Table of contents:
- Too much personal data
- Creating assumptions from a small data set
- Personalization that exceeds your limits
- What can work?
Introduction
Marketing has evolved significantly over the past 100 years. From mass advertising, marketers came to the conclusion that the best chance to convince visitors to make a potential purchase is to create an individual experience for all of them.
This evolution was a very long process with routes that went nowhere. And even if we can all agree that personalization is an important part of the marketing strategy in every industry, there are still situations where using personalization techniques may cause more harm than not using them at all.
In this article we will explain how personalization works in e-commerce, and why it should be neglected in some cases, and insisted on in many others.
Why is personalization important in digital marketing?
Imagine a scenario in which one hundred different users visit your site at once. You don’t have any previous research about their age, gender, or marital status. You only know one thing: they found your site from somewhere, and they were interested enough to click on that specific site.
In this case, without any information at all, your website’s bounce rate will be extremely high. You don’t know what they want to find, what messages convince them, or whether they are satisfied with your site’s structure.
If you have clear assumptions or have past data, you can gain valuable insights about your potential visitors, and target them for more purchases, better funnel performance, and writing reviews.
What doesn’t work?
First, we need to pinpoint a couple of mistakes you can make through a personalization process. Some of them may lead you to court visits, while others only influence your brand’s success negatively. Either one you commit, you won’t be satisfied with the result.
Too much personal data
On the internet, personalization is way easier than it ever was in the offline environment. Here, visitors don’t need to stop for ten minutes to dictate their personal data to a staff member, as their computer or account speaks about them earlier.
Through an internet network, a third-party website can seamlessly figure out the visitors’ country, browser, or device. All of this can be precious information for website optimization and personalization, but these were all just the tip of the iceberg.
If the user logs in from a Facebook or a Google account, theoretically, the website can get access to a bunch of personal information in seconds. But you also voluntarily give out a lot of personal information about yourself to unknown websites or apps. When you download an app and click on the “give access to everything” button inside an app without ever taking a glance at its terms and conditions, you are always taking a risk.
However, due to the recent data scandals, there were two very positive effects that followed these events: first, users started to be cautious about what they download, open, and agree with, and take labels very seriously. On average, only 70% of users accept a reliable site’s cookies, and if the site is unreliable, this ratio can drop to 48%. These were all higher percentage points a few years from now.
The second effect, which is even more important than the change in the users’ behaviour, is the change on the legislators side. The European Union was the first association that highlighted a vision of online privacy. They concluded that it is worrying how easily websites get access to their users’ personal data, in many cases, without the victims’ awareness.
So they created a data privacy role, known as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), that took some precautions for the sake of the users. If a website doesn’t obey these rules, it can face several punishments, including fees, online bans, or imprisonment.
Creating assumptions from a small data set
From one point of view, it is better to make assumption mistakes than not pass the requirements of the GDPR rules, as it won’t get you behind bars. However, this can make your business go bankrupt.
When you have a small amount of data, humans tend to be braver than at any other period. It is like the Dunning–Kruger effect. When a small beginning of knowledge makes us too confident, it leads us to wrong decisions.
A great example of this is the singing talent shows. Many people face negative comments, and are truly shocked about the jury’s decision to get him/her home. They usually quote that nobody ever told them that they sing like a shouting pig, although they demonstrated their “ability” to many of their friends. They were biased, and they didn’t have clear information about their talent.
If you don’t want to be biased in the online atmosphere, try to gather as much data as possible, and make a decision afterwards.
Personalization that exceeds your limits
Personalization is important, don’t get us wrong. However, it’s just one key part of a successful E-commerce website. The performance of your website, your prices, the user experience, your hosting service provider, and the user interface of your website are all crucial criteria. Without these elements, your personalization is just the small bandage of an arterial wound: it doesn’t save you!
Also, over-personalization can bring other negative aspects: for example, a slow-loading website because of the 100 added plugins to get clearer data about your users’ activity on your site. Or too much data that you can’t store properly and securely.
What can work?
In this part of the article, we will suggest some tips that, unlike the latest “no-go zone” recommendations, really help you grow bigger.
Contextual personalization
As we mentioned before, there are a lot of barriers ahead of the marketers to get real insight into the potential buyers. The protection of personal data, or the resourceful data gathering processes, is not just to reach a single purchase event.
Today’s marketing specialist focuses on other aspects. For example, the context of a potential buyer. This approach focuses on the present: the device that the user uses, the time, the context of the query, or the geographic location of the user. This data lets us segment the users and recommend different types of solutions.
Based on the user’s device, we can offer them a customized website build-up that fits well with their screen resolution. Based on their search intentions, we can land them on different website pages, where they are more likely to find what they need. On top of that, we can create customized messages for different locations, times, or types of intents to increase trust, awareness, or the general satisfaction around your brand.
Behavioral-based recommendations
Fortunately, if a user accepts your website cookies (and you have a clear indication about data gathering on your declaration of data protection), you have the right to gather some of the users’ data on your website. You can track where they go, what they look at, where they click, or at what elements they look at the most.
However, you can also integrate these data to Google Ads, or Meta, and make targeted advertisements to those who once browsed on your website, but ended up without making a purchase, for example.
These are one of the most powerful types of advertisement, as you clearly know that these potential buyers are interested in your products, and very likely to convert soon.
You may think that behavioral-based data only focuses on past visitors; therefore, it can not be used for reaching new customers. But that’s what lookalike audience settings are for! These tools are eligible to analyze the data of your past visitors and pinpoint their main characteristics. From these data, the software makes lookalike audiences whose characteristics match those of your previous visitors, but who have never gone to your site yet. This is a powerful weapon to ensure that your targeted mass is the right audience for your website.
Conclusion
In this article, we discussed personalization in digital marketing, the possible scenarios where it can be impactful, and situations where you need to forget the use of personalization. Even though personalization should never reach a level that disturbs the users, we should strive for data-based decision-making, where a little portion of personalization is obligated to create something magical.
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