extreme personalization

I got a briefing from Conductrics recently. Conductrics is a start up delivering an agent-based decision optimization solution focused on next best action or next best message. Designed for a website, mobile application or even a POS it uses machine learning techniques to optimize the behavior of the site/application to meet some overarching objectives – [...]

I am presenting at a Calpont (see my Calpont first look here) sponsored webinar on Taming the Data Tsunami: Next-Gen Analytics Enable Effective Relationship Marketing. Online advertisers are deluged by an increasingly complex marketplace, exponentially growing data streams, and demands for greater value from online spend. Marketers must employ highly dimensional and granular analytics to [...]

Ginger Conlon had a nice post this week – Don’t Blast. Target. – Think customers: The 1to1 Blog. many marketers are still drawn to the ease of blasting to a broad audience, instead of targeting for maximum impact among those most likely to respond If you are trying to make this transition from blasting to [...]

Syndicated from ebizQ Tom Davenport had a post today on Microdecisions for Macro Impact that pointed out on the key benefits of decision management, with its focus on operational decisions: If you can identify a few key microdecisions that can be addressed and improved, you can often dramatically improve performance. “Micro decisions” is a phrase [...]

This post caught my eye last week – ecommerceinsights.com Blog » Automated recommendations: ubiquitous in 2009? Predictive merchandising becomes ubiquitous, and the crowd begins to separate. “Predictive merchandising” is also referred to as “automated merchandising” or “personalized product recommendations”. Whatever term you like (or are marketing) we will see this area are the “product reviews [...]

Elana Anderson, now at Unica, wrote a nice piece titled Where CRM Goes Next for Baseline Magazine. In a short piece she highlights some of the key challenges for CRM/Marketing going foward: It must become more focused on interactive marketing, engaging with customers It must break free from old habits like fixed campaign schedules and [...]

Great post by Elana Anderson – What Will Campaign Management Be Like In 2020? « NxtERA Marketing Blog. I have long believed that improved campaign management, like improved customer experience and improved marketing, requires a greater focus on customer treatment decisions. I have blogged before about the role of decision management in campaign management (in [...]

Interesting article on how the NHL used the power of personalization and targeting (or extreme personalization) to improve results. It does not talk about how they do this but clearly they have made things like the front cover choice for their catalog and key elements of their web presence decisions so they can make them [...]

Tim Walters of Forrester had an interesting post this week – Is Web Personalization Now A Matter Of “Thurvival”? in which he emphasized that, even in a downturn, getting better at web personalization has a payoff. Now I think personalization is a good thing and the evidence that it results in more engagement, better results [...]

Scott had a great article on segmentation and personas this week that is a nice, quick read. I think the use of analytics in persona design can make a big difference (as I have noted before) and that decision management can use good customer segmentation as a first step towards extreme personalization. If you are [...]

Stephan Chase of Marriott generated the third set of thoughts. He is working to make Marriott more customer-centric, in particular by employing predictive modeling to determine what customers are likely to do in the future while using results in marketing to create a learning organization. This is of course the heart and soul of decision [...]

Some time ago I saw an article that discussed the 8Ps (4 old, 4 new) of Marketing. It seemed to me that decision making, especially operational/transactional decision making is critical to most of these Ps. Here, then, is my summary of the 8Ps and why decisions, and decision management, matter. 4 Ps Product You might [...]

The WSJ had a little piece today on personalization – Personalized Emails Are Creepy, Not Effective based on a study done some time ago but still very relevant in today’s market where companies are being told to personalize (including by me). Here are three quotes I think summarize the problem: [there is a negative] response [...]

[amazonify]0470189088:right[/amazonify][amazonify]0470189088::text::::The Best Service is No Service: How to Liberate Your Customers from Customer Service, Keep Them Happy, and Control Costs[/amazonify] I just finished reading The Best Service is No Service: How to Liberate Your Customers from Customer Service, Keep Them Happy, and Control Costs and I can’t recommend it too highly. This is a tremendous [...]

Some time ago the folks over at the Analytical Engine had a post about Data Driven Persona Development. I loved the way they described taking a very qualitative approach – persona development – and adding some analytic rigor to it. Given my interest in using analytics for segmentation and in developing different websites/experiences for different [...]

Two articles caught my eye yesterday – Robert Nascenzi wrote an article “Real-Time Segmentation Levels the Playing Field” over on Destination CRM while Jeremy Nedelka wrote “The Ultimate Personalized Marketing” over on 1:1. Both articles focusing me in on what I have called “extreme personalization”. Jeremy’s article was a cute story about a school targeting [...]

A collections session next with folks from Adeptra, Fair Isaac and GE Money talking about GE’s vision for virtual collections. The collections environment is extremely bad this year with massive growth in the need for collection agents. Delinquencies are up, problems are up, consumers are stressed. Scores are worsening (credit profiles are worse), payments are [...]

Stephen Brobst of Teradata was next with A Reference Architecture for Integrating an Active Data Warehouse into the Real-Time Enterprise. He started with a great quote from a Gartner analyst: No such thing as a business surprise – there is always a warning in advance but were you listening – did you collect data about [...]

[amazonify]1422103323:right[/amazonify][amazonify]1422103323::text::::Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning[/amazonify] by Tom Davenport and Jeanne Harris Tom and Jeanne have written a new book (building on a paper they wrote some time ago) about what they call “analytic competitors”, that is to say companies that use their analytic prowess not just to enhance their operations but as [...]