Reaching the Individual: Site Surfers Becoming People

Each vis­i­tor is unique. This sounds so obvi­ous, yet most sites treat all vis­i­tors the same. These days are num­bered as com­pa­nies real­ize that their sites are now their most impor­tant chan­nel for doing busi­ness, regard­less of the direct rev­enue con­tri­bu­tion today. It is now pos­si­ble to iden­tify like vis­i­tor inter­ests and even com­mon sales cycles through each click a vis­i­tor makes on a site. With new test­ing and tar­get­ing tech­nolo­gies, Web sites can lis­ten and respond intel­li­gently to cus­tomers (and poten­tial cus­tomers,) much like a real-life con­ver­sa­tion or visit to a store could result in great ser­vice.  Think about the last good cus­tomer ser­vice expe­ri­ence you had.  Most likely, the sales­per­son actu­ally lis­tened to your needs and offered you some­thing rel­e­vant prod­uct to fill that need. This same type of expe­ri­ence is pos­si­ble if your Web site is set up to lis­ten to vis­i­tors through their behav­ior.  Shov­ing offers to all vis­i­tors is a short-lived strat­egy for suc­cess today as com­peti­tors start enabling their web sites to act smarter.

While most sites have not yet imple­mented test­ing and tar­get­ing tech­nol­ogy, many com­pa­nies are start­ing to real­ize its impor­tance.  Social net­works are dri­ving this shift in how com­pa­nies think about per­son­al­ized mar­ket­ing, as they are all about indi­vid­ual vis­i­tors and their pro­files.  The pop­u­lar­ity of social net­works is dri­ving com­pa­nies to under­stand why cus­tomers really visit sites, and more impor­tantly why they come back, pur­chase, and then pur­chase again and again.  Under­stand­ing where poten­tial cus­tomers go on the Web, which net­works they belong to, and how to develop a deeper rela­tion­ship them becomes the mar­ket­ing focus. Stick­i­ness is no longer the pri­mary objec­tive of a Web site.  Dave Mor­gan pointed this out in his post on peo­ple net­works. Through rel­e­vant, per­son­al­ized mar­ket­ing based on online behav­ior, com­pa­nies can bet­ter build a rela­tion­ship with the indi­vid­ual cus­tomer.  As the online chan­nel matures, I think more often we’ll see the offline ser­vice aspect miss­ing in so many sites today.  Cus­tomers will begin to rec­og­nize this per­son­al­ized level of ser­vice online and will demand it in all of their online inter­ac­tions. Web sites that refuse to adapt to this will sim­ply be left behind.