MozCon Day 1

Hello from Seattle! My first MozCon so you can imagine how excited I am right now plus I met so many awesome people at the conference and at the #MozCrawl of course!

Alright so for those who could not attend or are looking for the key takeways, I have few notes here. BIG thanks to the Unbouncers!

Rand Fishkin, @randfish

Full slide presentation here: http://www.slideshare.net/randfish/introduction-to-mozcon-2015

If we don’t build the thing that kills us, someone else will
Industry disruptors focus on ideas that’ll make the 10x change – not the incremental difference.
Our innovation is usually restricted to the areas we’re allowed to control and influence
Are we willing to disrupt our own model in order to innovate and grow?
Mobile search growing rapidly – desktop has flat lined
Facebook drives 90% of all social referrals
Social traffic is creeping up on organic search in total referral volume for some verticals
Email & SEO are the leaders in driving ROI
Search results continue to trend towards giving you an answer (without clicking through to a page)
Majority of people spend their time using 1 or 2 apps. SEO for apps may become a huge driver of new app adoption
Bing is moving towards encrypting search data – meaning marketer’s will lose even more keyword data in their analytics

How to Make Your Marketing Match Your Reality – Dana DiTomaso, @danaditomaso

Once upon a time…we did some marketing for manufacturing client. We got them great results, BUT we noticed they had tons of awful online reviews.
We brought it up to our client’s team yet nobody wanted to take responsibility for the problem
The company looked reputable from the outside, but once someone experienced the product and service, their experience was awful.
The real customer experience didn’t match their marketing. The marketing didn’t match reality.
It’s not only the silos in marketing that affect your brand, it’s the silos within your entire organization.
Your brand is your promise. “If you choose us, this is what’s going to happen.”
Every touchpoint with your customer is a chance to enhance your brand experience (WestJet Christmas example – buying presents for kids while they were flying on the plan – delivering them by the time they landed.)
Humans like consistency – keep your brand experience that way.
Good marketing feels right. Good marketing makes people make decisions they are unaware of.
Digital marketers should lead brand strategy because they are aware of all the things that contribute to a great brand experience.
Brand strategy is the future of marketing
Consider your core values when developing your brand strategy
Brand strategy is how you execute the main message you want convey
Imagine your company as a person. There are things that make it good, and others that make it bad. Have a conversation about them.
If someone went up to your company and asked what they stood for, would they get 100 different answers or a consistent one?

Building a Brand Strategy:

*Keep it as simple as possible
*Keep it consistent across all channels (online and offline)
*Living, breathing document that is a true expression of your company

Step 1:

Why did it fail before? Be honest. What’s going to cause havoc for your strategy? Get the C-level on board. The most prominent person at the company will be leading your brand.

Good branding can help you do more with less. Do it right and you’ll get less angry customers and more satisfied ones. Attract the right people, not the tire kickers. Eliminate the marketing debt – the effort that attracts the wrong people – an innacurate marketing strategy.

Step 2: The brand is / is not?

2 attributes that the brand is not. (try starting here)
2 attributes about what the brand is
2 points about what it will be in the future
Try getting 1on1 feedback as much as possible (it’s usually more unfiltered)

Step 3: Define your voice & tone (Get HR & international on board)

Brand strategy > voice
In a brand voice document try creating examples of “Write like this”, “Not like this”, and then a section on Why.
A good brand strategy defines culture fit. Are your new hires, inline with your brand?
Title tags, meta descriptions and PPC ads are a great place to stand out using a consistent brand voice. Don’t write the same thing as the other guys.
The post purchase experience is even more important than the pre-purchase. Think about how you can create customer retention and loyalty.
Get your service team on board to help your brand experience can stay consistent regardless of when and where your customer interacts with your company.
Remember “brand coach” not “brand police” – no one wants that.
Always be coaching – encourage your people to be consistent with the brand voice

How to Do Content Strategy (Probably) – Kristina Halvorson, @halvorson

There are secret slides and a PDF of her extended presentation! tinyURL.com/mozconCS
Definition: Content strategy is the practice of planning for the creation, delivery, and governance of useful, usable content.
Helped us clear up the “what” of content strategy
Think about:
What,
why,
how,
when,
for whom,
by whom,
with what,
where,
how often,
what next
How is this applicable to our business goals and user needs!
If your content is for everybody, then it really is for NOBODY.
Define your personas – this has to feed into your content strategy and plans
The big question: what next? What’s going to happen once that content is out there?
Content that just piles on top of more content without any strategic plan = you just end up with content that dies on the vine…
“Content Strategy For The Web” by Kristina Horvalson – her book!
Definition changed again:
Content strategy:

Defines how you’re going to use content to meet your business (or project) goals and satisfy your users’ needs
Guides decisions about content through its lifecycle, from discovery to execution

Then EPIC CONTENT MARKETING was on the rise (ay ai ai)

Content marketing and demand gen rose up at the same time
The only kind of content that’s left is the content that builds trust and affinity with your brand – custom publishing is important but the way that was translated within our industry was this. This is big trouble!
It’s more and more critical that you’re looking at your content from a strategic angle now
Content marketing and content strategy are the two fastest growing verticals in the industry
Substance, structure, workflow, governance and strategy
At the center of this quad is the strategy
Make active decisions about where you’re going to focus your energy and resources to improve your content efforts
Any good strategy forces you to make a choice (ie, we’re going to focus on this and ignore that)
Marketers hate this but you can’t do it all. What will you say “no” to?
The work that search analysts do allows them to understand the science and art of content strategy
People, content are at the center of strategy
Roles, structure, processes, tools = workflow – this is going to put structure around content lifecycle
Governance is going to allow the content to empower, facilitate
Definition is now about content strategy in terms of the user experience
What do people do when they come across your digital content?
The second way that she talks about content strategy is in terms of adaptive content strategy
responsive design has messed with content
Third way to look at it is enterprise content strategy

There are 4 parts to getting content strategy done that she works with:

Assessment, Analysis and Strategy
Architecture and Editorial
Implementation
Maintenance

The first two are often where we can play in

Think about what you can bring to the table in these stages

Assessment:

The questions that get asked in the assessment stage are really important
When problems arise it’s because smart questions weren’t asked up front

Come to the table with questions and the content strategy checklist
[content strategy checklist]

Strategy:

Sample: we’ll deliver the right content, to the right person, in the right time, in the right place.
BOOO! – this is not a good strategy.
If you were a bear:
get food (like, fish) (many places to get food); you also have a bunch of ways in which you could get that fish
goal = get fish
strategy = go down to the river
tactic = stand in the river with your mouth open
no strategy? you’re standing in the middle of a field with your mouth open hoping to have a fish fall from the sky!
Sample of good, effective strategies:
“We will use our website as the primary vehicle to gather qualified leads.”
“We will evolve our print production model to deliver single-source, omnichannel content.”
Your documented content strategy should have:
Business goals and success metrics
Audience segments and needs
Content strategy statement and guiding principles
Priority areas of focus
Roadmap for implementation
You can get these, again, by coming to the table and asking good questions up front!

When creating strategy these are the pieces that are often overlooked:

Messaging
Topic maps
Style guide
Page tables
Content models
Content types

Don’t let your content ROT
ROT: redundant, outdated, trivial
Check out “The Content Strategy Toolkit” book
The hard stuff: This framework does not eliminate creativity. But what is important, as marketers we tend to become subject to the bright shiny object syndrome. Instead of optimizing things that are we’re working on and building on, we get distracted by things like a new platform.
Make brave decisions about what you are gonna do and what you aren’t gonna do
How do you make the case for content strategy?

#1 way to get buy-in for content strategy is to talk about pain points.
Figure out what your boss or your boss’ boss is having trouble or frustrations within the content process
Then, step back and figure out how one of the pieces of the content strategy process might be able to solve one of these problems.
NOT. MAKE. CAMPAIGNS. ON. ASSUMPTIONS.
Find where you have the opportunities to ask smarter questions for strategy, or address unanswered questions.
Look for opportunities – how can you really, truly differentiate yourselves to improve visibility with your content.
How can understanding more about your audience or business objectives help prioritize your content opportunities.
Can you spot those opportunities? Can you articulate them?
How will you make content strategy a part of your world?
It’s up to us to shape this conversation, bring it to the table, and stand up for the user needs
What are you going to do, what are you not going to do – and they stuff that you are going to do – how are you going to kick-ass at it?

Download Kristina’s pdf at tinyURL.com/mozconCS

It’s up to us to shape this conversation, bring it to the table, and stand up for the user needs
What are you going to do, what are you not going to do – and they stuff that you are going to do – how are you going to kick-ass at it?

An SEO’s Guide to the Insane World of Content – Matthew Brown, @matthewjbrown

What is content strategy?
The strategic planning and management of content creation and distribution for maximum effectiveness. Content strategy involves elements of user experience…
Change to B2C content:
Content strategy is now the #2 service offered by agencies
There are 2.5 million blog posts created per day – that’s a lot of noise
Change in B2B content creation:
43% of businesses are moving to create “MORE” content. Most of these companies are putting this content on Facebook.
Facebook is now 25% of social traffic
With all this noise, it’s a struggle to get clicks on your articles – people are using any imagery they can to improve click through rates.
If you’re targeting “How to” content, you’re dealing with users who have A.D.D.
Should you be worried about them bouncing off your content?
Spending a low time on site?
79% of marketers say their org is shifting to branded content (paid content)
Branded content is working – brands are not seeing a drop in engagement.
Content fatigue happens all the time – we see too much content every day so we stop paying attention to what we see.

Develop content loyalty by developing content that is timely and relevant – great way to build brand awareness

Ways to develop content loyalty

Long form content
Develop highly specific content for a loyal audience – long term play
Target a specific persona
Evergreen 10x content
This content has long term relevance
It needs to be maintained, revised and iterated over time

So how can you make content that stands out?

Let users control their story experience
How can we give users something that they haven’t seen or done before
Make your content about your reader – try personalizing it based on IP address location
Break the standard article template
Scroll page horizontally with mouse wheel

How can you get someone to consume 38,000 words of content. Add interactivity every 2000 words or so [What is Code example]

Linkable assets – give people useful chunks or resources throughout the article
Have fun – do something/give something that’ll make your audience laugh
Know your users persona
Hit all the distribution channels
Adjust your content to fit and work amazingly on each device
What can you remove from your content that will make the user experience even better on a smaller device?

What’s the goal for content distribution?

Biggest problem:

There’s no content distribution plan
There’s no success metrics

A better way to do it…

BuzzFeed’s POUND (process for optimizing and understanding network diffusion)
They began to understand how network diffusion brought them backlinks.
Therefore, the better we can diffuse our content socially, the less time we have to spend link building.
Old Way of Link building: Build all your links to to the hub
New Way: Publish all your content to right streams for the right audiences.
This drives the fastest social network diffusion, which improves the velocity of link building.

Content Loyalty – Loyalty through return visits drives a solid content strategy

2.6 days is the median pageview peak for articles
For any single piece of content, you’ll get that peak and then traffic will decline.
You don’t have a lot of time to get your content seen
Find out what get’s your reader to come back more.
Identify which content attributes improve this metric.
Optimize for those attributes and measure your progress

Which Content types create loyalty?

Implementing a content strategy can take 12-17 months before you see a good ROI

Where can you start?

Do a content audit
[get links to content audits from slide deck]
Use SEMrush to benchmark the monetary value of your content
Scope out your potential ROI [siege media slide]
Use Buzzsumo to identify which content topics are popular on social
Add traffic and on-page engagement into one on-page performance score (Moz Content tool)

[Matthew also announces Moz Context API at #MozCon. Yay!]

Main Takeaways

Optimize your content for return visitors. Find out what makes them come back and make sure you do more of that. Sometimes it will be a certain aspect of your page layout, other times it could be the type of content you used or how you delivered it.
Optimize for faster social diffusion (social sharing and amplification). This can replace time spent on old-school link building.

Delightful Remarketing: How You Can Do It – Duane Brown, @duanebrown

Why delightful remarketing is important
over 60% of people abandon a shopping cart every year
Of the 40% that don’t

What is Delightful remarketing?

Message match
context – when the ad will be soon, where they’ll see it, what they’ll be doing when they’ll be seeing it
B2C
B2B
A burn pixel is a pixel that fires on your page, for example, after someone purchases something in order to put them on a remarketing list so they never get targeted with a buy something ad again.
A burn pixel keeps your customers from seeing ads for products they’ve already bought.

Commerce + Burn pixel = Ateam

SaaA +Intercom = Marketing

Intercom is great because you can communicate with your customer in your app or website and direct them to helpful resources.

AdWords Customizer

Use countdown timer on your ads

Send people to a landing page and get them added to your remarketing so you can show them these ads

The Dos of Delightful of Remarketing

Set the ad frequency (how often you show someone an ad)
2-3 ads per day for any one brand
Age: only target people in your target age demographic
Location: Try targeting a region of a country – maybe your audience is only in certain places. Consider testing this at the city level too.
Spend your time going after your major markets & defending territory, not going after the whole world
Look back window – use 30 days, if people haven’t converted by then, they likely won’t.

Creative: Understand what your customers want to see

Remarketing Lists for Search Ads

Takes a search campaign in adwords and layers on a segmented audience from a remarketing list. The benefit is that your CPC will be lower

Takeaways

Make your customers a better version of themselves. Know what they want and why they want it.
Experiment with your creative and use it to your advantage
Use those burn pixels!
Check in on your campaign constantly and update accordingly

The Perfect Pair: Using PPC Data to Influence SEO- Stephanie Wallace, @swallaceSEO

SEO & PPC should work together to…

Increased visibility in the SERPs
Increased perceived brand authority
Well, in reality SEO & PPC are usually siloed in organizations and they don’t tend to work together effectively.
So how can we make these 2 areas work together effectively?

4 ways:

Testing MetaData

Use PPC ads to test title tags and meta descriptions
Start by using the search analytics report in Google WEbmasters Tools.
Once you define the pages you want to test, start testing.
I like to create a separate campaign for my test
Create different ad copy (headlines and body text) to test the metadata you’d like to get results for
Be sure to point all these ads to the same landing page
Ad Rotation: optimize for clicks
Once you get conclusive data, be sure to apply the winning headline and body text from ad to your website’s pages as title tags and meta descriptions.

Identify Content Gaps

Start by looking at multi channel funnels in Google anltyics
look at top conversion path (30 day look back)
Secondary dimension filter by path “paid search”
Identify paths that don’t include “organic”
So the question becomes “are we targeting this keyword organically? If not, Why?” “Should we create new content for this opportunity?”

Define Ranking Opportunities

Find keywords we are ranking for but haven’t spent any time targeting organically. These are the low hanging fruit within striking distance.
Start by looking at top converting keywords in AdWords
Export to Excel
Pay attention to clicks, impressions, CTR, Conversions
Identify whether you are targeting this keyword? Based on your current rankings, identify which terms are worth targeting.
Tier 1 = keyword on the 1st page
Teir 2 = keyword on the 2nd page

How to Leverage PPC for CRO

Instead of looking at pages by keyword themes, look at them through the “buyer journey” point of view.
Test different sets of ad copy and send them to different landing pages.
Run the test.
Identify your top performing page in your PPC campaign based off Clicks Impressions CTR and Conversions.

Tracking Beyond the Pageview – Adrian Vender, @adrianvender

We all have a part in creating Awesome Content. Some content is going to turn out great and some not so great. So how do we know when our content is working?
Answer: Content Analytics.
Analytics tells us how people get to and through our content. There’s a story to be told, but the truth is most people are poor at understanding and measuring content success.
Standardized Google Analytics reports don’t tell a very good story.

Why?

We’re not really tracking content interaction. We’re tracking Page views – what about the people reading it?

How can we track people reading, downloading, navigating?
Analysis is hard. How can we report on event tracking and conversion influence? Finding these reports is not easy…
So what we need to do is make sure we’re tracking the right things and we also have to be able to collect the right data and report on it in a meaningful way.

So what do you do to start tracking?

Add some additional javascript to the page

BUT, this requires IT help. Most often, devs are too busy to help you.

The solution: Google Tag Manager

All you need to do is add one piece of code to your site to start tracking. From there you have a centralized way to add tracking scripts and event tracking to your site. Google Tag Manager (GTM) makes tracking cleaner and easier.
Components you need to know about in GTM

Tags: What should fire?
Triggers: When should tags fire?
Variables: Values used within Tags and Triggers

How it works

Choose and configure a tag

Set up a trigger based on URL, clicks, form submissions etc.

i.e. fire the tag when someone lands on page “example.com”

Protip: use inspect element in Chrome DevTools to identify IDs and Titles that you can use for triggers.

If you want to learn more about Google Tag Manager visit Simo Ahava’s Blog:http://www.simoahava.com/

What else can you track?

Tracking Content Scrolling
Track outbound link clicks
Youtube & Vimeo tracking (see instructions link in slide deck)
Track URL Fragments (i.e. AJAX pages)

So now that you’re tracking all this – GREAT! But what the heck are you going to do with all that data?

We have to become better analysts. These tools are not made for data scientists, they’re made for digital markters.

Get started by Understanding Event Reporting in Google Analytics

Events are described via categories, actions and labels
Use shortcodes and Dashboards
Configure your perfect report then create a shortcut and/or custom dashboard in Google Analytics so you can reference your favourite reports at any time.
Connect content interaction to conversion using Custom Segments in Google Analytics
Use the “sequences” tab in Custom Segments to start tracking a particular user path or sequence of user behaviour.

Too Busy to Do Good Work – Marta Turek, @mturek

Are you really doing great work?

80% of CMOs say they need to restructure the marketing function to better support the business.

What’s changed?

Marketing is being seen on the PNL statement vs a cost
Marketers have increasingly more responsibility – the entire customer experience from the first touchpoint to post purchase.
We need to be conveying our marketing message through multi channels
We now need to grasp new data, operations and technology to do our jobs well
We’re completely overwhelmed – we experience 50-60 interruptions everyday. If the average interruption is 5 min, we are wasting over half our work day.

If 80% of those interruptions are rated as “little value”, we’re wasting approx. 3 hours of every work day.

So let’s focus on improving the effectiveness of the granular day to day grind of what we do.

Goal: Make timely specific changes in our daily work habits so that we can become more effective, so that we can have more time to think, to create, to innovate.

21 Days to better PPC processes.

These examples are PPC specific, but they can be easily implemented for any discipline.

What we’ll be doing: implement a new tactic every day so that the habit becomes unconscious and automatic.

What We need:

Capacity – time
Context – Priority, interdependence, clarity
Mindset – Focus, efficiency
Review – Feedback
The biggest time waster in a day is meetings. Let’s focus on taking back control of your work day.
Review your calendar. Ask yourself: How much time do I have to do real work – meaningful work (email is not included in meaningful work!).

Tactic 1: Stop mindlessly accepting meeting invites

If there is no agenda, its unclear why it exists. Decline it.
If a meeting pops up in your calendar on the same day, Reschedule it to a better time.
If there are only 15 or 30 minute gaps between your meetings, reschedule your meetings.
That time between meetings is lost time – it won’t be used for anything useful.

Tactic 2: Create blocks of uninterrupted work 2-4 hours per day

Now you need to know what to work on.
Practice systematic time planning to figure out what you need to do
Master list – everything you can possibly think of that you could do
Monthly list – strategic list of high level elements you want to work on this month
Weekly list – create it on Sunday night and define the priorities for the coming week. The idea is to be proactive and not reactive.
Day list – create this at the end of the day. These are items from monthly and weekly lists transferred to your daily list
Avoiding distraction during your blocked off time: Switch off all pings, popups and notifications. Do not check emaTry doing this for 2 hours. You’ll be surprised at how much you can achieve if you work on a single task.
For every distraction, you lose 20 minutes of productive time.
Time yourself – understand how long work actually takes.

Organize Your information

The average executive loses 6 weeks per year just looking for lost information

Start with naming conventions: Create a naming structure that can be shared with anyone involved.

Email is not a storage container. It’s a shipping container. Extract critical information from your inbox and organize it in the right place…

Document management platform
Master task list
Master knowledge base

Label File Names clearly

Have a hierarchy and make sure everyone on the team can navigate it intuitively.
Make sure there is a clear context in how your documents are named.

Set up a master client knowledge base

This is a single place with all the information on a client and the work you are planning to do for them. It doesn’t matter what platform you use.
PPC Example: an Excel workbook that has separate tabs outlining campaign organization, campaign strategy etc.

Account Change Sheet

Create this to help keep track of high level changes. This helps when you need to look back and identify why a campaign has shifted in performance metrics.

Email Subjects

Write clear subject lines

Compartmentalize

Move your communication to the relevant platform:

project management tool
Group chat tool
Face to face/Phone communication
Ask yourself, do I really need to send an email? Try to reduce the # of emails you send.

Use a Shared Google Doc to collaborate on Client Agendas

Actionable Tips to shave seconds off your day

Bookmark all frequently used programs
Use Pocket to save articles to read later
Use a password mgmt tool
standardize
Everytime you work on a repeatable task, add instructions to it to make it more efficient. That way you’ll eventually be able to delegate the task.
Use a project brief for all new projects/tests/campaigns.
Make sure all the key info you’ve talked about before launching a project is summarized so that any other key stakeholders can quickly understand your project without hunting through 100’s of email to get the info they need.
Set aside 30 minutes a day to update your skills.
If you don’t have the knowledge you need to work, you’ll become redundant

Online Personalization that Actually Works – Cara Harshman, @caraharshman

Cara says we all look amazing – aww thanks!
Personalization is something that we all experience online
could be ads that are haunting us on the internet or websites like amazon and netflix that are doing a good job at personalizing our experiences
most of us don’t have the army of amazon engineers behind our websites and marketing – how can we do personalization that actually works?
Personalization is a really big word (preach!)
How are we going to use personalization at each of our businesses
Story of how personalization worked well on Cara:

Cara’s two roommates moved out (Jared and Kate) – this means she got to move upstairs to a room with the best view!
Problem = she had no furniture. She goes on the hunt to CB2 and found a peekaboo media console (great choice).
So she’s browsing, looking at the console but it’s too expensive so she bounces.
2 days later she got an email from CB2 that said 15% off of all acrylics (her table is acrylic!)
So she goes back to the site, but she’s still not ready to own this thing. She wants to browse craigslist, etc. to find it for cheaper.
The next email she got it for CHEAPER – It said “still deciding?”
So she goes back to the website and decides this is the right time! And purchases.
It’s still pleasing her to this day in her living room.
A company is using what they know about Cara to get her to convert.
Today, email is a really powerful channel for personalization (along with retargeting).
See Duane Brown’s talk above for more on remarketing.

Your website:

Your website is underutilized when it comes to personalization.
We’re spending a ton of money and effort on email and paid only to send people to our websites (boo!)
THE ONE SIZE FITS ALL WEB IS DEAD (and lazy)!
We have so much information about our visitors
It’s time that the web kept up with us

Framework for personalization:

WHO to target
Slice your audience into unique segments
WHAT to show them
What are you showing the unique who
HOW to prioritize
You have no limit on the ideas you have to how to personalize

WHO:

How you’re slicing your audiences:
Contextual (Where they are coming from, are they logged in?)
Demographic (you innately know these to be true about the visitor)
Behavioral (the things that your visitor has done on your site)
Some examples of businesses who have been slicing their audiences in the above 3 ways:

Secret Escapes

Spending a TON of money on adwords

Sending all of that traffic to a landing page

Tried personalizing the landing page based on the keyword a visitor was coming in from – really powerful
Personalized page for the keyword “spa breaks”: changed the images and the copy to put people in a luxury environment
They saw a 32% increase in conversions just by making the messaging on the ad symmetric to the messaging on the landing page (=message match)
Not only more conversions, but saved money on adwords, and quality score going up!
Using context or the status of the visitor to personalize the experience for the visitor

Adroll

Pre-sale experience gets a phone number to call
Post-sale they’re giving a link to the support center
Another example, is when they targeted the site to enterprise audiences and smb audiences

They think splitting this demographic is going to be more personal and relevant to the visitors

Clymb

Behavioural example
They want to show the right products to the right people who will actually buy them
They found the leading indicator of whether someone would buy or not is whether they’ve purchased in the past
They created a different version for people who had purchased in the past with oakley products
Saw a 10% increases in conversions on oakley products from people who were past purchasers
10% is really significant on one segment – if you could do this across mutliple segments your going to see a big, collective change
So how can you slice and dice your visitors, change the experience based on demographic, or optimize based on visitor behaviour?
Remember that you have existing audiences right under your nose. You can start personalizing experiences for those people!
There is no one size fits all way to do this because personalization is personal.

WHAT:

This is really a hypothesis – there is not one thing that’s always going to be amazing for old visitors or new visitors.

This is a great time to flex your a/b testing muscles.
Start thinking of how can I move the needle on this segment? etc.
Say you go to a DYI website and you’re coming there as a new visitor.
One idea is to show a tour of everything you offer to get the visitor to come back.
If you’re a return visitor, capture value by asking for a newsletter sign-up and get that person to come back.

Say you’re a retail site.
You know the shopper is located in San Fran.
There’s a hypothesis that if you have the opportunity for in-store pick-up you might have more opportunity to make a sale.
If the visitor hasn’t visited the site in 90 days, offer a discount to see if they come back
Take these ideas to your team and try them out!
BUT don’t be creepy!
Don’t be creepy – Cara wasn’t creeped out by CB2’s super personal emails, but someone could.
Be careful about how you approach personalization.
Stay true to your company values.
Again, remember ‘what’ is a hypothesis.
Personalization will come naturally when thinking about what to do that’s best for a certain segment of your audience.

HOW:

How to build and ship these ideas that you just came up with.
Comes down to 3 things for prioritizing personalization:

Potential business impact
Technical effort to execute
Requirements to sustain
When thinking about prioritization:
Take BIG bites for big impact
A lot of traffic for a lot of value
Think about who makes up most of your traffic
Don’t get too aggressive for 1:1 personalization right off the bat; start small.
The audience that takes the most amount of money to acquire is who you should be personalizing for.
Be realistic about the technical effort that it’s going to take to execute this campaign.
There’s a lot of software, but if you don’t have it think about: programming resources, product resources, etc.
Diversify and see what feels good and natural
Don’t slice your audiences too thin.
This is going to create a content problem because you might not have the content resources available or spending too much time on unique content for each of those audiences.
Give the audience enough time to surprise you. Don’t pigeonhole what they think about you either.
The who to target, what you’re going to show them and how you’re going to prioritize it.
The power of personalization is in how you wield it.
There are many ways we can use personalization for good, not for evil.
We as small/medium businesses need to start thinking about leveraging this strategy to also be more competitive and relevant in the world.
Personalization as delivering value to your customers is amazing.
Personalizing for the sake of personalizing is useless.
After this, think about: