WWW Marketing 3e w/WS: Integrating the Web into Your Marketing Strategy 3rd Edition

JIM STERNE has over fifteen years of marketing and sales experience. He is cofounder of Target Marketing, a firm specializing in creating Internet marketing strategies for businesses. He organized and hosted the world′s first Internet marketing seminar series in 1994 and regularly speaks at industry conferences around the world.

The companion Web site at www.wiley.com/compbooks/sterne includes a complete, live listing of all Web links in the book, as well as more of Sterne′s writings.

Excerpt from World Wide Web Marketing 3rd Edition

Chapter 8 – Personalization–Getting to Know You

We’ve come full circle. From inter-personal relationships, to mass communication, to meta-personal relationships. We used to know our customers up close and personal and the value to the customer was not just having another friend in the community. Personal knowledge of individuals gave customers better service. You knew what they wanted and had it ready for them when they walked in.

As the mass communication and mass distribution came in, we lost all contact with our customers. There was one ad on the radio, on television, and in the papers and everybody heard it, saw it and read it. Then we got into market segmentation. Knowing a little bit about our customers based on their Zip code or their income bracket helped up tailor our messages.

When database marketing came along, we could provide significantly more value to each customer by cross-categorizing them. We could now mail out different messages to twenty-something year-olds in the North West who liked the great outdoors and read investment magazines, than we would to twenty-something year-olds in the North West who liked gardening and watching cooking shows.

But then came the Web.

If people will tell you what products they’re interested in and what they’ll use them for, it’s easy to present those products in different ways. Even calculators mean different things to different people. Are you a high school student? A college student? A financial professional? An engineer/scientist? (Figure 8.1)

Figure 8.1 HP will tell you slightly different stories about their calculators depending on which market segment you’re from.

With a database firmly attached at the back end, a Web site can cater to each individual on an individual basis. This, coupled with the fact that the Web lets you accomplish tasks at any time of the day or night, is what sets the Web apart from all previous forms of communication. It is unique. It is powerful. Customers love it. Heck, they even love it when your site simply welcomes them back by name, as long as you respect their privacy.

We’ll look into segmentation, recognition, customization, personalization and Customer Relationship Management but let’s start off easy.

Identification through Segmentation

What’s the very first thing you notice about a person? Walking down the street, or from across the room? Gender? Race? Clothing? Hygiene? The answer doesn’t matter. What does matter is that we use each of these as clues to gain richer understanding. Yes, we pigeon-hole people. We classify them and categorize them and try to make them fit into a neat little box so we know how to deal with them. Good, bad, or indifferent, the human mind does this with everything it comes across. Animal, vegetable, or mineral?

So it comes as no surprise that Web marketers do the same. What’s the first thing you notice about a visitor to your Web site? Their technical specifications.

Tech Specs

One brief glimpse of your home page and you can already start classifying who’s there. Their broswer tells you a great deal:

*What kind of computer they have
*What operating system they use
*What Web browser they use
*The IP number of their computer or gateway (reverse look up might pin point a geographic area).
*What types of files their browser will accept including the plug-ins they have installed.
*Whether they have a cookie from your server yet

With a little coding, you can also check to see how fast they’re connected to the Internet, the resolution of their screen, and a variety of other variables. All told, that’s quite a bit for one, single click. Based on that information, you may choose to change the size of the pictures on your home page and the amount of technical wizardry you impose on people (Flash, Javascript, DHTML).

Demographics

We’ve been dealing with demographics for a couple of decades now and we’re getting pretty savvy about putting that data to use. If you offered something on your site that I considered valuable, you might get me to fill out a form and learn that I am:

*Male
*years old
*Working in 93101
*College eduation
*Small Business (*Professional Marketing Consulting
*Psychographics

If you offer some information or membership that is very compelling, I might even divulge some more personal data–information that has more to do with how I feel and what I think, rather than who I am.

*Read marketing, technology, and trade journals
*Read science fiction and detective novels
*Don’t watch much television
*Live within three miles of my office

Now you can start categorizing me and serving up information that will interest me. At least, it will be of more interest than the generic content you serve to everybody. But you still don’t know who I am. In fact, you don’t even know my name–until I tell you.

Recognition–Web Sites That Greet You by Name

In 1996, when I wrote Customer Service on the Internet, Microsoft was just beginning to experiment with personal content (Figure 8.2). It was brand new.

Now we’ve gotten used to configuring My Yahoo! (Figure 8.3) on command, but how does Yahoo! know it’s me when I hit the My Yahoo! button? I didn’t log in. I didn’t use a password. I’m just another anonymous visitor, but I’m a visitor with a brand on my browser so they know where I’ve been this time. Yahoo! uses cookies, created by Netscape and now used by all browsers.

In a nut shell, a cookie is a small text file that the Web site can place on your computer. Only the site that placed it there can read it. When you ask for a page, the server looks for a cookie. If you have one, it reads the ID number and finds you in its database. If you don’t, it gives you one ..