Chapter 8

Developing History

That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.

—Aldous Huxley

How did Kevin Whittemore know that Mrs. Appleyard needed more than a new lightbulb before anyone spoke to her? Well, obviously he is observant. But more than that, he knew her as a customer who had been coming into the store for decades. His understanding of her needs and her history provided him with perspective about the kind of relationship response she expected. Being polite, she did not want to interrupt someone to help her (she was demonstrating the “acknowledgment” relationship type). But as soon as she caught Whittemore’s eye, he recognized her desire for a relationship response as more of a BFF. He knew she came to the store for more than a lightbulb; she was looking to speak with a friend.

Understanding and reacting to those cues, and developing that depth of history does not happen overnight. B.L. Ogilvie & Sons cultivated the relationship with Mrs. Appleyard over decades of interactions.

Unfortunately, we often do not have decades of history or the time and patience to develop deep histories with our online visitors, as we form and nurture relationships in the digital world.

In fact, digital interactions vary by the second. How can you generate a history with someone when you can barely keep his or her online attention between mouse clicks? To answer that, we must look at the two types of histories we can log in the digital world—overt and covert.

Overt History

Overt history is related directly to engagement. When someone responds to a Facebook post or posts a blog comment, you have an element of history with them. But it is not an element of history hidden in a database somewhere. It is history visible to the entire world. That history should be captured and tracked at every turn. Store it in a spreadsheet. Drop it in a database. Just put it somewhere. Thankfully, many social media tracking and analysis services and software provide simple methods to retain and examine overt interactions.

Covert History

Covert history is the behind-the-scenes data you can collect from website visitors. Whether you are using cookies or a registration process, this kind of history keeps track of the content with which people are engaging.

As the name implies, this type of history is difficult to interact with directly. It is all a jumble of IP addresses and codes and session IDs from the web server. But good analytical tools can give you a bird’s-eye view of what people are doing on your website. This helps create a more clinical history that, although less personal, is still very useful in pushing users through the relationship cycle and up the digital relationship pyramid.

1 + 1 = 3

When it comes to history in the digital world, the combination of overt and covert historical information enables you to not only generate meaning about your digital experience (i.e., Are visitors interacting with the experience as I designed it, and, if not, what are they really doing?), but also to classify and categorize people into their different relationship types. Many marketers might be fooled into calling these personas, but they are much more than that. The focus of categorizing data into a relationship type (which could be combined with other persona elements) is about capturing people’s desire for relationship response and understanding how they want to connect.

What’s a Persona?
For businesses and marketers, a persona is a set of attributes that categorize a prospective or existing customer by a set of needs, job responsibilities, industry, and other elements to provide a better way to target them with specific marketing materials. The concept has been around for quite some time. In fact, a definition goes back as far as 2002: Buyer personas are research-based archetypal (modeled) representations of whom buyers are, what they are trying to accomplish, what goals drive their behavior, how they think, how they buy, and why they make buying decisions. But the key, according to Tony Zambito, is that personas have “nothing to do with profiling. And, it has everything to do with buying behavior.”1 Why are personas important? Because buying behavior is a direct result of a relationship. When you don’t give people what they want and how they want it (i.e., appeal to their relationship needs), they will never buy anything from you even though they might still have an internal story that is driving the need for your product.a

Patterns within Patterns

As we discussed in Chapter 7, people change all the time in the digital world. Their relationship needs may be one type today and another tomorrow, adding to the increasing difficulty of keeping up with what they want from you (in order to make it a positive experience).

But the digital world is real-time.

People click, they comment, they click again. They share and like and forward. This is all reflected in the new buyer’s journey we illustrated in Chapter 4.

In the analog world, history was only partly real-time—when people were engaged in face-to-face discussions about the value of an LED lightbulb over an incandescent—but there was really no way to know if people were touching other kinds of lightbulbs down the aisle.

In the digital world, history can be truly real-time. That’s one of the benefits of businesses having digital relationships with their customers. Everything they touch or do becomes part of that history—even if you didn’t see it with your own eyes.

The Context of History

Real-time history gives us the context to enable personalization in real time. As we explained in Chapter 7, understanding context enables you to create a website that dynamically adapts to visitor interactions. But how does that technology know what kind of experience to give to someone? The answer is history.

Context is a powerful concept in the digital world because it combines transparent technologies and history (called behavioral data) in a way that makes a website seem almost like it was meant for each user.

All of the data that we collect about people, the covert history, enables us to create the context that provides for a personalized web experience. That, in turn, helps create highly targeted content that will help attract people to our digital experience.

History, then, as part of a contextual layer in your digital presence, is at the core of providing us the means by which to provide a truly personalized experience.

Never Getting Past “Hi”
Without technologies to enable context and personalization, a website can seem like it’s lacking something. It can seem like it’s two-dimensional. Robert Scoble, Startup Liaison for Rackspace and co-author of The Age of Context, imagines it like this:
“What if you and I had a relationship and every time that I met you, we had to start over. ‘What’s your name again?’ and ‘What kind of beer do you like again?’ and ‘Are you a meat eater or a vegetarian?’ If I had to start over again each time, you probably wouldn’t come over very often.”
And yet, this is how most organizations operate their websites—they know little to nothing about the users that visit. However, according to Robert, this isn’t indicative of just the digital world. It also happens in the real world, like with the Ritz-Carlton in Half Moon Bay, which we discussed in Chapter 1.
“If I didn’t remember anything about you,” says Robert, “you would find me weird. And that’s how I find most businesses today. Weird. They just aren’t serving me well. They just aren’t forming good relationships with me. We can’t get past ‘hi’ or ‘hello’ and ‘thanks for spending money with us.’ And that’s just lame.”
In order for organizations to form deep and meaningful relationships, whether it’s in the real world or the digital, they must have some history from which they can draw upon each time they engage with a customer.

Personalization and Relevance

Online personalization systems enable dynamic changes to be made to the presentation of an online experience to an audience member, including inserting relevant content, customizing greetings, making suggestions, and displaying specific offers, based on the visitor’s explicitly provided information, and, importantly, the implicit observation of visitor behavior and external factors such as time of day, referring source, and geolocation. MarketingSherpa continues to demonstrate through various case studies that organizations offering personalized online content enjoy higher conversion rates and lower abandonment rates.2 Personalization improves the visitor experience. Done well, it shows concern, understanding, and respect for the visitor’s time, allowing for faster and deeper online relationship development. For it to be truly effective, though, personalization cannot be contained to only websites. It must cross all online channels.b

Until recently, there seemed to be a generally accepted belief that the ability to offer this level of online personalization was limited to the largest online organizations—the Amazonian giants who could afford proprietary software and legions of mathematicians and programmers to attempt to imitate face-to-face interactions. In a recent study, “The Realities of Online Personalisation,” Econsultancy found that 94 percent of responding organizations believed personalization was critical, but most did not know where to start or how to offer a personalized online experience.3 Thankfully, new advances in technology allow targeted content to be delivered more easily and inexpensively, democratizing the playing field for all organizations.

Personalization requires the collection and analysis of vast amounts of historical data, and, as we talked about in Chapter 3 with the Ritz-Carlton, this data can be from the connection of multiple internal systems. But that’s not the only data. It also has to come from external sources like social media. And, of course, some can come from the audience itself through surveys and other interactions.

Just like historical data can be divided into overt and covert, audience data falls into two strata—known and unknown (anonymous).

Known

Known visitors have chosen to identify themselves, typically by filling out a form of some sort. Your audience is likely to want to engage you online in this way. In a recent Infosys survey, “Engaging with Digital Consumers,” over 50 percent of respondents reported they were comfortable sharing personal information when purchasing online.4 Interestingly, only 4 in 10 reported being comfortable sharing the same information when purchasing in person. You will be able to augment your understanding of known visitors with implicit observations, and with data provided by a third-party service such as Demandbase, Data.com, and even LinkedIn. There is virtually no limit to the types and forms of data available regarding known visitors.

Anonymous

Anonymous visitors have, by definition, not (yet) identified themselves, although it may still be possible to gather information about them as individuals by observing ambient data, meaning, quite literally, data that are surrounding the visitor’s online interaction—time, connection type, location, browser type, access device, language, even the weather conditions. Understanding what search term brought them to your site, for instance, can help you personalize content to be more relevant to that term. Additionally, using cookies (if available), anonymous visitor behavior, such as “time on page,” click patterns, and exact pages viewed can be tracked.

A Heightened Sensitivity
On May 25, 2012, the European Union began strict enforcement of its EU Cookie Directive. All companies that use cookies or other tracking technologies to gather info on EU citizens must inform visitors that their data is being processed, get prior consent before storing data on, or accessing information from, the device through which a user is visiting, allow visitors to access their data (to correct or delete), and disclose the purpose of the data collection. It’s probable that this kind of required opt-in policy will become the norm. People seem to be okay with sharing information in exchange for some sort of utility (as indicated by the Infosys study), but they want to know when they are doing it. Transparency, then (i.e., exposing details about how and what you are doing), can become a powerful form of authenticity and credibility.

Once the data collection requirements and opportunities have been investigated, the next step in applying the data to personalization is to segment the audience into groups with similar characteristics, interests, needs, and so on, so that content can be targeted more effectively. We talked about this in Chapter 5—applying profiles developed about individual need (culled from personal interactions with high Relawatt individuals) to other people in your relationship network who share similar characteristics.

With an understanding of target segments, rules can be established to deliver specific content to particular groups and individuals. Targeting rules can be based on the visitor’s inclusion in a particular segment (e.g., a college student), on a specific behavior or set of behaviors (three site visits without registering), on a specific characteristic (visiting the site after midnight), or any combination. Imagination is the only limitation here, but it is necessary to continuously try and test the effectiveness of rules. That’s the power of digital again over the real world—the ability to change and test activities that will affect relationship building in real time with relatively little cost.

Used intelligently, data analytics and personalization technology enable marketers to create the online equivalent of one-on-one conversation at massive scale.

Scale: Something We Can’t Get in the Analog World

Digital does not change our fundamental human desire to have relationships, but it adds scale to our ability to build and manage them.

There is no feasible way for someone in the store to know the history of more than a few dozen customers. In addition, a clerk can only deal with one person at a time. Also, unless the staff has daily huddles and keeps meticulous notes about Mrs. Appleyard and her cat’s health conditions, it just is not possible for every clerk to access, analyze, and leverage the store’s history with each customer.

Digital provides us the mechanism to do all that by utilizing technology to capture history, store it, analyze it, share it, and act on it in real time across millions of customers (if we are that lucky). This, in turn, allows us to provide a unique and powerful online experience that best meets the relationship needs of each individual.

Summing It Up

Ultimately, our ability to access, analyze, and leverage the history we have with people helps us connect better and faster with them. In the hardware store, that means we know how they behave and what they want from us as they walk into the store. Kevin Whittemore knew Mrs. Appleyard on sight . . . and knew exactly what type of relationship approach and assistance she needed.

Integrating a contextual layer and personalization into your digital presence enables you to do the same thing. Technology immediately begins to tailor the webpages to your visitor so that the entire digital experience they receive aligns with and appeals to the type of relationship they want, and the assistance they need.

Wow.

But there is more. By capturing their digital behavior, turning it into history, and wrapping it up into technology that creates context for each visitor, we can create personalized experiences that are comfortable and inviting, and that builds the strength and value of the relationships.

Think about it this way:

  • Understand what kind of relationship a person wants.
  • Give the person the experience and assistance he or she expects and needs.
  • Ensure the experience is positive.
  • Use the positive experience to move the relationship forward—to make a sale, change a belief, earn a vote, or achieve whatever your digital relationship goal may be.

Helpful Takeaways

Analyzing the history that you have developed (and are developing) with individuals within your audience is essential to almost everything you will do to build meaningful relationships. Here are some helpful tips, tricks, techniques, and things you can do today. Note that these aren’t in any particular order.

  • Start tracking the data that matters. Lots of organizations capture basic web and digital engagement data like the time spent on a page. This is great in aggregate but does little for developing any history with individual audience members. You need to implement technologies that provide you the ability to target individual users. Of course, that doesn’t mean that you’ll know their names, just that you will have a unique way to identify one anonymous visitor from another.
  • Implement a registration feature. The best way to gather personalized data is to ask users to register with your digital experiences. Perhaps that is a “member’s only” section on your website or an email address requirement for your mobile app. Regardless, once logged in, all of a user’s activity will be highly personalized and eventually form a history of interaction and engagement.
  • Add marketing automation. Rapidly becoming a mainstay for marketers, this software solution (integrated into your website) enables you to anonymously develop dynamic histories of website visitor behavior based on the individual’s interaction with your website. The software works especially well through links that include unique identifiers, such as those links you include in marketing campaigns like emails, landing pages, etc. When users click on these links, the software takes over and begins to build a profile of the visitor that it can deepen over time.
  • Connect your systems. The biggest issue that organizations face today is running their businesses with disparate, disconnected systems (like the Ritz-Carlton in Half Moon Bay, California, discussed in Chapter 1). This means that one part of the business has no knowledge of what the other part is doing . . . and no way to connect the history of an individual who visits different parts. The first step in developing a comprehensive history that can lead to more targeted, future activity is connecting the systems so that there is a complete picture of the user’s engagement with the business.
  • Differentiate the experience based on responses. Sometimes, the simplest way to determine how people want to be treated is to ask them. Take the Castello di Amorosa winery in Napa Valley. If you are a user of Instagram, you can get access to a different tour (offering more photographic opportunities) than non-Instagram-connected visitors.

Notes

1. Tony Zambito, “What Is a Buyer Persona? Why the Original Definition Still Matters to B2B,” Tonyzambito.com, May 27, 2013, http://tonyzambito.com/buyer-persona-original-definition-matters/.

2. Adam Sutton, “Case Study: Email Personalization: 750% Higher CTR and More Revenue for E-Commerce Site,” July 23, 2013, www.marketingsherpa.com/article/case-study/email-personalization-ctr-ecommerce-site.

3. Econsultancy, “The Realities of Online Personalisation,” April 2013, http://econsultancy.com/us/reports/the-realities-of-online-personalisation-report.

4. This is from an Infosys report that requires you to sign-up to receive: www.infosys.com/marcom/digital-consumer-study/default.asp.

aA great resource for building B2B personas is available from Mintigo, which can be found here: http://www.mintigo.com/creating-personas-for-b2b-marketing-ebook/

bAnd marketers agree. According to the “Real-Time Marketing Insights Study,” published by Neolane and the Direct Marketing Institute, “75 percent of respondents believe that delivering dynamic, personalized content across channels is highly important. For instance, marketers said that delivering dynamic, personalized content in email (80%), on the web (69%), on mobile devices (53%), at the call center (49%), at the point of sale (49%), and via social channels (45%) are all highly important” (www.dmnews.com/infographic-its-all-about-me/article/304587/).

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