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Oct 1st 2019 ux
Today, everybody agrees on the positive impact of personalization, for consumers and businesses alike. From simple demographic based website personalization to comprehensive behavioral based multichannel personalization, every step towards a more personalized experience is a step in the good direction.
Having said that, how do you do personalization right? Which strategy is the right one for your audience and your business? What is the line between a creepy personalization and a personalization that really enhances the experience — and serves your bottomline?
This past July, we announced Algolia Summer ‘19 feature launch, enabling businesses of all sizes to deliver fast, tailored and personalized experiences across any channel.
Today, as we unveil the General Availability of our Personalization Simulator, we’d like to double down on the importance of total visibility and control of your personalization strategy.
Personalization done wrong is worse than no personalization at all. Poor implementation has the potential to annul every uplift brought by personalization. Or even worse, damage the experience and drive your users and shoppers away from your brand. Here are key pitfalls to watch out for.
Unfortunately, the complexity doesn’t stop here.
As Jay Baer puts it, “[…] we cannot ever forget that our audiences—not us—are those that decide what is satisfying and what is creepy. They decide what is clever and what is stupid. They decide what is in bounds and what is out of bounds.”
You won’t be able to quickly assess the behavior of your personalization, nor optimize it, if you have no visibility on the logic behind it. Of course you will probably A/B test a personalized vs. non-personalized experience before rolling out your personalization to all your digital properties and all your traffic. But you’ll still be exposing a potentially broken experience to part of your traffic for several business cycles, and losing those users, as well as wasting this time before iterating.
Giving the keys of a core element of your user experience to a black box has its downsides even when it works well. You won’t be able to know why your personalization strategy is performing well, and to apply those learnings to other parts of your experience, or your business altogether. Visibility of the personalization logic is therefore critical.
Visibility unlocks even more value when you can act upon your learning, and define this personalization logic. Like in any conversation, context matters. Instead of blindly applying a personalization algorithm built for any business, control on the personalization logic allows you to adapt it to your business and your audience. If you know that a visit to a product page is less important than an “add to cart”, or that an interest in a brand is more meaningful than an interest in a color, you should be able to apply it to your personalization.
Personalization is key in every part of the user experience, and we believe it is especially true for search and discovery. Search and discovery are where consumers will most clearly state their intent. Answering them with irrelevant, non-personalized content is not an option.
At Algolia, we believe that our customers should have full visibility and control over the search and discovery experience they build for their business, and their audience. We enable our customers to combine their knowledge, the data we surface to them, and our algorithms in order to achieve best results. And it is with this mindset that we’ve built our personalization.
Algolia Personalization Simulator is the human-facing side of our personalization engine.
Control:
Visibility:
Transparency:
Let’s look at a real life use case of this new tool. A large luxury fashion marketplace in Europe is using Algolia to power their search and discovery experience.
Given the breadth of their catalog (~1M items), it’s reasonable to think that all their shoppers aren’t looking for the same items. So,they decided to offer their shoppers a personalized experience — one that made sense for their audience, business and catalog.
Their business is unique which is why the ability to control the personalization logic matters hugely. For instance, people clicking on very high-end handbags might just want to have a look at them and not actually buy them. Therefore, the ability to tell Algolia that an add to cart or add to wishlist is a way more important event to consider than a simple click on an item is critical.
In addition, they’ve seen that shoppers tend to buy items from the same brand, while the color for instance isn’t that important. That’s why they decided to optimize the personalization logic to show their shoppers items of the brands they interact with the most in priority. A black box personalization tool that optimized for criteria that didn’t make sense for them wouldn’t have been productive.
Personalization is only the cherry on the cake of a great experience. We have more tips and best practices for your multi-channel experiences. Watch our Algolia Summer ‘19 webinar on demand to learn how to create amazing, personalized experiences across platforms.
And if you prefer a personal tour, we’ll gladly connect you to a search specialist. If you’d like to speak to a search specialist. Meanwhile, we’d love to hear your personalization tips. Leave a comment or tweet to us.
Tips and checklist tactics you still have time to implement.
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