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| Benno Wasserstein talks about personalisation | ||||
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In this issue: 1. Benno Wasserstein talks about personalisation 2. The watercooler: stories of note in the past week 3. Paid-Search Roundtable Briefing (free access) 4. White Paper: Digital Media Outlook 2006 5. JOBS: Internet marketing / new media jobs 6. Top forum post: PAS 78 - New accessibility guidelines 7. Top forum post: Search engine demographics |
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| 1. Benno Wasserstein talks about personalisation | ||||||
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Benno Wasserstein is a founder and Managing Director of Box UK. Having started it whilst at university, the company had grown consistently and is now a leading provider of internet consultancy and development. Benno has worked on numerous large projects, for clients including Lloyds TSB Insurance, English Heritage, Wales Tourist Board, Saatchi & Saatchi and many others. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ You mentioned that Box UK has been working on new software that allows business managers to customise online forms, presumably bypassing the IT department? What’s the thinking behind this? We’ve been working with a few large financial houses for a couple of years now whose core online activity focuses on the selling of financial products online. What we quickly found was that all the changes we recommended making had to go through a minimum 6 week change cycle, no matter what their size or impact. This was because the complexity of their systems required the process to be managed by IT, and not the business users. Some changes would take months. Whilst it is not essential to bypass internal IT departments, it was apparent that there could be potential in offering clients the opportunity to improve their change capabilities and therefore speed to market. At the same time, we had been implementing personalisation through our CMS product. So we started investigating the possibility of creating a multi purpose application platform which would include what was effectively a Forms Management System, with integrated personalisation capabilities that enable our clients to better match their customers' expectations. The level of involvement of their IT departments is then left entirely up to the business. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ And what sort of changes might a business manager make? A business manager has complete control (through a workflow process) of all form elements, including their appearance, positioning and behaviour. Changes they might make range from moving a set of questions to another part within the application process, or simply adding personalisation rules to a question. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Why would you want to customise a form differently for males vs females, or for people referred by Google vs MSN? Let’s take an online product application form as an example. Our research has shown that the different genders react to privacy information in different ways. So you may wish to summarise it for some users, whilst expand it for others. At the same time, you may wish to display it on step 3 of the process and not at the beginning of the buying cycle. Our software enables the business users to do all this, based on user profiling, segmentation, click-stream analysis and other techniques. This further increases their ability to match their customer’s needs and expectations. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ What sort of assumptions can you make to refine targeting, e.g. for a new user that has never visited your website before? There are numerous assumptions we can make to refine targeting, based on existing research and our own, although it is unlikely that any two clients would use exactly the same assumptions. Another point to note is that assumptions are just that; the hypothesis needs to be tested before being fully integrated with the overall picture. A couple of examples include a user’s computer platform (some might argue that within a large data-set, a Mac user may be deemed to be more affluent) or their screen resolution (a user with a high screen resolution at this point in time, may be more computer literate). A crucial issue here is that the extrapolation of these assumptions is an entirely iterative process, as both the web-user and their environment are in a continual state of change. A client needs to continually test and learn in order to keep up with the needs of its customers.
------------------------------------------------------------------------ Do you have any metrics that you can share with us to prove uplift from adopting your customisable forms, or for other forms of online personalisation? The clients we deal with all have very clear measurables. They may be ‘income per visitor’ or ‘visitor to sale conversion rate’ amongst others. Whilst we can’t share exact metrics, we can certainly say there has been a noticeable uplift! ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Do you have any insight on where an e-commerce manager should start with personalisation? Which areas of the website should be prioritised? The key success factor here is the ability to successfully match the needs and expectations of customers. So for many business managers, the starting point would be to ensure they have a clear understanding of their customers and their associated expectations. To this end, they should really start with their data. From this point they can do segmentation analysis, leading to the proof of concept and working prototype. Using our product, they will have the tools necessary to deliver multivariate versions of the site to ensure the testing and prototyping stages leads to a successful roll-out into their live environment. As to prioritising areas of the website, this will depend on the type of site, its traffic levels, and where the conversion points occur. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ I interviewed Gloria Moss last September about user experience design and gender. Presumably the same thinking applies with other website design and content elements, e.g. changing CSS / look and feel on the fly? Absolutely. I’m an avid Gloria Moss, Rod Gunn and Krzysztof Kubacki fan, and their research is incredibly apt in this of age of personalisation and flexible transactional sales processes. There are many tidbits of research which indicate that males and females often interact with a website in a different, but segmented way. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ I guess that one of the main barriers to adopting this sort of technology relates to implementation, assuming you aren’t building something from the ground up? The implementation of this technology is not an overnight process. That’s not due to the software available, but more the fact that successful implementation requires a long-term strategic approach. Data analysis, segmentation, prototypes and so on are all factors within the strategy. Once agreed, this strategy will inevitably ensure that the foundations have been laid to support the business for the next 3 – 5 years at least. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Are there any websites that are doing a good job of customising the user experience already? There are many websites which are brilliant at what we refer to as ‘content targeting’ i.e. offering personalised content. There are fewer websites which are customising the entire user experience, and particularly the sales process. There have been a few phenomenal success stories, mostly in the US and Canada. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ What sorts of companies will be the likely early adopters of next-generation personalisation technology? Companies who are implementing this technology may not agree that they are early-adopters. Indeed, many of the theories and some of the technology have been around for years. A wonderful conclusion we can make from our client’s enthusiasm for this technology is that many websites have become so good at what they do. The website managers are finding it hard to continually improve conversion, and are now looking to new methods. Overall, the type of company adopting this technology at this stage would be customer focused with a good understanding of their customer base and the needs and expectations their customers might have. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Benno was interviewed by Chris Lake, editor (chris@e-consultancy.com). |
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| 2. The watercooler: stories of note in the past week | ||||||
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1. The logos of Web 2.0 (FontShop) 2. The Net's New Age (Business Week) 3. Volkswagen and Google develop navigation system (AutoMotoPortal) 4. 25 Things Danny Sullivan Hates About Google (SearchEngineWatch) 5. Tesco slams eBay in voucher row (Retail Week) 6. eBay buys into Meetup (The Register) 7. Craigslist and Wikipedia founders cosy up (CNET) |
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| 3. Paid-Search Roundtable Briefing (free access) | ||||||
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Notes from E-consultancy's latest Paid Search roundtable, from February 2006, where key trends, issues, tips and tricks were discussed by attendees over a two hour period. Free access for all.
View White Paper / Report » |
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| 4. White Paper: Digital Media Outlook 2006 | ||||||
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This Avenue A | Razorfish report takes a good look at online media trends in 2005 and makes various astute predictions about the future. Includes sections on Video, Podcasting, Blogging, Mobile, Gaming, Targeting, Web 2.0 and SEO.
View White Paper / Report » |
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| 6. Top forum post: PAS 78 - New accessibility guidelines | ||||||
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The Disability Rights Commission (DRC) commissioned The British Standards Institution (BSI) to develop a set of guidelines on how to create sites accessible to all users. This thread outlines what E-consultancy readers make of the guidelines.
View Forum Message » |
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| 7. Top forum post: Search engine demographics | ||||||
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How do you think MSN users typically differ from Google or Yahoo users? This post invites you to share your own observations about search engine demographics, to try to shed some light on this question.
View Forum Message » |
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