Four Personalization Mistakes to Avoid

• July 26, 2011
Steph

The new rage on the Internet has been the personalization of web pages, everything from recommended reads on NYTimes.com to song recommendations on Pandora. Personalization has taken over the Internet, and gone from a privilege to an expectation. While it may not be hard to create the personalization experience, you can hinder the process by making the following four mistakes:

If you’re paying more attention to customer profiles than to their intentions, you have a problem. Instead of focusing on a specific customer’s profile, pay attention to their “intent clues,” like the searches he makes, the links he clicks on, and where his time is most spent on.

If you’re depending more on rules than on customer insight, you have a problem. A manually administered “if they do this, give them that” approach can be difficult to configure and maintain, and is often abandoned for simplified alternatives like displaying the most popular products. What you should do instead is deploy recommendation engines and other technologies that will automatically adapt to changing customer insights to generate the best content for each interaction based on intent clues.

If you’re limiting personalization to just your web page, you have a problem.Your customers access your brand through a variety of digital channels, not just your website. Don’t forget about social networking sites and other outlets.

If you’re underestimate the power of search behavior, you have a problem. Business owners tend to forget the most important clue – what search term brought the customer to you. If you know a visitor comes to a site searching for one item, like golfing clubs, then automatically adapt the landing page to show golfing clubs so that customer can engage.

While Miami Web Design Pro knows the wonders personalization can do for your client-base, we also know how easy it can be done incorrectly. Do not fall victim to these common mistakes.

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