In Chapter 13 of Hello $Firstname, Mark Robertson reads ‘Personalization on Inbound Platforms’.
Mark Robertson is Partnerships Director at Mastercard Dynamic Yield and has spent around 25 years working across marketing, technology, sales, partnerships, and tools for both outbound and inbound marketing. In this chapter, he reads about personalization on websites, apps, and other inbound platforms.
The chapter explains that visitors arrive on inbound platforms with some kind of intention. If campaigns and marketing automation have done their job, the brand may even have helped spark that intention. The question then becomes how websites and apps can respond with the right content, functionality, messages, and feeds.
The chapter argues that the core customer experience must come before personalization. A website or app must first work well as a self-service experience. Only then should marketers add dynamic personalization, starting with ‘My’ pages, then content feeds, then personalized messages based on intent, and eventually the hiding of irrelevant content that creates unnecessary friction.
In his reflection at the end, Mark draws a clear distinction between testing, conversion rate optimization, and true personalization. He also points to the importance of operability across CDPs, loyalty systems, CMSs, digital asset management systems, ecommerce platforms, and analytics tools. His view is that AI will push inbound personalization beyond single-page testing towards more journey-based optimization.
The chapter reminds marketers that inbound personalization is not just about changing the homepage banner. It is about understanding customer intent in near real time and designing the whole platform experience around what the customer is trying to do.
More resources from the Hello $Firstname universe
You can buy the physical book here:
https://amzn.eu/d/6jV4QZT
If the Amazon EU link does not work in your country, please search for Hello $Firstname: Profiting from Personalization, AI Edition on your local Amazon store.
You can download the illustrations and models from the book here:
https://www.omnichannelinstitute.com/en/resources
You can also learn more about the Personalization Cards and Canvas, which help teams turn the Bowtie of Personalization into practical use cases, here:
https://www.omnichannelinstitute.com/en/personalizationcards
