Using browser cookies for onsite personalization

1. Personalizing for Secondary Sales
By Gaurav Misra
Secondary sales are a big revenue generator for many businesses. It not only provides a great
opportunity to add revenues but also lets a business engage with its customers for long term and
thereby build brand loyalty. Various online transaction that we do on regular basis like flight bookings,
purchase of smartphones, air purifiers, printers, credit cards, etc. offer a big opportunity for secondary
sales like hotel bookings, phone accessories, air filter, printer cartridge, add-on cards, etc.
respectively.
To cash in on such opportunities it is important to identify whether a visitor to the site has already
made a primary purchase and is a prospect for secondary purchase. However to connect with the
visitors this information should not be limited to basic purchase information but it is ideal to
understand their actual shopping needs in real time whenever they visit the site.
I would like to take a personal example of an air purifier which I bought in September from the site of
a well-known provider of air purifiers to beat Delhi pollution. Now when I visited the site of vendor
again in December mostly like than not I wanted to buy a filter for the air purifier I had purchased
earlier. My greediness of optimal site experience expected I been taken to the cart page with filter
added in the basket in just one click rather than browsing through the entire website to reach the
product listing for the filter of the air purifier.
Pre-requisites
Before elaborating the approach on how to achieve this, I would like to shift gears & call out the pre-
requisites of the approach. I have observed that browser cookies set by a Tag Manager are usually
used for analytics tracking and very rarely for personalization. In most cases the marketers rely on the
analytics tools for creating user segments for serving an experience. While it may be necessary for
complex user segments, in this article I would elicit an approach which uses a Tag Manager like Adobe
DTM & an Optimization tool like Adobe Target that can read a browser cookie.
For illustrating how to do this let me introduce SeaPioneer Cruise lines
SeaPioneer Cruise Lines
SeaPioneer Cruise Lines offers cruise packages starting from 3 days to 10 days. They have packages
for all age groups and various exotic destinations across the world.
Meet Aryan
 Aryan is around 30 years of age and is working
with a large investment banking firm.
 His annual income is $1.5K.
 Aryan got married with Prisha around 10
months back.
What happens in background?
On the order confirmation page of the site,
SeaPioneer drops a cookie which stores the
Cruise Name & Sail Date of the cruise. The
expiration of the cookie is set as the Sail date
of the cruise.

2. Planning for 1st
Anniversary
Aryan wants his first anniversary to be special and hence decides to go for a cruise trip with Prisha on
their special day. While browsing the internet for popular cruises he lands on the site of SeaPioneer
Cruise lines. Aryan likes a 4 day cruise trip in the Mediterranean Sea. After doing some additional
research Aryan books the cruise online.
Surprise is waiting
While Aryan is almost sure
that Prisha would elated to
know his plan for their first
anniversary, he still picks up
the topic over dinner on one
night to know Prisha’s point
of view. On hearing the idea,
Prisha jumps off the chair and
asks Aryan to find more on
cruises. Aryan decides to
surprise Prisha by logging to SeaPioneer site and share the cruise details. After dinner both of them
sit to browse on Cruise options. Aryan visits the SeaPioneer’s site to surprise Prisha that he has already
booked the cruise for both of them. However to Aryan’s surprise, as soon as Aryan lands on the site,
it shows a personalized experience to Aryan with promotion on ‘Do more while on your
Mediterranean cruise’. It shows options for candle light dinner under the stars on cruise deck, single
day excursion at Alemria, etc. So Aryan & Prisha get delighted and go ahead and book few more add-
ons.
Conclusion
 In case of SeaPioneer the cookie was dropped only on Order Confirmation page for secondary
sales. However the same can be extended to any checkpoint on user journey to enhance rate of
conversion by personalized targeting for onsite behaviour.
 In case of SeaPioneer the cookie information can be enhanced to store the secondary sales data
as well. This will enable not to show promotions for add-ons that are already purchased by users.
Further Enhancements
 The big assumption that I made here was that a user will use same browser for making site visits.
While there are other ways in which we can overcome this issue it would require involvement of
Development teams to overcome it.
What happens in background?
As soon as Aryan visits SeaPioneer’s site again its personalization
tool reads the cookie stored, identifies that Aryan is already
booked for Mediterranean cruise on a certain date in the future.
Hence he is a great prospect to be shown & sold add-ons. The
idea to set the cookie expiration as Sail Date is to ensure that
Aryan is not shown any promotion for secondary sales once the
cruise has sailed.