Guide to Personalization

The marketer’s guide to personalization
Improving customer engagement in a digital world
2013/2014

ADOBE PERSONALIZATION GUIDE
Table of contents
02 Introduction to personalization in a digital world
05 The buyer journey: converting anonymous visitors to customers
08 Turning customers into advocates
09 Actionable insights to accelerate your journey
10 Personalization examples
13 Evaluating your personalization strategy
14 Conclusion
The marketer’s guide to personalization: Improving customer engagement in a digital world – 2013/2014
1

2
Introduction to personalization
in a digital world
Who doesn’t enjoy that feeling of walking into a shop and being recognized,
welcomed and treated as an individual?
We can all think of examples of great personalized service in the offline
world: a restaurant offering a favorite drink or dessert to a customer on their
birthday, or a local trader upselling to a loyal customer using insight gained
from previous purchases. When this happens, we feel welcome
and keep going back for more.

3
Increasingly, customers have come to expect a consistent, personalized
service across all touch points: in-store, online, on mobile – wherever and
whenever they choose to engage. It’s up to you to ensure you are providing
your customers with a service that makes them feel welcome.
A good personalized web experience is smooth, non-intrusive and relevant
to the customer. The information and content they are presented with
should meet their needs and encourage them to interact with your site,
deepening the engagement.
As the customer starts to interact, they generate data that can be used to
enhance their experience in future situations and validate the impact of the
programs that you put in place.
Personalization is the use of data to deliver a relevant and engaging
experience to a consumer across channels and devices.

19%
Uplift in sales
19%
Uplift in sales
14%Click-through
rates
14%Click-through
rates
14%Lift in RPV
14%Lift in RPV
10%Conversion
rates
10%Conversion
rates
4
The numbers consistently support personalization as a key strategy
for improving ROI and generating additional business.
Companies that are personalizing web experiences and are also
able to quantify the improvement (in the context of online sales
or their key website performance metric) are seeing, on average,
a 19% uplift in sales1
.
Personalized emails deliver on average a 14% greater click-through
rate than non-personalized versions, and perhaps more significantly,
a 10% higher conversion rate2
.
One Adobe customer, Lenovo, saw a 14% increase in sales as a result
of implementing a cross-channel personalization strategy.
1
Forrester CIO/CMO Survey 2013 (‘The CMO And CIO Must Accelerate On Their Path To Better Collaboration’)
2
Aberdeen
19%
Uplift in sales
14%Click-through
rates
14%Lift in RPV
10%Conversion
rates

5
The buyer journey: converting
anonymous visitors to customers
When a prospective customer first comes to your site, you don’t know
a great deal about them, but you can begin to find out:
• Where they are based using geo-targeting, either through a lookup
or by asking them for their location through the browser.
• Which social network they subscribe to, based on the use of social
plugins to share the product information they researched.
• Whether they are a first-time or returning visitor.
• Possibly the search terms they have used to reach your site.
• Which device and browser they are using.
This knowledge is still hugely valuable –
already you can start to personalize and
enhance the user’s experience based
on the data that’s available.
Awareness

6
When the customer or prospect starts to explore your site, you can start
to build a better picture of their interests, allowing you to serve relevant
content to them.
Even if the customer leaves the site, there may be an opportunity to serve
relevant advertisements based on their interests, as opposed to a generic
banner advertisement. This is more likely to draw them back to complete
the purchase.
Consideration

7
At the point the customer identifies themselves, a massive amount of data
points become available. This can be used to personalize the experience
across a variety of channels: for example, a tailored lead nurture program
customized to their specific interest area.
When the visitor clicks through on an offer, for example by downloading
an app, you have further opportunities to serve relevant content and offers.
Customer
identifies
themselves

8
Turning customers into
advocates
Once a customer has signed up, continuing to deliver a personalized and
relevant service is just as important.
By this stage, you’ve gathered enough information about them – including
how and when they prefer to be communicated with – to enable you to
target them effectively with relevant offers, or indeed via other channels.
Using this information to personalize the user experience helps you to
deepen the customer relationship and create advocates for your brand.
Cross-Sell/Up-Sell Advocacy

CRAWL WALK RUN
9
Actionable insights to accelerate
your journey
Start simply – web or email optimization
offers big uplifts in engagement
and revenue, often without massive
investment.
Test and optimize your web pages.
Segment your audience and personalize
landing pages based on their profile.
Use a variety of data sources – web, CRM,
social, even second and third party data,
to develop the customer profile.
Use data and content to personalize
the experience for your prospects and
customers.
Serve content and offers that are targeted
to the user’s needs.
Use automated recommendations and test
to see where they are most effective.
Use behavioral data to trigger targeted
emails at the right time.
Look at automated behavioral targeting
software to predict user behavior and
match to content.

10
Argos uses personalization
offsite and beyond
Personalization is not limited to your owned properties such as web and
mobile apps. You can also serve targeted advertising to the right audience
based on first-, second- and third-party data.
Audience management and modeling allows you to target advertisements
based on look-a-like profile and user behavior data captured on your
website. You can optimize and personalize display advertisements in real
time using techniques such as retargeting and A/B testing practices.
Using onsite behavior to trigger retargeting emails is an incredibly successful
and easily implemented technique – as demonstrated by Argos, the UK
multi-channel retailer.
Argos achieved tremendous results from this approach, which combined
algorithmic and rules-based targeting with personalization.
Result
Maximised value of some campaigns to deliver an ROI of
1,500% to 7,000%

11
Groupe FLO increases customer
loyalty through personalization
The umbrella brand for more than 300 restaurants around the world, Groupe
FLO is a leading restaurant group and commercial caterer.
Groupe FLO uses Adobe products to provide a single platform to manage its
marketing database and points calculations, and to execute all loyalty program
communications. It has also integrated the cash-register as a
1:1 communication channel, providing members with personalized
messages and offers via their receipts.
More than 450,000 customers registered for the loyalty program after launch,
and the company has determined that members spend 30% more than non-
members. As a result of the program, Groupe FLO has increased knowledge
about its customers using data they’ve collected over time. Overall, Groupe
FLO registered a 50% conversion rate for distributed
loyalty cards.
Result
Members increased their visits by 4%
Members spend 30% more than non-members

12
SAP increases conversion through
personalized digital experiences
For SAP to reach its goal of one billion users by 2015, the company will require
focused digital marketing that provides audiences with the right message, at
the right time, on the right device.
SAP used Adobe solutions to help measure complex interactions throughout
the conversion funnel and across channels in order to better understand
customer engagement across the sales cycle.
The company found that personalization drives 300% more conversions
than one-off campaigns, shaping digital strategies.
“Adobe Marketing Cloud allows us to create a digital experience that
delivers relevant information to our customers at all times – by industry,
by LOB, by geography, and more.”
Shawn Burns, Global Vice President, Digital Marketing, SAP
Result
300% more conversions than traditional digital

13
Evaluating your
personalization strategy
It’s crucial that any digital marketing initiative is measured so that the impact
on the business can be captured and understood. For many organizations, it
can be as simple as measuring the additional revenue generated by serving
personalized experiences and messages to users and customers. But it’s not
always that simple.
The goals of your business and digital presence should drive your evaluation –
it might be capturing leads for a B2B organization, or exposing visitors to more
advertising (by keeping them on site longer and serving more pages to them)
for a media business.
This chart from the Adobe Quarterly Digital Intelligence Briefing on
personalization shows the many ways that organizations are evaluating the
impact of their personalization strategies. Above all, it’s important that you
define your goals in advance and know how you can measure them.
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
70%
80%
Impact on ROI Impact on engagement
70%
61%
50%
38%
34%
36%
33% 33%
11% 11%
7%
4%
Increased
conversions
More time
spent on site
Positive
feedback
(e.g. social
media
mentions)
Lower
bounce rate
More visitors Absolute
ROI figure
($/£)
We/they
don’t
measure
Other
32%
How do you / your clients measure the impact
of personalization on ROI and engagement?
Source: Adobe Quarterly Intelligence Briefing

14
Conclusion
In summary, data plus content create the moment of relevance that turns
a faceless prospect into an engaged, unique individual and a customer.
There is no wrong time to start personalizing the experience for your
customers. The Adobe Marketing Cloud solutions can assist you at
every step of your personalization journey.
• Marketers finally have a complete, integrated solution for all their
marketing efforts.
• You can benefit from analytics, social media optimization, targeting,
web experience management – and now cross-channel campaign
management with Adobe Campaign.
• Learn more at www.adobe.com/marketing.
© 2014 Adobe Systems Incorporated. All rights reserved. Adobe and the Adobe logo are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Adobe Systems Incorporated in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
Key Takeaways
1. Optimizing the experience for the unknown
customer widens the funnel.
2. Orchestrating the conversation with known
customers creates advocates.
3. Personalization creates competitive advantage.

Guide to Personalization

Guide to Personalization

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