World Wide Web marketing is about one-to-one marketing of value-added services and information to the Internet user. One can market on the Internet most effectively by catering to the individual through customization. A number of high-profile companies on the Web are offering such “personalized” web sites, including InfoSeek (”InfoSeek Personal”), Ziff-Davis (”Personal View”), Bank of America (”Build Your Own Bank”), Amazon.com (”Personal Notification Service”), Netscape (”My Page”), and Microsoft Network (”Custom Start Page”), to name a few.
Personalizing your web site to each user gives you the opportunity to deliver a tailored message to an infinite number of target markets. Your web site can change based on the user’s buying and surfing habits, his past usage of your site, his demographics, his relationship to your company, and a multitude of other attributes which you could collect from your users online or cull from your corporate legacy databases. For example, imagine a customer who is surfing an online computer catalog and purchases a pack of floppy disks. Two weeks later he returns to the site and finds that floppy disks are “On Sale” that week. What he doesn’t realize is that he is the only person receiving the sale price, based on his recent purchasing patterns.
This type of “mass customization” makes a user’s visit more efficient and productive, thus saving him time and money. It encourages customer self-service. By catering to individual needs on a personal level, you foster self-reliance and lower support costs. Personalization also makes it possible to track visitors and correlate web site usage data with customer profiles. So not only does such a strategy allow you to do targeted value-added marketing, but also the user profiles and patterns that you collect will provide invaluable data for your marketing departments!
This in-depth, half-day workshop, is specifically designed for non-technical marketing and customer service professionals. We will:
- Explore basic concepts, terms, practices, and directions
- Examine closely a number of successful personalized web sites and analyze, in detail, the characteristics of their success
- Illustrate exactly how these companies are creating a personalized experience for each user, thus creating satisfied
customers and ultimately reducing costs, and most importantly… - Show you how to apply these techniques to your own online marketing and sales venture
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