It’s Getting Personal

I was looking at the 2019 Gartner Magic Quadrant on personalization and noticed something wierd:

And noticed that most of the personalization players on this Gartner map have been gobbled up, Pacman style.

The rabbit hole of personalization got interesting to me after I checked out this #1 post on personalization over on ventureharbour and they have a fun WordPress plugin to illustrate their point. I was struck by how important e-mail is in the experience loop — apropos to some of the early runaway hits like Square receipts and the Nest “monthly energy report” e-mails**.

OMG I found my new favorite site called “reallygoodemails.com”

**Note that the goodness of Nest e-mails are being considered exactly the opposite these days.

Personalization Thoughts

It was fun to see Jeffrey Zeldman highlight almost every paragraph here. I would have done the same. Good imaginary stats are:

  • Remember: 2/3 come back if you remember what they bought
  • Relevance: 2/3 likely to purchase if you promote relevant stuff
  • Recommend: 3/5 likely to purchase with personalized recs
  • Recognize: 1/2+ likely to shop with you if you recall their name

The author’s ideas subdivided into a two-by-two:

low-intenthigh-intent
lean-inmatchmaking
near misses
filtered
zero noise
lean-backcurated impulses
good neighborhoods
pinpointed
less is more

And a content personalization frame from Colin A. Eagan is shared:

WhatWhy
AlertList of flightsTime-sensitive info
Make EasierShortcuts to priority stuffPromote what this user needs
Cross SellAd for something premiumNotify extra value opportunities
EnrichBlog post on some bigger topicGive broader perspective as expert

And lastly the Accenture model for personalization maturity is very model-esque in ways that makes me dizzy.

Wow, this medium post is super epic. I’ll come back to it later.