I am surprised it was not mentioned but persistent cookies that can be used to identify specific customer are of vital important for targeting.
By knowing your customers browsing patterns you can achieve significant increases in email conversions. In our case in Jungle.com we achieved increases in both response and conversion of over 1,000% each! Once you try it first time you will be convinced that you want to keep doing it, the business case for it is simply overwhelming.
This is where you will hit first major problem - you will find that only a small minority of your customers are always "logged-in" even if your system uses persistent cookies for that purpose. And there is a good reason for it - persistent "login" is a security issue because someone else who uses that PC can conduct operations that logged in customer might not want to.
Amazon worked it around by requiring to provide password on a session basis, in effect that's where they "log you in", but they can still track you on persistent basis. This is a good solution but we developed a better one - independent persistent cookie that uniquely identified customers or any email subscribers but it was not used for any security sensitive operations. It was not “logging in” people in its normal sense, but still allowed to track them.
Running two similar cookies in parallel is not something development teams will like, but there is a good business case for it as number of "tracked" users will be much higher than number of "logged" in users especially if you liked that tracking to emails, ie you know who you mailed to, so that a click on a link which would contain that second tracking ID to be set as a permanent cookie. Added bonus is that this will enable you to understand what some of your (say) newsletter subscribers want from your site even if they have not yet become your customers.
We found that this tracking system that can be run in parallel to normal "logins" greatly increases number of people who can be presented with personalised features such as those detailed by Obi. In early days a lot of investment was made into online personalisation and most of which was waste not least due to small number of people that were actually presented with personalised pages.
Last but not least thing is that whatever you do make sure its inline with current legislation regarding cookies usage!
Keep me Logged In - persitent Cookies, Ting, 26 Feb 10:57 Just wondered what people think about persistent cookies that keep you logged in on sites.
I can see the use on sites that you need to come back to frequently like mail or auct ...
Keep me Logged In - persitent Cookies, spxdcz, 26 Feb 11:24 My personal opinion - based on (a too-frequent...) use of ebay, amazon, and all the other biggies - as long as the site gives me the option (e.g. 'Remember my details?' checkbox), ...
Re: Persistent cookies are MUST have, Alex Chudnovsky, 1 Mar 11:35 I am surprised it was not mentioned but persistent cookies that can be used to identify specific customer are of vital important for targeting.
By knowing your customers browsi ...
Keep me Logged In - persitent Cookies, Ting, 26 Feb 10:57
