Personalization is dead, right? Gartner and the other cool kids say so. Particularly when you’re trying to scale personalization on your website. There are lots of reasons that people provide:
- It’s too hard to collect personal information.
- It’s too hard to do.
- It’s too hard to deliver ROI.
And they do have a point—websites and the Internet as whole are littered with the debris of failed personalization projects. But what if there was a different way to do it?
Let’s start with the objections. Yes, it is definitely too hard to collect personal information, and it is getting harder every day. Not only are web users more reluctant to part with information, but privacy regulations and the elimination of cookie tracking from browsers thanks to ITP and ETP are making it difficult to personalize your website even when users are willing to let you. But what if you adopted a strategy for personalization that works with anonymous information?
Personalization at scale has also certainly been hard to do. Marketers have been given tools that require creating new content and crafting manual rules for when that content should be shown. Sure, in theory you can do personalization without martech, but would you want to? And bringing martech into the mix makes it even harder, requiring significant amounts of IT collaboration and support to implement it all. But what if there is another way that requires none of that?
And, of course, many failed personalization projects have failed to prove they delivered the ROI that business leaders expected. But maybe that’s because it’s too expensive to do—obviously, it’s a lot easier to show ROI if you can do it at a lower cost. And if you can make personalization work automatically, it can work everywhere, which means you get the benefit across your whole site not just the few pages you can hand-craft. So, what if there was an inexpensive way to scale personalization?
Believe it or not, the idea of delivering personalization at scale for all your users and at a reasonable cost is not science fiction. After all, does anyone think that Amazon’s personalized experience is being hand-crafted on its pages? Amazon has automated personalization at scale. That’s what you need to do, also.
But you’re right if you are thinking that you can’t do it the way Amazon does. You don’t have Amazon’s data about customers. You don’t have Amazon’s traffic to test the experiences to success. And you don’t have Amazon’s budget to build this technology from scratch.
Fortunately, you don’t need any of those things. Your site can inexpensively and easily create an experience of web personalization at scale. You just need the right tools. Want to learn more? Drop us a line and let’s talk about how you can deliver personalization at scale for your website, your customers, and most importantly, for your business today.
