3 Tips To Avoid #Personalization #Fail

Marketing personalization holds the promise of delighting your users, and drive dramatically higher conversions. However, poorly executed personalization can sometimes lead to what can only be described as #personalization #fail. How can marketers avoid this? Read on for our top three tips on avoid

1. Use Conditional Logic to Deal With Missing Data

Aww, you called me #FirstName#! #email#marketing#personalization#fail by #highered#design school. https://t.co/slkXNF5SGm

— Dave Wieneke (@UsefulArts) December 17, 2015

Addressing users by an incorrect name, or worse still as “#FIRSTNAME# or FNAME, is one of the most offending mistakes marketers can make. Most customer databases contain missing entries for first name and other attributes. Thankfully, personalization systems these days let you use conditional logic in your templates to check if data is missing and select a better salutation in these cases.

2. Personalize your Merchandising based on the Audience you target

Wow @gap, only ever bought men’s items & you send “a deal just for me” that’s women’s clothes? #personalization & #ListSegmentation #Fail — Liberal Art (@liberalart) March 25, 2014

It’s important to segment your audience correctly, and select the right kind of personalized merchandising for each audience. An audience of users who were browsing your website yesterday might be best served by merchandise that’s re-targeted based on their browse behavior, and collaborative filtering (“people who liked this also liked that”); but a different audience of users who have shown a strong affinity for one category or brand over another might be best targeted by affinity-based merchandising. You can create other audiences or segments based on a combination of behavioral, demographic, and lifecycle cues, and appropriately select the right personalized merchandising for each of these audiences.

Getting the audience and the merchandising right is absolutely critical to personalization success.

3. Stitch together data from all platforms

#personalization #fail no. 5734. #apple sends me an ad for a product I bought in their own store earlier. Wow, awesome laptop I already own!

— Lukas Vermeer (@lukasvermeer) December 5, 2012

The last kind of personalization failure we discuss today happens when you don’t connect all your data sources across store, web and mobile. Often times, marketers trigger messages based on the user’s behavior on the website, without accounting for the possibility that the same user might have completed a purchase on a different platform (e.g. a store or a mobile app). Building a cross-platform view of the user is the only way to successfully market to today’s perpetually connected customer.

At Blueshift, we help our customers avoid these pitfalls by constructing a cross-platform view of users, providing full flexibility in defining your audiences and merchandising, as well as enabling template customization options. These are just some of the basic ingredients towards targeting a Segment-of-One across all your marketing channels.