The 3 C’s of
Personalization

There is a growing disconnect between companies and their consumers because online personalization is imperfect. In order to stay relevant, companies must offer a first-hand experience online and make information user friendly. The following 3 C’s of personalization will result in a more fulfilling and efficient experience on your company’s site.

Customer Profile:

In order to start creating a strong customer profile, companies must start from the first interaction. As much information as possible must be pulled and analyzed so that companies are able to generate accurate results. One example from the article, 3 key ways marketers should personalize the online experience by Tom Wentworth was, “At a department store, your customer who’s a  gardening enthusiast might also be a chef or a soccer player as well”. This quote is relevant because if companies do not inquire all this relevant information they could miss out on marketing opportunities. This customer who visits the department store site looking to buy a shovel could also leave with cooking utensils or soccer equipment. Companies must remember that this information is always changing and that it is important to keep it up to date. Demographics like age, income, and gender as well as other geographic and psychographic data form a picture of the consumer visiting your site to pinpoint specific needs and interests. It is important that companies do not hesitate with the anonymous users, they may not be well known but their online habits can be tracked and analyzed.

Context:

The next step is what happens after you gather all of the information from each user’s profile and  actually put it into play. “Contextualization is the where, when, and why around a customer’s interaction with a brand, and is sensitive to many fast-changing factors like seasonality, location, and time of day”, explains the article. Holidays are important to keep in mind because customers are most likely not shopping for themselves so that information will be a little thrown off for that period of time. Technology is used so often that analyzing the context of sites is very important because that is where people spend most of their time. Context is important to build a one-on-one relationship with the consumers and will result in better overall feedback.

Clarity:

Although consumers have a need for the personalization from the websites they visit, there is also a hesitancy about the way the information is gathered. People want their personal lives and information to stay personal. So how do you give consumers a personalized experience without them feeling like their personal information is being violated? If they are interested in knowing how this data is collected, tell them. If a company is trying to sell someone a certain item then they need to actually sell it and tell them why the product fits their personal needs. This way the customer will feel more in control and less like they are being manipulated for personal information they do not necessarily want to give out in the first place. Netflix does a great job of this by asking each user to rate a show when it is finished then offering up a list of recommended shows and saying “because you watched…”. Giving costumers this information will make them feel more at ease and can increase the likelihood of them responding to the personalized content and will benefit everyone in the end. As more companies begin to develop this system and become more interactive with perspective consumers it will become a natural and less-forced relationship.

For more information please visit the original article here.