Personalization or CRO? Inbound vs. Outbound

Recently, I came across this brilliant Marketoonist cartoon by Tom Fishburne . Guy Yalif was kind enough to share it and a good discussion came up that I believe deserves its own blog post. It also has a place in my upcoming book on #personalization called ‘Hello $Firstname’.

The cartoon displays so brilliantly how marketers very carefully work personalization into their practices when they are working with #outboundmedia such as email and #advertising. On the website however, not so much. It’s obviously funny because it’s true – by why is that the case? Are all online managers stupid? I beg to differ...

Prioritizing between Conversion Rate Optimization and Personalization

Some see Conversion Rate Optimization (#CRO) and Personalization as two very different things. They both are – and yet they aren’t. Obviously a personalized message to the right person at the right time etc. can help increase conversions. But until you get to know your customers through consistent data collection and a persistent login that isn’t prone to deprecate in the everlasting ‘privacy war’ – it makes sense to spend time on optimizing the general CX for the unknown customer as opposed to optimizing for the few known customers. These customers may in turn have quite different customer preferences. CRO will consist of experimentation to find the best possible selection and positioning of generic content, navigation and functionality to maximize the share of the average visitors converting into becoming customers through making a purchase.

Even when you get to a point where you can actually identify most of the website visitors you’d still want to spend plenty of time with optimization just due to the fact that building websites, ecommerce and apps are quite complex of nature and there’s a high degree of arbitrary design decisions that are made during such a project and thus very little chance that you got them all right in the first go. No matter how good your personas and your designers are.

Start with generic CRO - move gradually towards Personalization

Once you know customers well enough and the generic experience is well groomed and most pebbles on the road /friction have been removed, then switch to personalization tactics instead while still measuring the effect in much the same way as with CRO. In practice, if possible, always test the personalized version (e.g. all the personalized variants as a whole) against a non-personalized version. Basically that’s still CRO - but with personalization on top.?

The time to switch from CRO to Personalization varies depending on the specific marketing discipline and the channel

Due to the different nature of marketing disciplines, the time to switch from a generic CRO approach to a Personalization approach varies.?

Remember that when working with outbound communication, the exact message that you use to catch people’s attention means everything, because you are actually disturbing these people. If I’m disturbed – it better be relevant, and personalization can help create that experience.

As a consequence this means that personalization should start earlier for outbound marketing disciplines. Let’s explore a little deeper.

Assuming a fairly wide definition of personalization, working with campaigns on paid media is hardly possible without doing any king of personalization. Gone are the days where everybody watched the same TV show Friday night. Even if we turn to Out-of-Home media such as posters on bus stops or simple posters the placement of these alone carries a connection with the people living in this kind of neighborhood. Some would claim this is ‘just segmentation’ - but when working with multiple different content pieces and segments, the fine line between segmentation and personalization becomes very blurry.

For campaigns based on owned media such as e.g. email newsletters, there is definitely the option of sending a one-size fits all newsletters and we all receive these now and again. Many marketers are doing subject line testing which basically is CRO. On the other hand it takes very little effort to let customers self segment either at sign up by clicking ‘Subscribe to women’s’ or ‘Subscribe to men’s’ or asking for a few details such as interests or preferences. So even if you have trouble getting data integrated into your execution platforms there is almost no excuse not to do a little personalization of at least the subject line, the highlighted offer, or the selection of product feeds in the emails themselves. Point being that personalization also starts early for owned media campaigns.

Marketing Automation projects focus primarily on matching the right moment of truth with the right message. For as long as this message is generic and supporting the customer in completing a certain task by removing friction, you could argue that this is in fact both optimization as well as personalization. When the time comes to crafting specific variants of this message depending on the receiving segments however, you’ve definitely moved on to personalization.

The move from CRO to Personalization comes later for websites and apps

As we just discussed the switch to personalization from CRO comes late for many inbound platform projects such as websites and apps. On these platforms, the personalization of messages is secondary to personalizing the content feeds for products, articles, shows and such. So to the extent that personalizing the content feeds is easily accessible, then by all means start this process early. But hold the effort for personalizing messages and functionality a while.

The cartoon is still funny and it’s true. But there are normally sane commercial reasons for this. Am I against website personalization? Totally not! Carefully curated landing pages and ‘Browse by need’ can take you far though. Consider how well you are doing this before becoming too myopic with personalization.

Thanks to Marianne Stjernvall and David Mannheim for excellent discussions on this topic. I realize (hope?) that not all people will agree to the above - please give me your feedback and comments below!