year, but cousin Alice from Austin thinks a smoked turkey would be better. You’ve never smoked nor fried a turkey before so it seems like an easy decision to stick to the traditional, which should be good for most of the group.

However you feel bad that Bob and Alice won’t get the turkey they want, so you decide to prioritize them for the sides. They’re both on board for your garlic mashed potatoes. This means though that the mashed sweet potatoes won’t fit on the main table, and will need to stay in the kitchen. Your mother will only eat the sweet potatoes and has a bad ankle. Is it fair to make her walk to the kitchen every time she wants more?

You could move the green bean casserole to the kitchen and leave all the potatoes on the table. Meanwhile your brother-in-law, Caleb, asked if the green bean casserole could use gluten free fried onions, and you’re still trying to decide if that would work for everyone or if it would taste noticeably different.

You’re completely lost when it comes to desserts. Your family will only eat pecan pie but your mother-in-law is severely allergic. It seems logical to make pumpkin, but how can you not have the pie that half your guests want?

Luckily you’re only faced with this conundrum once a year. Destination marketers, however, face this challenge daily. Instead of a turkey, they need a homepage hero that still appeals to in-state, out-of-state, and special interest visitors. They might not need to worry about someone walking the extra steps to the kitchen, but they struggle with keeping content easy to find so that brides looking at wedding venues or business travelers coming for a conference don’t need to dig through page after page of general vacation trip ideas.

Reimagine this Thanksgiving feast/website with personalization. Most guests would see the traditional turkey hero, but Uncle Bob and cousin Alice see the turkeys they want. Your mother doesn’t need to “walk” to the kitchen, because you’ve set a fly-in on the sides content that takes her right to the sweet potatoes. That pecan pie that can’t get near your mother-in-law? You’ve set rules to exclude her from ever seeing it.

We hope YOUR Thanksgiving is delightful and there are no challenges with planning. If you’re interested in learning how to take your website to the next level with personalization request a consultation to see how we fit in with your current marketing strategy.

The post Why Personalization Matters As Explained By Your Thanksgiving Feast appeared first on Bound.