Digimarketing holds out the promise of the Holy Grail of marketing: meaningful personalization. Meaningful personalization is the delivery of messages and offers that are constructed around each particular customer’s interests.

Permission, Participation, Profiling, Personalization

Successful digital marketing starts from permission: getting potential customers to opt-in to receive marketing communications. These communications will be most successful when they allow the customer to participate actively.  Today’s consumers, whether in Thailand, Tibet, or Toronto, don’t just want to have marketing wash over them as passive couch potatoes, they want to have their say, to be actively involved in some way.

I just received a beautiful email from one of Bangkok, Thailand’s leading hotels, announcing that it had just reopened after the recent “troubles”. But the email carried no personalization at all; no offer; and no call-to-action. It didn’t tell me that I could get a discount, or an extra something at the restaurant. This is marketing through a digital channel (email), but it is not effective digital marketing!

The most effective participation provides benefit to the customer and benefits to the marketer. Customers get to have their say; or to play on-line games involving a brand; or to make their personalized videos based on their Facebook page; or even mix the perfect paint shades for their rooms. They get to do something that gives them benefit.

Meanwhile the digimarketer learns about each customer. Whether it’s her opinion on an issue; or a couple of questions that preceded the game; or the groups the customer belongs to on Facebook; or her favorite color. Gradually the marketer builds up a customer profile which will eventually allow personalized marketing to delight each customer.

Behaviorally Targeted

In the simplest case, participation is simply visiting a website, and personalization is simply delivering banner ads that reflect each user’s prior browsing experience. If someone spent time on a site about high definition TVs; later (maybe days later) when he or she visits a sports-related site, the banner ad would feature watching sports on a particular brand of high definition TV.

This is known as behaviorally targeted advertising.  The advertising is personalized based on the user’s browsing (or other) behavior. Some digimarketing studies have found that such behaviorally targeted ads are twice as effective as untargeted ads.

Personalization, not Stalking

What’s amazing is just how inept some digital marketers are at this personalization. One blogger, David Hughes (www.NonLineBlogging.com),  recounts an interesting experience. As he was considering a vacation in Thailand (ok, this was back in February), he visited the site of his favorite travel company and did some research.  A few days later, on an (apparently) totally unrelated website, he noticed a banner ad carried the branding of the travel company and text thanking him for having visited their site. A few moments later the text in the ad changed to thank him for his interest in Thailand!

Now this is not meaningful personalization! This is not great digital marketing. The banner ad provides no additional information about holidays in Thailand; no additional offers; no customer benefit at all. Just the flaunting message that “we did know what you did”. This is stalking not personalization.

In the follow up discussion on the blog, several posts discuss the problem. One writer shows how he was automatically unsubscribed from a newsletter because he hadn’t clicked on any of its links recently.  I can just imagine the digital marketers deciding to ‘help’ the customer by automatically opting him out because he didn’t seem interested. But from the customers point of view it was ‘over-familiar’. Offering an easy opt-out option would have been so much better. Most customers don’t want to treated like little children (most little children don’t either).

Get it Right, or Get Blocked

Another post recounts a more difficult case for marketing. The potential customer browsed for cycling equipment on one site, and then saw that exact same equipment in ads on his email page!

This freaked him out. He actually went to the trouble of identifying the company providing these behaviorally targeted ads: the company calls it “personalized retargeting”.

Their specialty is to record items that a user has looked at on an e-commerce site, or even put in their basket, but not bought. And then represent those items to that user on totally separate sites. This re-presentation might include improving the offer (e.g. reducing price, free shipping etc.)  This particular customer was so upset that he claims to have blocked all ads served from that personalized retargeter.

Yet many marketers would feel this representation is meaningful personalization. It just goes to show how difficult effective personalization will be, and how many new skills digital marketers need to learn. In this case, perhaps the marketers knew too little about this prospect and so antagonized him. Perhaps, some failures are inevitable, and well-monitored digital marketing will adjust to minimize, but not eliminate such events.

Digital marketers need to always remember that the point of personalization is not to show customers just how much you know about them. Not to make them think of the ‘big brother’ watching their every move. The point is to delight them with an unexpected offer that is just what they wanted. David Hughes aptly terms this “dynamic serendipity”. From the customer’s perspective the behaviorally targeted ad is a fortunate, but accidental, discovery. Only the marketer knows that fortune favors the well-built profile.

A shorter version of this column originally appeared in Ian Fenwick’s digimarketing column in the Bangkok Post, April 21, 2010.

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