Online Personalisation and Engagement

One of the key aspects of digital delivery in the current age is that of personalisation. Users who consume content and services are now constantly connected and on the move. The time they have available to look for content or products and services is also limited. To address this content needs to be easy to access, relevant and engaging.

To achieve this personalising the experience uniquely to a user is the key. If done it is also a proven mechanism to increase stickiness. Taking this one step further providers of digital content and services can also use this capability to target advertising or the content and thereby increasing conversions.

“84% of marketeers believes the personalisation directly impacts  customer retention and loyalty” source Forrester 2014

The key requirement to achieve this being knowledge of the users and their habits. Without this the traditional approach has been to use content related targeting techniques which provide related advertising and content based on the content being accessed at that point in time and is typically categorised as content to content personalisation. This approach effective to a certain degree does not take into account the most important component, this is of the user and their behavioural and mood based affinities. To achieve a true targeted strategy a three-stepped strategy is recommended:

1. Content to Content based personalisation of Advertising, Content and Products where relevancy is provided based on just the content being accessed.

2. Provide user to content based personalisation where the content presented is based on the activity of the users over various timespans, from the current session to their historic usage patterns of interests, therefore ensuring users are not presented with non-relevant content if access was a one time activity. This approach can also be utilised with anonymous users.

3. The third is to refine the targeting by taking the customer through explicit profiling processes such as registration and data collection to further segment and refine the conversion flows. This can be done by defining key user segments based on profile data ( such as age, gender, location, services subscribed too etc..) that can be used to further refine the experience to the user’s persona.

To achieve this strategy employ mechanisms for tracking users over a period of time and all the time updating the users behavioural metrics and then providing these metrics back to the digital delivery systems to allow real-time targeting of content and advertising. This approach ensures users are presented with most relevant products, offers and content based on their personal experience of online activity. The approach here should also works seamlessly with multi-tiered content and also product and targeted advertising delivery.