Implementing Personalization

*  Everybody likes to feel special and if you feel special, if you think that a message is carved out for you, without even knowing it, you’ll have more of a chance for that recipient to open an email and look at it because they think, “Hmm this is interesting. It’s really about me.”

* Another definition of personalization is that acting upon the things that you learned about somebody.  Reacting to the little bit of information that you collected and just harping on it, well people call that personalization and it is actually.

*  The ultimate personalization is personalizing for everybody, every chance, through every channel.

* Don’t just use data just to react to certain things that you know. You’ve got to learn how to bring out the potential of that.

* Marketers need to think about what the limits are of personalization and have some conscious decisions to make in terms of what would you want to do with it to avoid getting creepy or to personal.

Below is a lightly edited transcript of Episode 21 of the Inevitable Success Podcast.

Transcript:

Damian: In today’s episode I’m going to get personal with Stephen. It’s funny because while Stephen and I both like puns, we’re going to be talking about personalization and what it means to you. So what does personalization mean to you?

Stephen: Well I know what it means to me. It’s very simple, I’m dealing with this merchant xyz and I’ve been dealing with him for a long time and if they know about me and actually analyze me…not about my whole personal life…I mean if they start asking me “how old is your daughter?” or creepy questions, I’ll turn that off.

But I really believe that as a buyer of services or products they really understand what my passion is. For example, say you go to the deli in the morning every day. If the barista knows how you take your coffee it’s easier for her. It’s easier for me. So you save time on both ends and I get the service that I normally want to get without saying much. If you do that for millions of people at the same time using the power of machine and modeling and all the other things and that’s personalization to me. Well, that’s one way to say it.

Damian: You tell stories that always remind me of stories. So there actually is a deli that I used to get breakfast from every single morning and they got so good at knowing who I was that I didn’t have to say anything. They would just make my sandwich. But it went to the point where at some point I decided “I think I want to do this keto diet thing” but they anticipated what I wanted so they just made me a bagel every time. It was almost like, you guys are too good right now and they make me think that there may be some situations where anticipating personalization can backfire.

Stephen: Yes. If you imagine that you don’t have any human interaction and you know that the machine is doing it, sometimes you don’t want to be too good because it becomes creepy. You have to draw the line. But let’s talk about the most rudimentary form of personalization and then start from the bottom. Instead of starting with the most elaborate kind and dialing it back. I’ll get to both ways.

So this is a question that I ask when I talk about personalization. I have been speaking about this in conferences for a number of years already because I thought that the natural next step of a big data movement is about personalization. What are you going to do with all this data? The premise is very simple. Everybody likes to be special and if you feel special,