It’s Getting Personal

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

• Salesforce acquired Evergage (2020)
• McDonald’s acquired Dynamic Yield (2019)
• Zeta Global and PubMedia acquired Ignition One (2019)
  Spunout of Dentsu in 2013
• Episerver acquired Insite (2019)
• Kibo acquired Monetate (2019)
  Kibo unified commerce cloud is in direct competition with SF
• Kibo acquired Certona (2019)
• Manthan Software acquired RichRelevance (2019)
  Manthan is based in Bangalore
• Emarsys had offers but decided to double down (2019)
  

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-intent	high-intent
lean-in	matchmaking near misses	filtered zero noise
lean-back	curated impulses good neighborhoods	pinpointed less is more

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

	What	Why
Alert	List of flights	Time-sensitive info
Make Easier	Shortcuts to priority stuff	Promote what this user needs
Cross Sell	Ad for something premium	Notify extra value opportunities
Enrich	Blog post on some bigger topic	Give 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.