The Ultimate Personalization Planning Guide...©2018 EVERGAGE, INC THE ULTIMATE PERSONALIZATION PLANNING GUIDE: HOW TO PUT YOUR PERSONALIZATION STRATEGY INTO ACTION | 4 SETTING YOUR

HOW TO PUT Y TION STRA

OUR PERSONALIZATEGY INTO ACTION

The Ultimate Personalization Planning Guide

THE ULTIMATE PERSONALIZATION PLANNING GUIDE: HOW TO PUT YOUR PERSONALIZATION STRATEGY INTO ACTION | 2 © 2018 EVERGAGE, INC

TABLE OF CONTENTS

WHY PERSONALIZATION IS IMPORTANT................................................................03

SETTING YOUR PERSONALIZATION GOALS.........................................................04

IDENTIFYING YOUR DATA SOURCES............................................................................05

APPROACHES TO PERSONALIZATION ......................................................................06

DEFINING PERSONAS AND JOURNEYS ...................................................................07

AUDIENCE SEGMENTATION....................................................................................................08

MACHINE-LEARNING ALGORITHMS................................................................................09

CROSS-CHANNEL PERSONALIZED EXPERIENCES.........................................10

SELECTING MESSAGE/EXPERIENCE TYPES.......................................................11-12

PERSONALIZATION IN ACTION.......................................................................................14-15

PICKING A PERSONALIZATION PLATFORM.....................................................16-17

TESTING AND MEASUREMENT..............................................................................................13

It’s no doubt you’ve made some big plans for digital marketing in your organization, and at the top of

the priority list is the customer experience. After all, what is your business without your customers?

And the key to your customer experience is personalization. Don’t believe us? Consider this: 96% of

marketers surveyed say that personalization helps advance customer relationships. And 88% believe

that their prospects and customers expect a personalized experience. So if personalization isn’t a

priority for your organization, be aware that it’s definitely a priority for your competitors!

What makes personalization so important to today’s marketers? The answer is simple: results.

Personalization allows you to effectively target prospects and customers in increasingly meaningful

ways across channels, based on their preferences and intent. It takes customer experiences beyond

the one-message-fits-all approach in order to generate more immediate interactions, greater

engagement and increased loyalty. And personalization has been proven to drive a significant

increase in conversions and revenue from your digital channels.

The good news is that it’s not too late to make personalization a priority for your organization, and this

Personalization Planning Guide is an ideal starting point. We’ll help you understand the ins and outs

of personalization and where to focus, and we’ll also provide examples you can emulate in your own

strategy. Let’s get started!

Why Personalization Is Important



SETTING YOUR PERSONALIZATION GOALS

Common Personalization Goals

INCREASING CONVERSIONS

INCREASING AVERAGE

ORDER VALUE

REDUCING BOUNCE

RATE

IMPROVING UPSELLS

IMPROVING ROI OF A SPECIFIC

MARKETING TACTIC

INCREASING RETENTION

FACILITATING PRODUCT

DISCOVERY

DRIVING REPEAT PURCHASES

Before you do anything, you want to set your personalization goals. Luckily, personalization can help you

achieve your broader business goals, so it shouldn’t be too hard to establish your personalization-specific

ones.

Begin by thinking about the challenges you’re facing and the goals you want to achieve for your

overall business. Consider the challenges and opportunities you’re facing in each channel you use.

Personalization can be used for websites, web apps, mobile sites, mobile apps, email, search, digital ads,

and in human interactions (such as in-store, in call centers, with sales and customer success teams, etc.).

Do you want to improve engagement, increase email signups, drive more revenue or optimize conversion

rates? Goals will vary across audiences, industries and organizations.

In addition to setting your goals, you have to understand how you will measure them. For example, do

you have a method for scoring customer engagement? How do you measure lift? Is revenue tracking

tied to the success of your website? Mapping out the analytics that are essential to supporting your

personalization initiatives will enable you to put the reporting aspects in place starting from day one.


How Will You Bring All This Data Together?

Data is only useful if it can be brought together in a central location in a

format that can be used by a personalization solution. Before seriously

getting started with personalization, give a lot of thought to your sources

of data and your plan for integration to ensure you have what you need

to truly understand your customers and prospects.

Data is essential for personalization. Think about it: you can’t create an experience that is personalized

to an individual if you don’t know anything about him or her as a person. A basic rule of thumb is that the

more data you can gather and attribute to an individual, the better. The more you know about a person,

the more precise and relevant the experiences can be.

IDENTIFYING YOUR DATA SOURCES

Behavioral Data

A person’s behavior gives you a clue into his interests, preferences and in-the-moment intent. The trick is to make

sure you’re capturing enough behavioral data to create a complete picture. Beyond pages viewed, you also want to

track time spent and engagement on each page, including hovering, scrolling, zooming, etc. Then, of course, you

can include how a person has responded to your campaigns in the past, such as email opens and clickthroughs,

push notification dismissals or clickthroughs, personalized experience views or clickthroughs, etc. And as activity

often takes place with your company across channels, cross-channel behavioral tracking is essential.

Attribute Data

Attributes describe any characteristic of a person. They can be accessed directly from the web (such as a person’s

location, referring source, browser or device type, firmographic details like industry or company, etc.) or they can

be pulled in from a database or other system (such as a person’s loyalty program status or plan level in a CRM,

demographic information in a DMP, or self-defined attributes from social media sites).

Surveys and Forms

Sometimes the easiest way to learn something about a person is just to ask. Surveys and forms provide explicit data

that you can use to supplement behavioral and attribute data. Surveys can be presented on a website, in a web or

mobile app, or via email triggered by a person’s actions — and any data captured in a survey or form can then be

leveraged for analysis and personalization.

THE ULTIMATE PERSONALIZATION PLANNING GUIDE: HOW TO PUT YOUR PERSONALIZATION STRATEGY INTO ACTION | 6 © 2018 EVERGAGE, INC© 2017 EVERGAGE, INC THE ULTIMATE WEB PERSONALIZATION PLANNING GUIDE: HOW TO PUT YOUR PERSONALIZATION STRATEGY INTO ACTION | 6

Once you establish your goals and compile your data sources, you need to figure out your approach. To

deliver personalized experiences, you can use rules or machine-learning algorithms. They each have their

place in a successful personalization strategy, and most marketers and digital professionals will use a

combination of both.

APPROACHES TO PERSONALIZATION

Rule-Based Personalization

Rule-based personalization allows marketers to deliver experiences to specific groups or segments of people

based on the manual creation and manipulation of business rules. Segments can be broad (such as all visitors

from a specific region) or narrow (such as visitors from a specific industry who have not yet downloaded a piece of

content and have spent more than a minute viewing a specific category of content on the website). Marketers can

set up rules to target experiences and messages to these broad or narrow segments.

Machine-Learning Personalization

Machine-learning personalization uses algorithms and predictive analytics to dynamically present the most relevant

content or experience for each and every visitor. With rules, marketers must design messages and set up rules for

each experience they want to show each segment manually. But with machine learning, marketers can simply

set up a single algorithm or an algorithmic “recipe” to provide a unique experience for each individual.

Account-based marketing

Geotargeting

Persona-based marketing

Any segment-based communication

RULES ARE IDEAL FOR

Product and content recommendations

Category recommendations

Search results and list sorting

Tailored navigation

MACHINE LEARNING IS IDEAL FOR


Most marketers will implement some combination of rule-based and machine-learning personalization

as part of their strategy. Even if you decide to leverage algorithms only, it’s a good idea to define your

personas and identify their journeys to help you plan your personalization campaigns.

DEFINING PERSONAS AND JOURNEYS


KNOW YOUR AUDIENCES KNOW THEIR GOALS

What are the key personas or roles we convert most often?

Where does our highest quality traffic come from (e.g. search, email, specific sites)?

Which business prospects are most important to us (e.g. key accounts, industry, size, location)?

What are the unique needs of each audience?

What are the typical paths high quality visitors take through the site?

Which resources do members of key audiences access most in their journeys?

What Are Their Goals? Not only should you identify your personas, but also define the buyer’s journey. Carefully map out the steps a

visitor takes from discovering your website to completing a purchase, downloading content, or taking some other

important action. With a journey map you can then associate key messages and targeted content that are most

likely to move a visitor from one step to the next: dynamic content, real-time personalized recommendations and

offers, progressive calls-to-action, and more. Such timely and relevant content will help accelerate the journey.

Remember, you may have more than one path per persona, and multiple personalized tactics per path.

Who Are Your Audiences? To define your personas and identify target buyers, begin by examining your historical sales data and refine it against

explicit visitor or consumer data — demographic information such as gender, location, income, etc. as well as implicit

purchase and browsing behavior. In the case of business-to-business (B2B), use firmographic data such as industry,

geography and size of company. Then you can further refine your personas using behavioral data such as referring

sources, products browsed or added to cart, pages viewed the longest, videos watched and content downloaded.


Your aim as a marketer is to reach your key audiences at optimal points in their buying journeys. Without

a systematic process for user research and continuous analysis, you are likely throwing darts in the dark.

While you learn about every customer on a one-to-one level, you will start to uncover key trends and

patterns that enable you to organize your data into key segments. These segments will help you deliver

more customized, personalized and tailored experiences across channels.

As long as you can collect the data for it, you can create a segment against it — and the segments you

create will depend entirely on your business. For example, a clothing retailer may want to speak differently

to its shoppers from different regions of the country, a financial services or insurance company may

want to segment visitors by age demographic, and a B2B company may want to focus on target industry

segments.

AUDIENCE SEGMENTATION


SEGMENT AND ANALYZE YOUR AUDIENCES INFORM YOUR PERSONALIZATION STRATEGY

Visitor behavior and trends analysis

Engagement history and predictions

User and account level analysis

Goals and objectives by audience

Personalized or targeted content

Measurement of campaign results

Clicked Adwords Campaign

Interested In Auto Insurance

Has Auto Policy Has Auto Policy

Spent 20+ Seconds on Landing Page

Spent 5+ Minutes on Site this Week

Has Home Policy Has Upcoming Renewal

In Atlanta, GA

Last Visited Three Months Ago

Doesn’t Have Discounts

NEW VISITOR

REPEAT VISITOR

EXISTING CUSTOMER

EXISTING CUSTOMER


You may be most familiar with algorithms for product or content recommendations, but they can also be

used for list sorting, search results, site navigation, and more. A robust solution should give you control

over your own algorithms, by allowing you to control four key areas:

MACHINE-LEARNING ALGORITHMS

Base Algorithms

Base algorithms are the foundation for delivering recommendations and individualized experiences. When choosing a base algorithm, you

guide the system on where to begin when selecting items to recommend or experiences to show.

Basic algorithms generally rely on specific criteria or the “wisdom of the crowd.” For example, “trending,” “recently published” and “co-

browse” are popular ones that will display products or content that are popular on the site, new on the site, or that are based on what others

have also viewed. More advanced algorithms such as collaborative filtering and decision trees are more complex behind-the-scenes, but

just as easy to use by the marketer once you understand their purpose.

Filters

You can customize your base algorithms by including or excluding certain criteria with filters. Filters allow you to exercise control over the

categories, brands, price ranges, locations and other attributes that are shown in your recommendations. In other words, filters allow you to

add human guidance to your machine learning-driven experiences.

Boosters Boosters allow you to incorporate and prioritize the specific preferences in brand, category, price range, color, gender, content type, keyword,

etc., of each individual on your site. While many advanced base algorithms already take individual preferences and differences into account,

boosting allows your experiences to be individually relevant even while using basic algorithms, such as “trending” products.

Variations Finally, you can decide to include some variations to keep experiences fresh. For example, you can set a small percentage of your

homepage recommendations to be randomized (while still being relevant to each individual).

Define the base algorithm(s) of your recommendation strategy

Apply filters to include or exclude specific variables

Add in boosters to account for individual preferences

Finally, determine whether you want to apply any variations

01

02

03

04

RECOMMENDATIONS AND 1:1 EXPERIENCES

Individual People Like Me Everyone

Base Algorithms


Now that you’ve identified your goals, sourced your data, defined your personas, gained a better

understanding of your audience segments, and considered how you would use machine-learning

algorithms, it is time to think about your personalization campaigns. What types of messages or

experiences do you want to deliver? How do you want your visitors to receive them? In what channel?

Knowing this is almost as important as the personalized content itself.

First, let’s cover the channels you can consider for your personalized experiences.

CROSS-CHANNEL PERSONALIZED EXPERIENCES

HumanPersonalization isn’t confined to digital channels. In-depth data should be used by call center or chat agents, in-store

associates, B2B sales teams, and customer success or support teams to deliver personalized human interactions as well.

WebsiteConsidered the primary channel for most digital

marketers, personalization of your website is critical.

No matter whether your primary goal is to generate

leads, sell merchandise, promote content, or something

else, personalized experiences will help you achieve it.

Web App

Mobile Email

Search

To make the most use of your on-site search, show visitors

the most relevant items with as little effort (and as few clicks)

as possible. Show search results that are selected and

sorted for each person, based on the visitor’s intent

and affinities.

Digital Advertising

Leverage the same in-depth data you use to

uncover a person’s intent and affinities to provide

better targeted and more relevant digital advertising

across the internet.

Personalization within a logged-in environment can

be used to direct users to the most relevant resources,

drive users to leverage features that can help them

get the most value, identify churn risks and upsell

opportunities, and more.

Similar to websites, you can target different segments

or individuals with personalized content on mobile devices

as well — but the smaller screen increases the importance

of showing something relevant to each person. This

applies to mobile websites and mobile apps.

Email is the most personalized channel, yet consumers still

feel that marketers miss the mark considering their overloaded

inboxes. Leverage personalization to include content updated

for each recipient at open time and send highly targeted

one-off emails triggered by specific visitor actions.


When employing personalization, you need to consider the types of experiences and message formats to

use across different channels. It is critical that each visitor receives personalized content that is cohesive

and timely — meaning it makes sense based on the context of her engagement, what she is engaged

with, and the actions she has/has not taken. For most channels, these experiences should be seamless

and unobtrusive, in line with the rest of the content (such as emails, search, digital advertising). But on

websites, web apps and mobile, interruptive message formats such as infobars, pop-ups and callouts are

sometimes appropriate as well.

SELECTING MESSAGE/EXPERIENCE TYPES

An Inline Experience is a personalized block

of dynamic content inserted into a website,

app or email that is relevant based on

a visitor’s behavior or intent.

.

INLINE CONTENT

Seamless Experiences

An In-Page Edit is an experience created by replacing existing parts of a web page,

app or email – such as text or images – with relevant and personalized content.

IN-PAGE EDITS

Personalize parts of a webpage including text and images to present relevant content.

Deliver personalized blocks of dynamic content based on a visitor’s behavior or intent.


A Pop-up is a message that overlays content on a website or app to interrupt a user, sometimes

with a lightbox, and typically used to drive a critical action or relevant content.

A Callout is a message tied to small sections of content, displayed on hover or click, commonly used to highlight features or secondary content

on a website or app.

POP-UPS

CALLOUTS

Interrupt the user experience to drive a critical action or to promote relevant content or incentives in real time. Lightbox optional.

An Infobar is a message contained in a persistent but non-intrusive header or footer bar, typically

used to communicate time-sensitive information or critical notifications.

INFOBARS

Interruptive Experiences

Communicate information or notifications with a persistent, but non-intrusive header or footer bar.

Highlight the most important features and content on your website to drive more engagement.


Personalization, much like all digital marketing, does not offer one golden answer. What works on

one site or in one channel might not work on another, and what works for one segment might not

work for another. As a marketer you need tools that put your data and ideas to work, and allow

you to test and understand your campaigns. With established goals, you can analyze how your

campaign is performing over a control. You also need to have confidence in your test results to

know if your personalization solution is properly supporting your efforts. With advanced technology

in place, you can capture and analyze every user’s actions and behaviors to provide a deep

understanding of your audiences. Marketers should also be able to analyze segments, test

and tweak algorithmic recipes and measure campaign effectiveness with real-time stats on

conversions, revenue attribution, engagement levels, and more. Set goals, test and iterate for

personalization success!

From Measurement to Success

Your personalization ideas are in place and you’ve started building your campaigns. Once you’ve QA’ed

them and set them live, it’s important to test how effective they are! Why? Your visitor/customer base is

dynamic and constantly in flux, and there are multiple pathways – across your channels – to reach multiple

goals and outcomes. You want to understand the wants and needs of each individual, giving him or her the

right content at the right time with the impact only effective personalization can deliver.

The power of testing is in how a marketer develops the test and analyzes the results. Your personalization

solution should offer you a simple way to conduct A/B and multivariate testing as well as a simple way to

see real-time results. Use your learnings to optimize your personalization strategy and achieve the best

results possible.

TESTING AND MEASUREMENT

A/B Testing

Also known as split testing, A/B testing is the simplest way

to test. It is a verification method that lets you know what

is working and what is not. Your A/B tests can tell you if the

control or variation won. When you perform an A/B test, you

create two different versions of a web page, one with changes

and one not, and split the traffic between the versions. Then

after receiving sufficient traffic, you can see which is most

successful. You can also test more than one variation of a page

with A/B/C testing, etc.

Personalization-Based A/B Testing

Combining A/B testing with personalization can be

particularly powerful. Rather than testing page changes for

your entire audience, you should A/B test your content

targeted at specific segments. With personalization-based

testing, for example, you may show a particular welcome

message to visitors from the U.S. and a different welcome

message to visitors from France. You can then set a control

for each experience and see how effective each message is

for each group.

COMMON TESTING METHODS


As part of its account-based marketing strategy, Mendix, a leader in the application

Platform-as-a-Service market, increased content downloads and reduced bounce rate by personalizing its site navigation

and promoting relevant content assets to visitors from target industries.

INCREASE IN LEADS

GENERATED

10%

Squaw Valley Alpine Meadows, an internationally renowned mountain resort, improved revenue per customer among its high-value visitor segments with persona-

based homepage experiences.

LIFT IN REVENUE

41%

Here are some real-world examples with results of personalization in action:

PERSONALIZATION IN ACTION


Zumiez, a multi-channel specialty retailer, achieved a dramatically higher conversion

rate and better engagement with individualized product recommendations

across its website, including on-site search.

IMPROVED

CONVERSION RATE

2.7x

After conducting A/B tests to find the best

approach, Apperian, a leading enterprise-

class mobile application management (MAM®)

and security platform, saw a large increase in

NPS survey responses when presented at the

appropriate time, within its web app.

SURVEY RESPONSE RATE

2x

PERSONALIZATION IN ACTION (continued)


A members-only boutique and flash sale site tested using individually

tailored recommendations in its email campaigns and discovered that they

delivered a substantial increase in conversions.

LIFT IN CONVERSIONS

PERSONALIZATION IN ACTION (continued)

15%

A women’s fashion brand improved the effectiveness of

its mobile search by helping shoppers find relevant products

in as few clicks as possible.

LIFT IN CONVERSIONS

25%

You know that when people interact with your company, they have different expectations and intent. As such,

a one-size-fits-all approach to the customer experience is becoming obsolete. While the notion of catering

to individuals may seem like a daunting task, providing personalized experiences doesn’t have to be overly

complicated. With a powerful and user-friendly platform like Evergage, you can implement, manage and

analyze personalization campaigns much like you do with all of your other marketing campaigns.

PICKING A PERSONALIZATION PLATFORM


A COMPLETE PERSONALIZATION PLATFORM

User expectations and technologies are evolving at breakneck speeds. You want an easy-to-use personalization solution, but not a simple one – it should be robust and constantly evolving. Your solution should help you understand, communicate with and report on visitors in deep and powerful ways. At the same time, “personalization” encompasses many tactics across channels; you don’t want to have to buy a different tool for each of those tactics and channels. Your personalization solution should be a complete platform that provides deep behavioral tracking, real-time segmentation and targeting, one-to-one recommendations driven by machine learning, A/B and multivariate testing, and analysis and attribution across channels. It should be a platform that you won’t outgrow; you should be able to count on it to enable continuous optimization well into the future.

A SOLUTION THAT PROVIDES REAL-TIME RESPONSE AND FEEDBACK

You should be able to respond in real time to visitor/customer behavior. Some solutions require hours or even a full day to make tracking data actionable or to summarize results. Your personalization platform should be able to track behavior and respond with personalized content immediately. It should also offer real-time analytics and reporting. This will improve your chances of increasing your conversions and provide your team with intelligent and actionable data.

A SOLUTION THAT CAN COMPLEMENT YOUR EXISTING TOOLS, TACTICS AND PROCESSES

In addition to providing more engaging user experiences, personalization can also improve many of your existing marketing efforts, such as online advertising, SEO, email campaigns and content marketing. Given the potential impact on your digital marketing efforts, look for a personalization platform that works alongside and easily integrates with other marketing technologies and customer data sources, and will be familiar to your staff in terms of campaign management concepts (e.g. email or marketing automation).

A SINGLE PROFILE FOR EVERY SINGLE PERSON

Successful personalization requires that all of your in-depth behavioral data from across channels be captured, synchronized with external attribute data, and brought together into a single profile for each visitor, customer and account. Without a single unified profile, you can’t compile everything you know about a person, analyze it and act on it. Make sure you find a personalization solution that includes a CDP (customer data platform) at its core and allows you to see a single profile for each person and account (for B2B organizations) that interacts with your company.

A USER-FRIENDLY INTERFACE AND ENVIRONMENTMany of today’s personalization solutions require IT or developer support. While personalization can seem like a technical challenge, it doesn’t have to be that way. You wouldn’t want to ask for IT support to implement email campaigns, so why should you need to do so for personalization campaigns? Look for a solution that’s easy for your marketing team to use for designing and launching campaigns and conducting rapid testing and iteration – without the need for deep technical expertise and resources.

A PARTNER TO HELP GUIDE YOU THROUGH YOUR PERSONALIZATION JOURNEY

Equally important to the technology platform, you want to find a solution backed by dedicated, expert staff and resources to help your team become personalization ninjas. After all, this is a journey. Should you need help with campaign idea generation and prioritization or best practices for managing your program, or you just want some guidance on implementing or A/B testing a particular campaign, your vendor should be there for you as a true partner, advising you every step of the way.

Understandably, however, any time a new technology is introduced to your marketing arsenal, there are

challenges, risks and uncertainties. Therefore, when evaluating personalization platforms, it’s best to look for:

PICKING A PERSONALIZATION PLATFORM (continued)

Contact Evergage at 888-310-0589 to speak to an expert about your needs today!

About Evergage Evergage’s real-time personalization platform delivers The Power of 1, enabling digital

marketers to transform the dream of 1:1 customer engagement into reality. Combining

in-depth behavioral analytics and customer data with advanced machine learning,

Evergage provides the one platform you need to systematically understand and interact

with each person that visits your site or uses your app – one at a time, “in the moment”

and at scale – to deliver a maximally relevant, individualized experience.

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The Ultimate Personalization Planning Guide...©2018 EVERGAGE, INC THE ULTIMATE PERSONALIZATION PLANNING GUIDE: HOW TO PUT YOUR PERSONALIZATION STRATEGY INTO ACTION | 4 SETTING YOUR