#17: "Personalisation Is Nothing Without Relevance" with Tim Ryan

~ This transcript is automatically generated so may contain some errors ~

it doesn't need to be super sexy. There are things that you can do that are super sexy, but it's about making the journey as kind of frictionless and relevant as possible. possible. And I think that's, that's the key.

It's kind of making it as easy for a customer to come on. And not assuming that, you know, the customer, making the, the site as accessible for everyone as possible. And I think accessibility is massively key and it's a huge growing area

Welcome to Statements of Intent. In this 20 minute episode, we're addressing how eCommerce has lost sight of the people at its very heart. You, the customer. It's a chat that's optimistic, it's casual, it's probably slightly ranty in places, but that's okay. But it's a place where I talk to senior eCommerce marketers.

And share their statement of how they're looking to change the status quo of eCommerce, adding more care, being more considerate to those very people that they're selling to - the customer. I'm your host, David Mannheim, the founder of Made With Intent. And we're going to jump right into it. Have fun

Hi everyone. Uh, welcome to Statements of Intent. I'm your host David Mannheim. I always feel the need to say that and I've, I've no real idea why. I think people know who I am. They've clicked on our link, they know what it is. Why do I say that? I feel like it needs an intro. Uh, anyway, I'm here with Tim.

Tim, say hi. Hi! So Tim, formerly Sea Salt, formerly Rees, formerly Karen Millen, Uh, formerly Best Buy. You are very entrenched in the e commerce world from the sounds of things. Have I missed anybody off there?

Missed a few, yeah. Missed Disney. Um, can we have a look? Alshire. Uh, Lidl for a bit. Yeah, all things digital, all things e com.

What is it that you're so attracted to within e commerce? Why, why you've clearly carved a very particular path there. Why, why does that interest you so much?

I think it's kind of a couple of things really. So one is the fact that it's constantly changing. So if I kind of look back at when I started at Disney and to kind of where we are now, both from a, Um, usage and how many people actually shop online.

And obviously that's been helped by pandemics, et cetera, but also by an improvement in everything and the offering that is involved within digital e commerce. So I think that's a big part of it. And kind of, it's constantly changing. You've constantly got new providers, new solutions, new ideas, new approaches.

Um, and you've got real innovative brands. So it's not purely where it was. originally kind of probably driven by pure play. Um, and then you've kind of got some omni channel that kind of have tried to get to a point and, and now it's kind of just a mix and you see kind of real success from obviously your massive companies like Amazon, but then you see real success from much smaller companies that have kind of got a niche, um, Selling their brand direct, like companies like Surreal, the cereal company that just do things a bit differently, and I think it's really interesting to see.

And I think the other thing is for me, it's data. So where, obviously, when you go in store, there is data, they collect the footfall. Um, and they're kind of, if you're LinkedIn with your emails, you'll, they'll kind of connect with data that way. Um, and they'll see your average basket and they'll do a version of conversion.

Um, that kind of works for them. It's nowhere near the level of data and understanding that you can get through digital. And obviously that data is changing with kind of cookie, consent, et cetera. But that's not to say that we still don't have a huge amount of data. That is kind of something that we don't have within the physical retail.

I like the, I like the phrase that you used by the way, version of conversion. That feels like, that feels like a podcast in of itself, doesn't it? It

does, isn't it? Yeah. Anything that rhymes. Copyright it now.

Yeah. , anything that rhymes is a clear winner. It worked. Um, so, so I co completely agree that it's changed over the period of time, and of course I am knowing near as experienced as a, as as yourself.

But talk to me about how it's changed. For the good and for the worst, let's focus on the worst. Like, how, how has e commerce evolved over the past 15, 20 years for the detriment of society, I was going to say, but society or customers or retailers? What's gotten worse?

Oh, I think there's a lot more assumptions than there used to be.

Um, where originally, right back at the start, there was No such thing as personalization, really, right? Everyone got the same experience. And rightly or wrongly, um, that, that meant that it's kind of a bit more of a level playing field. You didn't feel like, people didn't feel like they were being chased around the internet.

They didn't feel like they were kind of being stalked on their devices. So effectively, there wasn't a need for all of this data consent, etc, because There was one, not that technology that was necessarily harnessing and doing taking that data and using it for the wrong purposes. And to, um, The kind of the actual way that technology has evolved means that there are kind of bad.

There's bad companies that are doing bad things, um, that are kind of taking advantage of that. And I think, um, so you've got that level of it. And then you've also got the area where. Um, people have been able to, um, in effect, check to reject how people are now operating. So, um, where we've tried to move away and assume that people know, um, things because they've done one slight behavior.

I'm thinking, I'm jumping down a kind of a rabbit hole, a rabbit warren of, okay, well, everything has to be based on that assumption. And rather than kind of giving the freedom to the customer to let them drive their experience And I think that's really important that it's Yes, a retailer, a brand has to kind of get across what they want to get across, but that needs to be coupled with that the customer, the visitors come on for a certain reason.

And whilst we can begin to understand why, what those reasons are. And, and start to rationalize them and present data and information back to them accordingly. At the same time, we shouldn't jump to conclusions and the assumptions, which we definitely weren't doing 15, 20

years back. Interesting. Customer, customer centricity.

It feels as though we have to, we talk about it an infinite amount more. It's always the year of customer centricity, is it not? Do you feel like we've moved closer towards customer centricity or further away?

Probably a bit both. Um, I, so I think where. Big data has been a thing that we've spoken about in the industry probably for seven or eight years, and it just seems to be going, oh, it's the year, it's the year.

And ultimately, where we see a customer, a customer is effectively a set of data. And whilst it's not to kind of take away the humanistic side of it, ultimately, you're going to know more about your customer by seeing the data that's behind them. So by being a data led company, You're then becoming a customer led business because you're effectively taking the data, which is the customer's behaviors, intent signals, um, and then effectively applying them into what, what the approach is for them across, uh, across devices, across channels, across, um, all elements of your proposition.

So I think. They are getting better, but at the same time, um, because of compliance and GDPR, et cetera, like, there are certain limitations to it. So how you can stitch up that data together, um, start to group customers together in a way that's not kind of. Again, giving massive, not being too specific and regimented and ultimately a customer can fit into a whole host of different cohorts or groups and that's fine.

Um, it's just about finding, right, what is the right thing for them. Um, and it's kind of the looking at, if you go back to like a traditional event diagram, there are so many bubbles there that are overlapping. And it would just look horrendous if you ever were able to visualize that for your customer.

But that, I think, almost needs to be a mindset, is that, look, there is no, there aren't like, I different types of customer. I think customer personas, for me, don't necessarily work when it comes to a digital perspective. They can give you a very top line view, but to kind of try and put all of your customers into four or five different personas is staggering, to be honest.

And whilst it can give you a, um, an approach. To how to build the site and to give, um, a better experience to these different personas. It's never going to be the be all and end all. So,

I mean, I'm trying to border the lines between what is segmentation and what is personalisation and what is personas in everything that you've said there.

I'm curious, are you pro personalisation or anti personalisation? Where do you sit on that fence?

I'm pro personalisation, I just think personalisation needs to be done in the right way, for the right reasons. So personalisation, where personalisation when probably about, I don't know, 8 or 9 years ago, personalisation when it was really like, kicking off and everyone was like, talking about it.

Um, personalization was just, oh, we need to do personalization, but it's kind of like, well, why do you need to do personalization? It's kind of going back to the testing mentality, go back to your hypothesis, build your hypothesis. I want to do this in order to, to see this result and start to do it. Do it and start to see the value of elements of personalization.

So personalization is going to be different to different companies. It's going to be different to different customers. Um, so my mom, for instance, might prefer to be, um, to see a less tailored, less personalized experience than me, who I'm kind of like. time poor, um, and happy for someone to personalize and tailor my experience because that I believe in the data.

As long as I'm being open and transparent, sharing my data, they will give me the best potential, um, product or service that I need. I think it's About relevance and it's that relevance to the different customer relevant to me is far more important than Personalization and in terms of the segmentation to personalization on that relationship.

I think segmentation is It's it's clearly different, but it's just about how you're segmenting data How you submit segmenting customers you can segment? Anything, right? You can segment your products, uh, you can segment your services. So, um, segmentation is such a broad area as is personalization, but it's kind of going, look, they kind of fit in the same, um, stratosphere.

Um, but at the same time, like it's about having a strategy that's right for you. So how you could have macro and micro segmentation. Uh, which I think is a really good approach to look at so looking at it from a macro like here's a big Big segments. Um, here are your, um, your active customers. Here are your, um, lapsed customers.

And there are some segments in between, but then also you can layer on different segments on top of that. So looking at, um, high value, low value, um, high frequency, low frequency.

That's fascinating. Yeah.

Yeah, and then kind of like building it down. So where you've got your top segments and then you can layer on the segments underneath is then when it comes to building advocacy, which is ultimately what any company and brand is trying to achieve.

You've got that journey of understanding, right? Well, here's our best customer. Um, who's in the upper right quadrant and we're trying to move everyone up to that, but where, what is the journey to get them up to that quadrant? Because. Someone who is, um, almost there, but low frequency and someone who is almost there, but low value.

They're two completely different customers. And then you can layer on all of the different behaviors around visits and conversion rates, et cetera. So there's just so much you can do.

I'm curious.

There's one thing that you said previously, which I really wanted to hook on because this show is all about having a statement of intent, like a flagpole that you put in the ground to say, this is what I believe.

And your statement at 10 is all about relevance over personalization and the importance between the two. And you said that you believe relevance is more important than personalization. What do you mean by that?

Um, I think the importance of relevance is ultimately we, I could have a, a site personalized to a very high degree, um, that those, that personalization to an extent is going to be based on assumptions.

And by kind of understanding what you know about your customers And what you also understanding what you don't know about your customers. You're going to remove the assumption And builds in relevance and then by allowing kind of the ability for the customer to tailor their own journey. So, um, yes, personalization is brilliant and it does amazing things.

Um, you want the customer to be able to choose things, right? Otherwise, you're. Otherwise, everyone would just be pushing all their money through PMAX. Driving a customer through to a product, the customer would then purchase that because it's the most relevant product for them, and then they would go through and purchase, and everyone would be laughing.

But that doesn't happen, and that's why PMAX tends to have the highest bounce rate of any of the channels, because kind of the relevance piece isn't necessarily the best, and therefore personalization is only as Good as kind of the on site journey the relevance that you're actually pushing through so it can't just be personalizing A bit of content or personalizing the product offering.

It's actually about making things more relevant and understanding The customer understanding where they've come from, what their drivers behind their journey. And it's not, as you know, it's not just about purchase, it's about understanding, it's learning more about the product, learning more about the brand, um, kind of coming back.

Like it depends on if you're a high value or a low value product, say buying a car online versus buying a pair of. Underpants online are kind of completely different. Um, so it's just about Straight to

underpants. Straight to underpants. Car versus underpants. The two main requirements in everybody's lives.

Exactly.

Exactly. You need to get there, but you probably need to be wearing some. Um

Like, do you see relevance as a precursor to personalization? A prerequisite to personalization? One leading to the

next? I think I almost see it as the rationalization of personalization. So, um, relevance is more important than personalized because ultimately you can have a hyper personalized experience, but if it's not relevant to you because you're not there in that journey that the personalization is trying to drive you to.

So the personalization is driving you to add to basket and you're not there yet, you're still in your research phase, then it's more important that you have more information, more content, short form video or kind of, um, UGC or whatever it is, but it's more important to have that because it's more relevant to the customer in the process.

That moment, then it is to kind of be hyper personalized with different things and saying your name.

That makes sense. So at Maid of Intent, we talk about being more appropriate. So we understand people's intent. So that enables our solutions or our experiences to be more appropriate. Then do you think there's a, maybe I'm getting into semantics here, Tim.

Do you think there's a difference between being relevant and being appropriate?

Um, I, I guess when I think of appropriate, I kind of obviously think of the converse and then saying like, what would be inappropriate for a customer to experience on site and so irrelevance to me makes more more sense. So kind of like, you don't want to have an irrelevant experience.

You want to have an immersive experience. We know, um, within the industry that a, the most valuable customer is an omni channel customer who shops both in store and online. So we want to drive more of that, but we also want to learn from what is driving that in store performance, what's driving that behavior.

And we know that's because it's immersive, that you get to kind of actually experience the brand, experience the product. And how can we do that? How can we drive that relevance and kind of, um, experience on, on site? And I think that's where. Um, understanding that becoming more relevant because you know those drivers of your in store performance or kind of just generally in store performances of other of other retailers and brands that can kind of really help to bring to life the online on site experience for your customers, um, which are going to kind of, um, help to drive that long term.

I guess one of the questions that's running through my head is, of course, it makes sense. I'm on the same bandwagon as you. How do you do it? And is there, is there any way that you can give me some kind of real life example? Because I imagine the answer to the question of how do you do it is understand your customers better.

Is there, is there some kind of example where you thought that was either a very relevant experience or a really irrelevant experience?

I think, um, one of the things that we've done most recently at SeaSalt that worked really well, it's really simple, was just, um, it's all about, for me, one of the things that's about, is for relevance, is also about kind of removing friction, so you want to go and have this immersive experience, but you don't want to have all of these barriers, you don't want to have loads of pop ups, no one likes that, and you want to, Effectively have a seamless experience be that on your mobile on your desktop and one of the things we looked at was how we could.

Remove friction, and we identified that when you go on to a listing page, you select a filter for your size, and then you click on a product, you realize it's not necessarily the right product for you, you go back to the listing page, and they've unselected the filters, or you go off the site, and then you come back, and you're still going back through that listing page, and the filter is not selected.

So what we did is use Tata, um, you've shown a interest in a medium, uh, therefore we're going to pre select the medium for you. Acknowledge the fact that we've pre selected the medium for you so you don't get confused. That means that you don't have to select it, it's always pre selected for you. And so it's relevant, listings, it's personalized, but it's really light touch and it doesn't need to be heavy touch for that because we know that you want to come look at t shirts.

Here are all of the ones we've got in a size medium for you.

Sure.

It just makes sense.

I often feel as though this term personalization has become this conceptual term. grandiose, sexy word. And in order for something to be abided by, that is a personalized experience. It also has to be a sexy thing to do.

And forgive me, that doesn't sound sexy. That doesn't mean that it's not ineffective.

Yeah, completely. And you can see like the results speak for themselves, right? You can see the, um, the update, you can see the. improvements in conversion. You can see the improvements in kind of dwell time. Um, generally the click through rates improve.

So as a result, all of the key metrics are going up. That's personalization. It doesn't need to be kind of, to your point, it doesn't need to be super sexy. There are things that you can do that are super sexy, but it's about making the journey as kind of frictionless and relevant as possible. possible. Um, and I think that's, that's the key.

It's kind of making it as easy for a customer to come on. Um, and not assuming that, you know, the customer, not assuming that like making the, the site as accessible for everyone as possible. And I think accessibility is massively key and it's a huge growing area, but I think it's something that needs to be considered by, by all brands to make sure that When it comes to it, understand who your demographic is.

And ultimately, if you're an online retailer, whilst you will have a core demographic, your overall demographic is anyone. And so loads of people have different, uh, accessibility needs and requirements. So therefore, by personalizing those, giving more relevance to it, that's another way of doing it.

personalizing that experience. Is it super sexy? No. Is it going to give you kind of a, a real good brand value, um, improve your relationship with your customers? A hundred percent.

We're going to leave it on there, Tim. Your wisdom radiates through the screen. Thank you so much for, uh, for helping and, uh, I'll see you on the next one.

Perfect.

There we have it. Thank you so much for listening. Please do like, subscribe and share on whatever platform it is that you're listening to on today. This show comes from the team behind Made With Intent, the customer intent platform for retailers. If you are of course, interested in being more profitable, whilst being more personal.

And please feel free to check us out at madewithintent. ai. Thanks again for listening and joining us on our mission to change how eCommerce sees, measures, and treats their customers. I've been your host, David Mannheim. Have a great day.

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