Done correctly, personalizing your customers’ online experiences delivers massive benefits that can be grouped into three big buckets:

Increased conversion rates

However you define conversions sales, downloads, sign-ups the right personalization can dramatically improve them.

Bigger orders

When they see what they want, visitors buy. And when you show related products – along with content and stories that explain them – they’ll buy more.
Happier customers
When they get what they came for, people stay loyal, tell their friends and return fewer products. So the big metrics that drive customer lifetime value go up. And the benefits go beyond e-commerce product recommendations, extending to content sites, too.

Mistake #1

Living and dying
by profiles.

Think about it: if you’re marketing effectively, a large proportion of your web traffic will be new visitors; people you have no data on. But that doesn’t mean you know nothing about them. In fact, if you’re looking, you can pick up dozens of clues from each session. We call these intent clues because they tell you what the visitor is trying to do – and they’re available to you whether or not you know the name, address and shoe size of the visitor.

Once you’re tuned in to intent clues, adding in profile data can be quite valuable. But without any insight about intent, profile data alone has limited personalization power.

Mistake #2

Building your personalization
strategy on rules alone.

Most personalization tools are essentially rules engines with digital bells & whistles. The rules (“If they do this, give them that.”) are created by expert analysts who, ideally, understand both web dynamics and the ins and outs of your business. In other words, they’re rare and expensive people doing a laborious manual task.

The problem is that, on their own, personalization rules don’t work.
Here’s why:
They’re labor-intensive and expert-intensive. Good rule sets are incredibly complex. Bad ones are, too. They go out of date quickly. As your business and your market changes, your rules need constant tweaking and replacing. Out-of-date rules can inhibit conversion. They multiply like rabbits. Rule stacks start growing on day one and never stop. That creates a management headache that grows, too. They clash. As rules multiply, they start disagreeing with each other. These rule conflicts are an overhead in themselves. Their uplift degrades. Because of the above dynamics, the benefits of rule-based personalization always tend to get smaller and smaller
over time.

Dynamic Personalization uses rules, but sparingly – to handle exceptions (like promotions), to hard-wire key business rules (like blocking licensed content from some territories), and to target visitors based on explicit profile data. But rules can never handle the real-time heavy lifting that personalization demands. Dynamic Web systems generate the best content for each interaction automatically based on intent clues – so the need for manual rule creation and deployment is minimal.