Personalisation is an umbrella. Both in terms of what you do and why you do it. Relevancy, loyalty, community building – there are many motivations as to why people undertake programmes of personalisation.
For example – go and visit Dominos pretending you’re a vegetarian like me. After seeing them eagerly suggesting “are you sure you don’t want 7 chicken wings with your veg-a- roma”, you’ll realise that relevancy isn’t that difficult and is sorely needed.
Or even better, the old “would you like a casual extra large pizza with your large pizza”, which gives “would you like this extra fridge with your fridge” vibes.
Clearly, there’s work to be done.
More importantly, and perhaps relevant to the non-pizza loving world, what does it mean if someone bought a sofa and they’re on the site 2 days later? Or 1 bulb for their car, and they’re back a month later? At every turn, there’s opportunities to make a journey more relevant.
We then have the activities undertaken...
We have “Hi Sandeep”, from the 00s. Recommendation carousels, more relevant banners, custom merchandising, perhaps some AI that sits behind your experiment. And in the best case I’ve seen, a complete breakdown of every component on a homepage to work out what should sit in every line and every box.
Where the world falls short in this picture is data
Most conversations about personalisation I have start with “personalisation is a business priority”, “we don’t do this nearly enough”, “we’re all super excited for it”, and then this is followed quickly by “and to make this happen, we must use data from Bloomreach”.
How many times have you heard “we’ve spent 500k and sacrificed a goat for PPC this month”, with the hope that this investment finds you new customers.
And yet new customers won’t have data in your Customer Data Platform, so what do you do?
Real-time affinity models learn from the users quickly
Almost no website I’ve ever browsed appears to recognise that I landed on a specific PDP when I then hit their homepage. I came to the website looking at those specific pair of trainers/sneakers. Do you think I’ve changed my mind on the brand and type by the time I click to the homepage?
Affinity is there to learn.
At any given moment in time, what’s your best guess for what I want, if:
- I land on a PDP for Air Jordan 1 Shadow trainers
- I click the homepage
- I browse into Air Jordans
- I set the price range to £100 max
- Etc.
Every click and every action can mean something. Sometimes strongly, like the reason and way I got to the site. Or sometimes a bit less tangible, like clicking into a product and going back. The only real challenge is being able to get into the minds of your users.
For example, yes, I’ve shown an interest in those specific pair of trainers, but in reality my interest is in a class of shoes of which this is just one. The same way that you could talk me into buying a burger if I’m looking at pizza, instead of just suggesting other pizzas.
Points make prizes
Or in this case, points allow for real-time personalisation.
We already know what’s possible when you have a full history of everything someone’s ever bought. It’s great. We know that you buy a couple of dresses once a month around payday. We know what style you like, and it’s that time again – let’s not make this difficult.
When someone’s new though, personalisation is not out-of-bounds. Within the first second, and at every click, you can choose to learn from your users, build a real-time profile, and personalise every corner of the website to them.
They landed on a PDP for a pink dress that’s around £25. They clicked their size. These are all things we can score, rank and then play back in literal milliseconds as it happens on the user’s machine.
The rounded picture of personalisation
Surveys, prompts and quiz-based journeys allow you to learn explicitly. Affinity allows you to learn implicitly. A given user’s profile allows you to interpolate and find correlation. Every user’s profile, fed into a machine for analysis, allows you to extrapolate and predict.
When you put all of these pieces together, you start to conquer at least one part of the meta-jigsaw of personalisation, in making websites relevant to people WHO JUST WANT TO ORDER A VEGGIE PIZZA DOMINOS.
