Introducing Optimizely Personalization

Technology has been chasing humanity for decades. When I used to go to my favorite local store to shop, the owner always had a stack of music behind the counter hand-picked just for me. This is the reason I continued to shop there for years – a person knew my tastes and gave me a personal experience.

Consumers today expect a personal digital experience, much the same way they do offline. They receive personalized experiences from their news feed, social network, and shopping recommendations. Expectations have risen so high that companies who want to improve their products are changing their strategy to address this need directly. It’s no wonder that so many of the business and technology leaders we’ve spoken to, and 75% of eBusiness and channel strategy professionals surveyed recently by Forrester (subscription required for access), name personalization as their top commerce technology investment priority.

Today we’re announcing Optimizely Personalization, the newest product built on the Optimizely Experience Optimization Platform, designed specifically to help businesses personalize their customer experiences across web and mobile.

The Customer Personalization Challenge

Businesses are overwhelmed with data about customers including online browsing behavior, purchase history, interests, and demographic characteristics. And, much of that data is hard to access. It’s locked up in silos, third-party tools or hidden on your site. It’s not easy to analyze these massive amounts of data, let alone take action quickly enough to accurately target your most valuable customers in real time.

Additionally, the technical sophistication required to set up and implement personalization for mobile and web is resource intensive for many businesses. Setting up the right data collection mechanisms, then leveraging that data to target relevant audiences should be fast and painless.

Finally, all of this complexity makes it difficult to measure the overall impact to your bottom line of providing a personalized experience for every audience. How do you know if you’re targeting the right audiences, and whether you’ve chosen the best experience for each one?

Introducing Optimizely Personalization: A New Approach

Welcome to Optimizely Personalization: a product designed with your feedback that’s built specifically for personalizing experiences across web and mobile. With Optimizely Personalization, you’ll be able to craft and deliver tailored content and experiences that delight your customers while increasing revenue and customer satisfaction.

An example of the results page in Optimizely Personalization.

Optimizely Personalization lets you:

• Discover meaningful audiences among all your visitors to generate hypotheses for personalizing.
• Target visitors in real time based on the actions they take on your site as well as what you know about them from other data sources.
• Create compelling experiences tailored to each audience that work on your web and mobile site with an elegant workflow.
• Measure the impact of the changes you’re making for every audience, backed by our industry-leading Stats Engine.

All of this is built on our Experience Optimization Platform, so you get the full benefit of the advanced targeting, developer tools, APIs, and integrations that make Optimizely so powerful and flexible today.

We built Optimizely Personalization because we saw an opportunity to reinvent an old idea and make it accessible and usable for all. Optimizely launched five years ago with the goal of making it easy for anyone in the world do A/B testing and turn data into action. We’ve now helped over 7,000 businesses do just that. Personalization is the next step on this journey. We can’t wait for you to join us, so we can continue to personalize the web together.

Optimizely Personalization is in private beta now, and will be generally available in the fall.