By Susan E. Aldrich
Sr. VP and Sr. Consultant, Patricia Seybold Group
Recommendations have become the new key to improving the electronic customer experience. Recommendation technologies are used not only to suggest other products for shoppers to consider, and to personalize email content to make it more compelling by including images of recently viewed products. Recommendation technology is increasingly being used to personalize much of the online experience, including selecting different look-and-feel templates for different segments, varying the choice of images on certain pages, adjusting navigation options, and changing the rules for selecting and ranking search results.
We expect that use of recommendations will be widely adopted in ecommerce in the coming year. The technology is available as a service, meaning that you can deploy it quickly. The impact is swift, within three to five weeks. And the impact is significant, lifting revenue ten percent and more. As more retailers use recommendations, and use them across channels to improve email and call center interactions, customers’ expectations for engaging interaction will rise. Merchants who are being cautious about recommendations will be signing up for recommendations a year hence to win back their customers. B2B marketers will eventually catch on that recommendations enable them to deliver some of the personalization that their customers have been demanding for years: only show us the items appropriate for our industry or geography, prioritize what I usually buy, prioritize our negotiated items and prices, keep my purchasing agents in the correct categories, notify me when my items are being discontinued.
Marketers are finding recommendation technology from a variety of sources, from their ecommerce platform, their search engine, recommendation engine vendors, and, as with Omniture, with a marketing suite. In our January survey, we saw that 68 percent of respondents preferred to use recommendation technology that is embedded in something they already own.
Adobe’s Omniture Recommendations marries technology for recommendations with Omniture’s Web analytics, site search, and site testing and optimization technologies. This creates a unified platform for merchants, supported by a unified service team at Omniture committed to making each merchant successful. The integration of the technology and the services make the addition of Omniture Recommendations pretty seamless for merchants in terms of day-to-day tasks, and pretty swift in terms of delivering uplift.
Omniture Recommendations
Integration with Powerful Omniture Marketing Suite
By Susan E. Aldrich, Sr. VP and Sr. Consultant, April 1, 2010
