Customizing and Personalizing Content - Page 10

Profiling is still an art and a mystery. Yet profiling is at the core of personalization. — Patricia Seybold and Ronni Marshak, Customer.com

Customizing content means addressing a niche group. Personalizing allows an individual to get exactly what he or she wants, whether or not that matches the content delivered to his or her group. Customizing goes a long way toward satisfying most people, but personalizing makes people consider the site their own.

To write customized content that can then be personalized, you have to look behind the curtain, to find out what information the profile contains, what business rules or inferences the software is going to use, and what categories of information the site already uses. For each piece of information in the profile—each nugget of personality—you need to figure out how you could create new material or adapt existing material, to show that you have "heard" the group, or the person.

An enterprise gets smarter and smarter with every individual interaction, defining in ever more detail the customer’s own individual needs and tastes. — Don Peppers and Martha Rogers, Enterprise One to One

Much of this thinking ends up dividing the audience into very small groups, micromarkets, or niches. For instance, if you recognize that your most valuable visitors fall into five different niches, then you should create specific content for each one. Perhaps one group wants to see specs right away, and another group prefers broader strokes, with large benefits and graphs. For each group, put the information they want first, and move the other material to a See Also, or linklist in the sidebar.

Customizing content means writing text for a small group, organizing the content in the order they want to see it, and demoting or hiding content they do not care about. In some circumstances, you may also prevent one group from seeing what another reads, such as confidential pricing terms, development reports, or in-progress manuals.

But you have to keep coming up with new stuff for each niche. For instance, take customer support people to lunch and find out what the latest problems are, by audience group. Help solve these problems within a day or so by posting new content, addressed directly at those groups—for instance, revising labels in the forms they use, adding a new topic to their own list of Frequently Asked Questions, or rewriting a key paragraph at the top of their personal pages.

Customers don’t relate to anonymity on your part or theirs. If you want to differentiate yourself based on personalized service, you need to be prepare to interact with customers—even millions of them—as individuals. — Patricia Seybold and Ronni Marshak, Customer.com

In this environment, you are often creating new objects, not whole documents. In fact, you are probably going to be using an elaborate tagging system, with XML, to indicate which niches (identified by their personas, perhaps) each chunk is suitable for. You might have an attribute such as Audience, and an agreed—upon list of audiences, so when you create a new text chunk, you say, "Well, this is for the suburban mom, only." (Or Rebecca).

The more you can tailor your text to a particular group, the more the members feel your content is relevant. You can then offer personalization, allowing individuals to pick and choose the content they like best, offering personal tips directly to them based on their recent clicks, and setting up a one-to-one chat or e-mail conversation with individual visitors. In fact, the best way to talk personally to one individual is by chat and e-mail. Your Web content may be niche-y, but your chat and e-mail must show you have really read the person’s last message, and are responding to that particular person’s unique (they think) situation. From customization to personalization, the path leads through you, personally.

Consider Your Aims, Honestly

By its nature, mass marketing aims to sell. But to win the loyalty of consumers, to get them to come back, you must give some real value when you customize and personalize your content, or they will rebel, clicking away from the page, or deleting your e-mail in disgust. The values you can communicate through personalization include openness (showing all you know about them), privacy (allaying their legitimate fear of cross-selling, junk mail, and credit card fraud), and reliability (showing an order confirmation page, e-mailing a confirmation of the order, e-mailing when you ship, e-mailing after arrival, including a return address label in the box, not arguing about returns). But honesty works best. If you don’t know the answer, say so, and promise to get an answer soon—then amaze them by actually following up.

Honesty is the beginning of open communication. Communication is the beginning of interaction. Interaction is the beginning of personalization. (Eric Norlin, Personalization Newsletter, 2001)

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