Business-to-Business Internet Marketing, Fourth Edition - Lifecycle ...

210 BUSINESS-TO-BUSINESS INTERNET MARKETING
In your role as a b-to-b marketer, you can demonstrate your commitment
to the concept of addressing customer needs individually. You
can do this by establishing a relationship program that truly enables
your organization to get closer to your customers, and you can use the
Internet as a powerful relationship-building tool in your move toward
one-to-one customer marketing.
The Personalization Phenomenon
Underlying one-to-one marketing is the rapid move toward Internet personalization.
The original definition of personalization in marketing meant
using a person’s name or other personally related information in a communication,
but today it has taken on a much broader meaning. Personalization,
in fact, often crosses lines with customization, which represents
the packaging of information in a customized way. For example, Dell
Computer (www.dell.com) customizes Web pages to meet the specific
needs of its major customers. By customizing these Premier Pages for
each customer (Figure 7.3), Dell provides a very personalized experience.
More important, this customization makes it easy for customers to always
know the discounts and other terms and conditions of their relationship
with Dell, thus making it easy to do business with the company.
Another very effective example in the context of customer service is
the way Amazon.com (www.amazon.com) advises its customers on purchasing.
Amazon makes instant recommendations and relates books to
“purchase circles” (which show who’s reading what by company and
town). Amazon also provides one-click ordering, which customizes the
ordering process so returning customers don’t have to reenter basic data
already on file. Amazon’s innovation in 2000 was New for You, a personalized
page of buying recommendations that it creates for customers,
reminding them to reference it via e-mail.
As mounting evidence of widespread Web personalization, you will
notice the presence of My pages at a growing number of sites, in particular
at portals and search engines. My pages give users considerable
individual power to customize home pages and other Web pages to meet
their specific needs. These pages typically use personalization engines
and tools that provide users with choices, usually in the form of check
boxes, from which to select personalization criteria. By answering a few
simple questions, the user is instructing the Web site to “learn” his or
her preferences, so that a personalized page appears the next time.