Personalisation

Web personalisation is a strategy, a marketing tool, and an art. Personalisation requires implicitly or explicitly collecting visitor information and leveraging that knowledge in your content delivery framework to manipulate what information you present to your users and how you present it.

Correctly executed, personalisation of the visitor’s experience makes his time on your site, or in your application, more productive and engaging. Personalisation can also be valuable to you and your organization, because it drives desired business results such as increasing visitor response or promoting customer retention.

Unfortunately, personalisation for its own sake has the potential to increase the complexity of your site interface and drive inefficiency into your architecture. It might even compromise the effectiveness of your marketing message or, worse, impair the user’s experience. Few businesses are willing to sacrifice their core message for the sake of a few trick web pages.

Contrary to popular belief, personalisation doesn’t have to take the form of customized content portals, popularized in the mid-to-late 90s by snap.com and My Yahoo!. Nor does personalisation require expensive applications or live-in consultants. Personalisation can be as blatant or as understated as you want it to be.

It’s a tired old yarn, but if you hope to implement a web personalisation strategy, the first and most important step is to develop and mature your business goals and requirements. It is important to detail what it is you hope to do and, from that knowledge, develop an understanding of how you get from an idea to implementation. You might be surprised to discover that it won’t require most of next year’s budget to achieve worthwhile results.