In the last few issues we have talked about personalization.

In today’s issue we are putting it all together in order to understand the bigger picture.

The Bigger Picture

Your website is only a single part of the customer journey. Personalization is not just on the website. It's everything around it before and after.

Go past the thank you page, go into the email data, see how they're interacting, understand if they prefer interacting with emails or with text messages, follow through into packaging.

You need to look at the big picture to make it successful.

The website is only one element.

Privacy

Now, when it comes to website personalization, we need to address the elephant in the room and that's privacy as well as the end of third party cookies.

So how can we actually personalize a user's journey if we need to wait for consent or we're not allowed to collect data?

Ultimately, privacy is not going to affect personalization.

I think it's going to affect it positively.

Meaning, we're going to shift our focus away from third party data to zero/first party data.

Once you have zero or first party data, you have accurate and valid data that was provided to you by the user. It is way more accurate than third party data.

So take that data, focus on getting that data, and your personalization will become easier and more effective.

You need to know how to segment your users based on all those data points. You need to know what data points are relevant for you to collect so that you don't get overwhelmed by every single piece of data.

Ultimately, the whole journey will be personalized better if you move away from third party data and instead use zero or first party data.

So yes, privacy will affect how you personalize and it means you will not be able to personalize to everyone, but you will be able to personalize to a subset of users where you have accurate valuable data to work with.

Key here is consent management.

Getting consent from the user will need to be part of your personalization strategy.

You need to understand how you can show that you're going to provide value in exchange for the data that you're collecting.

Are you going to increase the value and make that journey easier for the user if they consent to it?

Don't think of privacy as something stopping personalization.

Figure out innovative ways to get that consent to collect zero party data and then to take all that information and use it to the user's advantage as well as yours.

Putting it all together

So now, how do we put everything together?

1. You have measurement.

2. You have segmentation.

3. And you have ways to personalize.

When it comes to putting it all together, you need to look at the overall journey and what is right for what time.

You need to consider what that user stages of awareness is and when to serve the appropriate personalizations.

If I'm searching for something, I need help looking for something.

If I'm on a product page and I'm determining my size, I need a size finder.

When I land on the homepage, I want you to tell me why I need to shop at your place.

I want to know if you ship to my country. I want to know how I can pay, and what the delivery times are.

So it's your job to take the data you're collecting and segmentate your whole database in different buckets.

So even though each bucket consists of anywhere from five to 500 users, you can still treat them each as an individual.

You need to consider all specific journeys and understand how to personalize them.

That's called personalization, that's called providing value and ultimately, that's creating loyal customers.

TL;DR

• Understand your user,

• Understand the customer journey,

• Gather zero/first party data

• Segment your database

• Personalize

It’s a hell of a job, but the rewards are enormous.

Have a great Sunday!
Erik

Whenever you’re ready, there are a two ways I can help you:

1. Download the E-Commerce Audit Report. A +300 items checklist that identifies areas of improvement of your e-commerce store.

2. Book a 1:1 Call. A No Bullshit 30 min Ask Me Anything call. If you’re facing challenges in online business, I’m happy to share my decade of experience.