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

Generating and Qualifying Leads with Your Web Site 65
such tools of relationship marketing for the visitor’s benefit and to encourage
the visitor to inform you if that is objectionable.
Databases and Personalization
Perhaps the most significant advance in marketing-oriented Web sites
has been the adoption of database-driven personalization. Basic personalization,
such as a Web page greeting you by name, is relatively
easy to implement, but industrial-strength personalization needs to be
powered by database technology.
Internet database and communication technology has advanced to
the extent that entire books are being written about it. Suffice it to say
that such technologies are revolutionizing marketing on the Internet.
Tools are now available that permit mass customization of e-mail and
Web pages, offering completely personalized communications to unlimited
numbers of users.
Some of the best examples of such personalization are resident in
the “My” pages that are now prevalent on the Web. You will find them
on major search engines, such as Excite and Yahoo, as well as on other
leading sites. See MySun at www.sun.com for a good example of a b-tob
application. “My” pages allow the user to customize preferences on a
Web page. Then, on return visits, the page “remembers” what the user
selected and provides the information formatted to those preferences.
Another well-known example that pushes personalization into the
one-to-one marketing world is the ability to make purchase suggestions.
The use of customer purchase history by Amazon.com
(www.amazon.com) is an excellent example. Amazon analyzes each
customer’s purchase history and makes suggestions based on past purchases.
The company personalizes a New for You page and notifies the
customer periodically that it has been updated. In addition, Amazon
makes suggestions on the fly when the customer is engaged in the buying
process. For example, as you are selecting a computer printer for
purchase from Amazon (yes, they now sell computer printers, too), you
will be informed that “customers who purchased this item also purchased….”
Then you’ll see a printer cable, or a cartridge, or other items
relevant to your planned purchase.
Obviously, for this to function day in and day out with millions of
customers, a massive data warehousing capability must be in place. This
might be justifiable for e-commerce, but it may be less attractive for
non-purchase marketing applications. Nevertheless, the move to personalized,
customized Web pages and one-to-one e-mail marketing cam-