Personalization, done effectively, is a lot more than making product recommendations or using technology to welcome a visitor by name. Smart personalization is the process of providing more relevant content and offers to your visitors based on their preferences and behavior.

I call it persona-lization.

Thankfully, today’s technologies have come a long way from those that would recommend “customers who bought my book ‘Call to Action‘ should also buy clean underwear.”

Moving Beyond Demographics

For over a decade, I’ve been railing about demographics’ limited…

...continue to read "The Power of Persona-lization"

Grok readers are doubtless familiar with the four temperaments we at FutureNow use to form personas.  If you’re new to personas, we suggest you take a detour and read this overview and then part 2 of how to get started with personas.

Assuming you’re familiar with the four temperaments, you know that one of the challenges of Persuasion Architecture is to satisfy the needs of the different buying modes on your website.  We generally recommend certain design principles for certain…

...continue to read "How to Hook Your Humanistic Visitors"

I knew I had to buy a copy as soon as I saw it on the magazine stand: the issue of Time Magazine with Presidential temperament as the front cover story.  They even had four presidential faces on the cover, which, before examining them, made me think of previous explanations of temperament using the Four Presidents on Mt Rushmore:

Dutiful George Washington for Sensing-Judging / Methodicals Philosophical Thomas Jefferson for iNtuitive-Thinking / Competitives Rambunctious Teddy Roosevelt for Sensing-Perceiving / Spontaneous…

...continue to read "Presidential Candidates, Temperament & Website Copy?"

The financial crisis is here. It’s not a matter of if it will affect you and your company, only a matter of when and how much. Clients and friends are checking in with varying reports, some are watching their growth plateau, others are watching sales trend downward.

Overall, conversion rates are starting to trend downward.

Almost everyone I speak with is looking for areas to cut expenses in and approaching spending from a more frugal mindset. Some are beginning to make drastic…

...continue to read "Online Marketers Can Weather the Financial Crisis"

Jenny Craig has just announced their new celebrity spokesperson, and they haven’t disappointed me. But they did throw me for a loop.

Remember a few weeks back, when I wrote about the perceived marketing strategy for the Jenny Craig weight loss centers? At the time, I ruminated over the possibility that the marketing and advertising execs at Jenny Craig were either consciously or unconsciously using personas to drive the success of their celebrity spokespeople campaigns. (To read the original post, traverse…

...continue to read "Jenny Craig Does Me Proud… and Throws Me a Curveball"

Yesterday Susan Greene wrote this comment to my previous post:

Great video, great message.  Now imagine that the guy in the suit worked for a corporation, and his boss asked him to come up with the words for the beggar’s sign. 
 His sentence would have been made into a paragraph by Corporate, watered down by Legal, and politically corrected by Human Resources.  I’m thinking it would be a completely different message by then. 
 Uh…

...continue to read "Do you share Susan’s Cynicism?"

Several of my recent columns have dealt with testing and optimization. Today, I’ll focus on the other half of the online marketing world, those who must drive leads through their site.

1. Review Your Lead Generation Forms

Typically lead-gen site forms fail in two major areas:

Many lead-gen sites simply copy forms from a site they like, giving little thought to the nuances and the difference between their business goals and the site they copied. The result can lead to a slew of unqualified…

...continue to read "5 Simple Tips for Lead-Generation Sites"

“Information Architecture involves the design of organization and navigation systems to help people find and manage information more successfully.”

Basically, Information Architecture (IA) views websites as libraries in need of the right kind of card catalogue set-up to facilitate information access by visitors.

But most websites aren’t libraries, or merely stores of information. In fact, most commercial websites are more interested in persuading visitors to take certain actions (i.e. converting) than they are in providing access to information.

In this sense, the interactivity enabled…

...continue to read "When Information Architecture Can Fall Short"

With annual revenues for the weight-loss industry estimated at $60 billion a year, competition is fierce. Food-based programs like Nutri-System and Weight Watchers account for hundreds of millions of dollars, so getting the right message across to potential customers is critical.

While other companies have featured real-life success stories in their advertising, Jenny Craig has chosen another route: the celebrity spokesperson. While I’m not a big proponent of celebrities as an effective marketing tool, Jenny Craig has applied the use of…

...continue to read "How Jenny Craig Uses Personas for Successful Marketing"

If you were to walk through the offices of FutureNow, you would get a sense that while we were in college any one of us could have been cast in the movie Revenge of the Nerds. A few of us got made fun of for being socially-awkward “bookworms.”

While it may not make you popular with cool kids, fancy book reading does have its benefits. So I couldn’t help but laugh when I read about a new study published in the…

...continue to read "Harry Potter and the Secret of Conversion"