Personalization, targeting, segmentation, customer states

I see lots of phrases used for ways to better treat customers - some talk of personalization, some of targeting. Some discuss segmentation of customers and others the definition of customer states. This last one came from a Seth Godin post (States rights) that I saw today. The upshot of ALL of these terms is that you are being encouraged not to treat your customers the same but to treat them uniquely to make them feel special, to make them more likely to spend more money, to make them more likely to remain/become a loyal customer. I have blogged before about personalization and this clearly should apply to your website for, as I said in a response to a Seth Godin post once before, your home page is a decision. I like to call this kind of personalization "extreme personalization" - see the presentation I gave on this topic once before:

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This kind of personalization takes several things:

Data about your customers and their past behavior
Analysis of this data to segment your customers into meaningful groups or segments
An ability to turn this analysis into executable rules so that a new or existing customer can be quickly put into the right segment
Decision services running as part of your application architecture so that the results can be effectively deployed
Adaptive control so you can keep track of what is going on, try out new approaches, and keep improving.

Enterprise decision management, in other words.

Technorati Tags: adaptive control, business rules, customer state, decision management, decision service, personalization, predictive analytics, Seth Godin, marketing, targeting