Customers.com Technologies

Adobe Recommendations Delivers Personalized Actionable Content

By Sue Aldrich

About a quarter of Adobe’s revenues ($1 billion out of $4 billion) come from its digital marketing solutions. Adobe’s Digital Marketing Suite provides digital marketers with multi-channel, cross-lifecycle marketing and customer experience management tools. The chances are that if you’ve been on the Web or if you’ve used a mobile app today, you’ve already received one or more Adobe-based personalized recommendations.

Personalized cross-device marketing is strategic to Adobe. In November 2011, Adobe announced that it was re-focusing on digital media and digital marketing.

Adobe’s Digital Media Strategy
Adobe’s digital media strategy helps content creators develop and deliver rich content to run on any digital device. As part of that strategy, Adobe has shifted away from Flash and embraced HTML5 and launched the Adobe Creative Cloud for SaaS-provisioning of all the relevant tools that digital designers and developers need, as well as project rooms for sharing work in progress.

Adobe’s Digital Marketing Strategy
Adobe’s digital marketing strategy helps marketers maximize the impact of their digital experiences across devices and media types throughout the entire customer lifecycle. Key to that strategy are the rich tools that Adobe now has for tracking and monitoring customer experience across devices, and for delivery of personalized actionable content, e.g., recommendations to users when and where they will most value them.

This week, Sue Aldrich provides an in-depth review of two of Adobe’s strategic solutions for delivering personalized recommendations: Adobe Recommendations and AdobeTest&Target.

Need Personalized Recommendations? Peerius May Be Your Solution

By Sue Aldrich

If you sell products and/or deliver content online or via mobile phone, there’s usually a big benefit to being able to provide personalized recommendations tailored to each site visitor. Automated personalized recommendations can double or quadruple the click-through rate on your site, increase the number of products each customer buys, and increase the frequency with which they return to buy again. For the content owner—whether a merchant selling products, a publisher presenting articles, or a marketer presenting offers—recommendation technology means delivering the most attractive item in those few seconds before you lose your audience’s attention.

Web site owners worldwide have yearned for recommendations ever since Amazon started telling us that “people who bought this also bought that” and today tell us “52 percent of people who looked at this bought that; 26 percent bought this other thing.” A decade ago marketers had to spend a great deal to implement recommendations on their sites. Today, recommendation engines can be had for some hundreds of dollars a month and can be implemented in a few days. Don’t you just love SaaS?

Good Recommendation Solution for Retailers

By Patty Seybold

If you are an online or multi-channel retailer in search of a good, state-of-the-art recommendation solution, you should consider PredictiveIntent’s Personal Merchant. Your prospects and customers will receive targeted, personalized recommendations on your web site, on Facebook, via email, and on their mobile devices. These personalized recommendations are based on their behavior across channels and visits. The recommendations are personalized in terms of images, navigation, search results, and content selection.

The fact that this solution includes personalized search along with recommendations makes PredictiveIntent attractive to companies seeking both. Only a handful of vendors in the recommendation space also offer a search solution, including Adobe, Baynote, Locayta, and Peerius.

PredictiveIntent’s founders, Neil Hamilton and Stuart Swift, have deep mobile roots. So the solution is designed natively to deliver recommendations to mobile devices.
The company does not offer separate email and mobile products: these capabilities are embedded in the core product. Cross-channel customer profiles further enhance the value of PredictiveIntent’s algorithms in the mobile channel.

Results. The company reports that its recommendation solutions positively impact 27 percent of its clients’ revenues. On average, 14 percent of clients’ revenue comes directly from customers clicking on recommendations shown to them.

Speed of Implementa

tion. The typical timefr

ame for a launch is less than three weeks.

Lets Your Customers Opt Out of Behavioral Tracking. According to Sue Aldrich, “PredictiveIntent has the only recommendation solution we’ve yet seen that allows customers (end-users, visitors) to opt-out of behavioral tracking and have their behavior deleted. Social data is collected and used when visitors have logged in to Facebook. These two features increase the likelihood that PredictiveIntent’s clients will be in compliance with the emerging ‘cookie laws,’ which require user permission before placing a cookie and collecting user information. PredictiveIntent’s blog post, “Cookie Law Solutions” provides an excellent review of cookie laws and compliance.”

PredictiveIntent Recommendations Evaluation
PersonalMerchant’s Strong Architecture and Industry Focus Deliver Revenue for Retailers
By Susan E. Aldrich, Sr. VP and Sr. Consultant, Patricia Seybold Group, May 17, 2012

Revisiting the Requirements for Evaluating Recommendation Technology

Once again, our expert on merchandising and recommendations, Sue Aldrich, looks at the decisions and criteria you should consider before implementing a recommendations solution. As she advises, choosing a vendor wisely is always better than choosing often. And to aid you in that effort, she offers insights into how recommendations are crucial to effective targeting and personalization, how recommendations are best used, and what the requirements are for the marketers, merchandisers, editors, business analysts and other business people managing the recommendations, as well as for the end-customers who receive the recommendations.

As we move forward, Sue will use this updated framework for evaluating recommendation solutions< as she analyzes the major offerings in the market.

You can use this framework to gain an overview of the functionality that makes a difference in the quality of the personalized and targeted recommendations you deliver by email, on your web site, and on mobile devices. It’s also an extremely valuable tool for those of you evaluating recommendation solutions on your own so that you do choose wisely.

Recommendation Evaluation Framework, Version 2
Evaluating Solutions for Personalization and Recommendations
By Susan E. Aldrich, Sr. VP and Sr. Consultant, September 22, 2011

Why Do Data Savvy Marketers Have an Advantage?

By Sue McKittrick

Recently, there has been a flurry of activity around data-driven decision making.

The McKinsey Global Institute’s recently released study, "Big Data: The next frontier for innovation, competition, and productivity," states that “Analyzing large data sets—so called big data—will become a key basis of competition, underpinning new waves of productivity growth, innovation, and consumer surplus… For example, a retailer using big data to the full could increase its operating margin by more than 60 percent.”

The Social Science Research Network made a similar discovery in its report, “Strength in Numbers: How Does Data-Driven Decisionmaking Affect Firm Performance?” stating that “Using detailed survey data on the business practices and information technology investments of 179 large publicly traded firms, we find that firms that adopt Data-Driven Decisionmaking have output and productivity that is 5-6% higher than what would be expected given their other investments and information technology usage.”

How Customer-Centric Is the Evolving Content Curation Ecosystem?

By Patricia Seybold

Why do we need content curation? To help us find and highlight the gems of useful information among the clutter. Content curation aggregates, filters, organizes, and highlights information for a specific audience. There’s a growing ecosystem of professional content curators (a hot career opportunity!), suppliers of technology to automate content curation, and marketers and social media practitioners who are using content curation to attract prospects, to nurture leads, and to keep customers engaged with their brands.

We’ve been covering content curation as a hot new discipline. Sue McKittrick has created a framework for evaluating content curation platforms and services that are used by B2B marketers. She has also reviewed a number of content curation platforms, including ConnectedN, Eqentia, Loud3R, and today, Curata. She looks at how well these solutions make it easy for the marketer, content curator, and subject matter expert to do their jobs. She also reviews these platforms from an information-consumer’s point of view.

But, today, let’s step back and think about this evolving ecosystem. How well does it actually help end-customers get the information they care about?

Want Marketing Success? Examine Your Internal Processes Before You Invest in Technology!

By Patricia Seybold

Today’s marketers need to use social media, email, mobile, and web technologies to effectively target and personalize their messages. Ideally, all of these targeted and personalized “campaigns” are managed by an integrated suite of marketing automation tools.

Marketing automation is one of the fastest growing niches in the technology landscape for good reason: it enables marketers to personalize their nurturing of leads and get higher conversion rates. Personalized marketing results in higher conversion rates for self-service sales, better quality leads to sales people for assisted sales, and, of course, higher revenues. It also helps marketers reduce creative production costs, cut short poorly performing campaigns, and improve predictability of revenue.

However, too many marketers view the technology as the panacea, so they often select and start to implement technologies, such as marketing automation systems, before addressing their own organizational issues and business process requirements.

Empowering Your Subject Matter Experts to Engage with Social Media

By Patricia Seybold and Susan McKittrick

In B2B marketing, experts' content lures prospects and drives online engagement…but the marketers who run these marketing campaigns, by and large, usually aren’t the technical experts in the content areas that interest their company’s customers. It's often hard for marketers to get the real experts in the company to participate in social media conversations; these SMEs are too busy and/or they undervalue the results that can be obtained by commenting publicly and/or contributing their own perspectives to the topics of interest to customers.

That's why we became interested in a social media curation and commenting platform that's designed to help professional subject matter experts become social media curators and commenters. ConnectedN focuses on your experts' needs to:

a) Identify interesting content from trusted sources

b) Highlight or comment on that content on a branded microsite

c) Get legal/marketing approvals for any content or commentary that needs it

c) Redistribute links to highlighted content and/or the expert's comments on third-party content to a variety of social media sites (Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.)

d) Control the time(s) of the day/week, etc. that they devote to reviewing and commenting on potentially relevant and useful content

ConnectedN’s Content Curation for Social Media Engagement
Enabling Busy Subject Matter Experts to Deliver Valuable Content to Clients and Prospects
By Susan McKittrick, Analyst and Senior Consultant, Patricia Seybold Group, March 24, 2011

How to Keep Customers and Prospects Engaged?

By Patricia Seybold

Provide Fresh Insights and Timely, Compelling Content

We’re all trying to grab the scarce attention of our target audiences—prospects and customers. One way we do this is by providing authoritative content in and around our expertise and our brands. We all disseminate our ideas, how to’s, and insights in a variety of ways. We use social media outreach, targeted opt-in emails, online discussions, informative e-newsletters, ever-changing content on our Web sites, and we link to videos, images, and audio that people will find appealing and seductive.

Coming up with new fresh content to showcase every day or every week can be a daunting task. But the metabolism of the Web and the rhythm of social media is greedy. It’s hard to keep up—both as a consumer of information and as a disseminator of information. As a brand owner, you want to be top of mind and easy to find when the customer’s need or mood strikes. That means that you need to be on their radar.

That’s the rub. It’s virtually impossible for any organization—even a professional publishing organization, much less a normal organization that isn’t in the publishing business—to continuously create and disseminate insightful, useful and captivating content on the topics of interest to our audiences.

The Next Big Thing: Content Curation

 By Patricia Seybold

Information over-supply and customers’ short attention spans have created the perfect storm of demand for a new genre of tools. Our customers are swimming in a sea of undifferentiated, unfiltered information. Every brand owner wants to provide authoritative information on the topics our customers care about. But our own internal experts now vie with third-party experts, passionate fans, uninformed bigots, and a cacophony of noise for customers’ scarce attention. It’s not enough to provide authoritative information on our Web sites. We also need our content to turn up everywhere our customers hang out. And we can’t rely only on our own internally-generated content. Customers trust third-party sources and each other more than they do the brand owner.

In this new world of content overupply and shorter attention spans, marketers now have three goals in providing the right information at the right time to customers and prospects:

1. Be perceived as authoritative and trusted.

2. Provide high quality information and resources, including valued and trusted third-party experts’ and customers’ contributions.

3. Provide a constant stream of timely, fresh, and valuable information to all the places and channels that customers frequent.

This is a tall order! Therefore marketers now need tools and services that make it easy for them to find, filter, aggregate, and curate targeted content that will appeal to their audiences.