Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

The three Miami experiments show that as long as people think information is personalised to them they are interested – even if there is no actual personalisation. The “Dear First Name” error is not a problem if the remainder of the email contains information that is of interest to the recipient. Because of this, they think the material is personalised.

Of course, this assumes you know the real interests of your target customers. This is where web technologies let marketers down. Web page advertising, for instance, uses past browser history to target adverts to people. However, it becomes incredibly annoying when you always see advertisements for items you have already purchased. No longer is the advertising about something in which you are interested. As a result, it is like calling David by the name Kevin.

Similarly, many e-commerce sites use visitor purchase history to present a page of options that is “personalised”. However, this frequently fails. If you have been shopping for gifts for a friend at an online retailer you are not that interested in the items yourself. Hence, the so-called “personalised” page is nothing of the sort. It would be better suited to your friend.

For marketers, there is another problem. People do not like their activities being tracked. In one study conducted by Adobe more than two-thirds of people say it is “creepy” when websites track their activities. Increasingly, too, web browsers offer private browsing and Internet security suites are preventing the data from being collected in the first place. The result, inevitably, is going to be that just as marketers start to be able to gather more information to provide greater levels of web personalisation, users are going to stop that from happening....