Barilliance eCommerce Personalization Blog » personalization

Social Targeting and Personalization

Ido Ariel — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 11:59:18 +0000

Most of the targeting done today is based on intent and behavior. For example offering promotions to new visitors or changing landing pages banners dynamically based on search keywords or Geolocation.

We think that the next level of targeting and personalization will be based on information derived from the shopper’s social network profile.

60 Million people used Facebook connect in 2009. This number is amazing if you consider the disaster Facebook Beacon program created not long ago. The main difference is that now, users explicitly allow Facebook to access their information and have full control over the information that is published to their wall.

While the basic Facebook login provides is a 1 click signup process, it presents many untapped opportunities for online retailers to differentiate themselves using this technology, and personalize the shopping experience.

Here are a few ideas to get you started thinking about the new possibilities Facebook login opens up:

Welcome shoppers who have upcoming birthdays, with a special message or even better with a credit towards their next purchase
Show shoppers pictures of friends with upcoming birthdays and recent products they added to their wish list (Amazon already does that)
Identify shoppers with high social capital (for example more than 500 friends) and offer them incentives to perform social actions on the site such as “become a fan”
Music stores could promote products based on artists and bands the shopper “likes”
Simple viral promotions that use “invite friends” functionality will be much more effective than asking users to enter email addresses of their friends to get a discount

These are just a few examples we have started to experiment with . There are many creative ways you can engage customers who login using Facebook.

personalized email recommendations without integration

Ido Ariel — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 15:50:33 +0000

We’ve been supporting email recommendations for a while now but it required our customers to use our apis which also meant – an “IT project”. We noticed that this approach creates a barrier for adoption of the technology and we thought that there must be a better way to add product recommendations to emails without pushing the integration burden to our customers.

We are excited to announce that in the spirit of our “zero integration” philosophy we came up with an innovative way that allows our customers to add personalized product recommendations to emails without any coding. And even better, our new product works with any email marketing platform that supports custom fields.

As a marketer all you need to do is login to your Barilliance account and create an email recommendations widget and then:

1. Select your email provider

2. Customize the widget if you want to

3. Copy and paste the HTML into your email marketing template

4. That’s it!

After you hit “Send” in your email marketing software , your emails will contain personalized product recommendations based on customers’ recent activity on your website.

Personalized store locator

Ido Ariel — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 11:18:23 +0000

There are so many opportunities to enhance the shopping experience by personalizing it. A few days ago I came across rockport.com and found their use of my Geolocation information to be very compelling.

Rockport shows you the nearest stores to you at the bottom of the page

This experience is much better than the standard one and definitely sets rockport apart. I wish they would have take it even further and show me product availability in stores near me automatically when I’m browsing products on the site.