According to McKinsey “…personalization can reduce acquisition costs by as much as 50 percent, lift revenues by 5 to 15 percent, and increase the efficiency of marketing spend by 10 to 30 percent.” With these impressive research results in mind we start our journey into the nitty gritty of web personalization and marketing automation.

In this article we’ll offer you a comprehensive overview of possible triggers and offer examples that are retrieved from data and facilitate smart automated personalized scripts that enhance the omni-channel user experience.

Once implemented you will gain many benefits from these triggers. Higher conversion rates, increased loyalty and more engagement will be amongst them.

When speaking of personalization in this article we mean: personalization is everything that you alter to the offered user experience based on electronical, behavioral, transactional or manual input retrieved from that user while engaging with your organization and your content.

With marketing automation we mean :  marketing automation refers to the software that exists with the goal of automating marketing actions. Many marketing departments have to automate repetitive tasks such as emails, social media, and other website actions. The technology of marketing automation makes these tasks easier. We follow Hubspot in this regard.

Well known examples of these kind of web personalizations are the abanoned cart e-mail message or the recommendations engine that “buyers who viewed this item also viewed these.”. We expand our personalization efforts from the inbound channels like the website and app to outbound channels like programmatic advertising and social advertising. Within the realm of social advertising the different variants of custom audiences deliver great oppurtunity to deliver personal marketing messages. You are not allowed to remind the viewer of such an ad of the knowledge you have about their person or personal behaviour – the Terms and Conditions of the social networks and advertising platforms prohibit that.

Anatomy of a personalization action

We have created a database with over 130 website personalizations and marketing automation examples and triggers that you van use for your own or your clients benefit.

The elements of each personalization are:

Below all the elements expanded on.

We have composed the list in several categories:

You will sometimes see some overlap. If it is unlogical, you can write us a note, and alter it yourself in your own spreadsheet.

B+F: Personalization channels

In this article a personalization channel is the carrier of the personalized message. In the case of web personalization in mosst use cases the website or native app is meant. In this channel we adress all channels where we can create a data based personalized experience.

In this article we seperate the following channels:

Custom audiences

All the social media can either include or exclude the audience segments. This means that you can show ads to selective groups/audiences or either prevent that groups see an ad. And this creates a lot of possibilities for creative marketeers.

Altough ‘custom audiences’ is a productname of Facebook, in this article we use it to group the same kindt of advertising possibilties with other social networks. To be complete you’ll find the complete list here under:

Facebook Custom Audiences

Linkedin Matched Audiences

Twitter Tailored Audiences

Google Customer Match

You can mix and match these Google Customer Match oppertunities with their ad products such as:

More information about Google Customer Match.

Programmatic Display (especially Retargeting)

Programmatic advertising is an advertising technology that came to light in the early 2000’s and became mainstream 2010 onwards.

The defenition according to State of Digital is:”Programmatic media buying, marketing and advertising is the algorithmic purchase and sale of advertising space in real time. During this process, software is used to automate the buying, placement, and optimisation of media inventory via a bidding system. Automating the process means that it can be done in real time and doesn’t rely on the human touch, manual insertions and manual trading.”

Retargeting has become famous (and notorious) for stalking shoppers with ads of last viewed items. But it has evolved.

Nowadays retargeting is an advanced programmatic technology that offers ads to very specific audience segments combined with dynamic creatives (see below for explanation) it can offer a great experience to visitors from your website and add tremendous value – if the message is relevant and compelling.

Dynamic creatives

Dynamic creatives work like MailMerge (e.g. between MS Word and MS Excel). The banner is the visual result that is filled with dynamic fields (logo, button, image, background collor, article, pricing, etc.)  retrieved from your datafeeds and audience information (often provided by your dataplatform). You can use all kinds of personal data and metadata to optimize your banners, increase CTR’s and increase your ROAS (Return On Ad Spend).

Sequential targeting

Sequential targeting is a form that uses digital advertising for storytelling and dialog marketing. Depending on what you know (or not) about your target audiences, you show them ads that tell the message you want to convey.

Data management platform

If you want to utilize the full capability of programmatic advertising, you have a lot of ad spend and you want to collect your own stats you need a DMP (Data Management Platform).

Most advertising platforms offer their own DMP (they need it to service you) but larger advertisers prefer to rely on their own data.

Google RLSA (Remarketing Lists for Search Ads)

Google RLSA (Remarketing Lists for Search Ads) are your ads in Google Search (Adwords – SEA) that are shown to users that previously have visited your website or app.

Knowing that the average B2B buyer does about 12 searches before engaging with a website (when in research mode) it is important to promote your content for which you haven’t got high organic rankings (SEO).

The reason why we made this a seperate channel is because of the unique characteristics of this advertising technology.

Public WIFI  for marketing

You can use your public WIFI for data gathering and marketing to your customers and users. If you would like to match users in your physical store with visitors to your website your should add a tracking pixel from your analytics tool (mostly Google Analytics) to your WIFI login/opt-in page and add a visit to that page as a goal. This is a smart way to measure the ROPO effect (Research Online, Purchase Offline).

And of course you can also add other pixels to your WIFI loginpage and retarget people who used your WIFI (read: visited your store).

Also you can add a social login function to get acces to your WIFI login page. In this way you not only can drop a cookie for the purpose of retargeting but also you can gather data from the social network about your visitors.

SMS marketing

Of course you can use SMS marketing, like e-mail marketing, for regular, non-urgent, messages. But because of it’s highly intrusive characters (proven by an openrate of near 99%) we recommend to use it with reticence. Only for must-see/read messages you should use this instrument in our opinion.

But besides sending them push messages you can also use cellphone numbers for two way verification processes which increase both security as data quality. And lists of cellphone numbers can be used to target advertisements to (see Custom Audiences).

Call (-tracking or outbound)

Calltracking is a very effective way to match online behaviour with offline signals. Call tracking works with the set of different phonenumbers (peak capacity). Every session gets it’s own telephone number and if a visitor calls, you know which session-id belongs to which phone-id.

If your inbound salesteam is largely depended for leads or sales by inbound phonecall we stronly recommend you use this technology. Examples of a company that offer this service is CallRail.

Of course a visit can also be a result of an (outbound?) call your customer service team has made. That’s why you need to match phonenumber or e-mailadress as soon as possible to your digital users so you can follow them in their journey. Once you have them matched you can track their behaviour and measure the effectiveness of each touchpoint.

Tracking anonymous (physical) store visitors digitally is a daunting task. Google Analytics offers to import store visits (a statistical method) and also Facebook Ads offers services in that regard.

Less technical complicated, but very effective ways are:

C: Trigger behaviour

The behaviour that triggers an action can be very different. A click on a button, the non-opening of an e-mail or a visit to a physical store.

D: Personalization data sources

Depening on your set of available tools and how well you have connected them (through API’s, webhooks or connectors like Zapier) you have several data sources for personalization available.

Google Analytics offers a wide range of tools that, once segmented and exported as retargeting lists, can really be used as a DMP (Data Management Platform).

In other cases, your CRM and website User database will be your primary resources for data and segments.

E: Personalization Goals

The goals are on a tactical level. Examples of the goals are ‘Increase conversion rate” or “Engagement”. If you download the Excel file that is an easy way to sort the the list.

G: Personalization Instruments

Within the personalization channels different instruments can be used to communicate the personalized message:

Not all instruments can be used on all channels.

H: Personalization content

This element is the actual content that you want to convey to your customer, user or prospect when engaging with them. This is unique per personalization trigger.

Challenges met when implementing personalization

Monetate conducted research on organizations and their personalization efforts and  found that among the top 3 most often mentioned challenges met when implementing personalization were:

And getting your data in order has always been a daunting task when you have to deal with user provided input or legacy systems. But when you want to fully automate your personalization you need to be able to rely 100% on the accuracy of your data.

Personalization and the GDPR

On the 25th of May, 2018,  the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), will go into effect.  This is an European regulation that ensures that companies secure their networks, databases and connections while also set rules that apply to data entrance (also user initiated data entrance).  In the Netherlands the name of the regulation is AVG (Algemene Verordening Gegevensbescherming).

This new law affacts all companies and organizations that do business with citizens from the European Union.

Using a personalization software tool on your website, app or other channe,l you will have to make sure that you have a processing agreement with the software vendor. Also you need an opt-in from you users and visitors.  A good resource for further reading you can find here.

Do you like to do your own research or looking for specific personalization tool then we recommend you start your quest on Angel.co. They have an extensive list with startups engaged in personalization.

Personalization and artifical intelligence

Because the workfield of digital markeing in general and web personalization specific iare driven by data artifical intelligence and machine learning drive innovation.

Artifical intelligence will speed up the implementation of personalization techniques because of smart algorithms that automatically will find, with enough data, the best path to offer to your users.

Some examples of AI in personalization:

Personalization plugins for WordPress

For organizations with a WordPress website there are also plugins available that offer several personalization possibilities.

Compared to the usually ‘free’or ‘low budget’ plugins these are relatively expensive. But if you have enough visitors and your value per visitor is high enough these plugins can be worth the money:

Some plugins also work excellent with Woocommerce. Other platforms that offer many automated triggers for WordPress and Woocommerce are Your Inpiration Themes , StoreApps and IgniteWoo.

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