LiveBlog: Presenting Content Recommendations and Personalized Promotions on the Health Care Web Site
Written November 5th, 2007 by Aaron HolbrookDescription: Health care organizations wanting a higher ROI for Web initiatives must move beyond content publishing. Providing visitors with a personalized online experience through segmentation and content recommendations can create more engaged patients, more effective marketing campaigns and increased conversion rates. Today’s content management solutions make it easy for marketing staff to quickly create and deliver targeted content to the visitors who have the highest likelihood of responding. Explore the basics of segmentations, learn how to implement segments and targeted content on the Web, and hear ideaes for using personalization to support marketing objectives.2:05
Lots of people are using CMS’s but very few are using personalization. Haha, they’re showing the cat-herding commercial. ‘That’s what personalization feels like sometimes’.
State of Health Care on the Web:
* 80% of web suers search for health info online
* Each day, that’s 8 million adults looking online for health information
* more than half said information found had some impact on their health care decisions
* Most online health seekers were action-oriented and highly purposeful because there was a pressing medical issue for them to address
How can your system’s site compete with the big guns? Personalization. Personalization delivers the right content to the right person at the right time. Personalized or behavioral calls to action are more successful than static marketing.
Benefits of personalization:
* More effective than static publishing
* cost effective
* faster reaction to market influencers
* capitalizes on existing site traffic
* higher conversion rater = higher ROI
* can be done without extensive IT programming
The Persuasive Health Care Web Site
* move to a persuasive, personalized web site using:
* segmentaiton
* targeted content
* personalization
What’s needed to deliver persuasive web applications?
[This session has really started to fill up. Obviously a very popular topic and I'm really interested to see if there is a decent solution that can actually be implemented fairly easily/quickly. My first reaction is nothing exists yet. I truly hope these ladies prove me wrong.]
2:15
Develop segmentation/personas - they can be simple or complex. Then create targeted content aimed at personas. This is key - before doing any user testing, create your personas a couple at the very least that really summarize your largest user group demographics.
2:23
Oooh, now they’re about to demo a CMS that will allow segmentation and the ability to deliver targeted content. Jennifer’s off the stage and Venkatesh has started to speak. Interesting idea he just proposed - there’s enough data out there to be able to start to identify the demographic based on geo location from the IP address. Other segmentation info can be determined by click paths. Hmmmm, I wonder why kind of algorithms would really be required to not only analyze what demographic a person is, but push them gently towards something they could use or want.
2:26
Looks like they’re having some technical difficulties - he’s improvising. :-/ I hope they get the CMS working, I was really hoping to see it in action. He’s explaining some of the clickpath theories.
2:35
Not so much a demo of the CMS, as much as demo of a front end example website. So far this is pretty slow moving.
2:37
Interesting. The CMS allows you to add specific segments. But the question of how the CMS and website determines exactly what segment it determines the person to be has still not been touched.
2:40
Alright, here we go. He’s started talking about analytics tools.
* fatwire.com
* clicktracks.com
* quantcast.com
[Insert pretty graph and pictures here - can't really tell what they say though, the screen is pretty small]
2:42
I’m a little confused, I think he just claimed that by using one of those tools (don’t remember which one) you could tell by the IP address of the person, what other sites they were going to and then determine what demographic they are… If this is truly the case, I’m scared. Talk about a lack of privacy. I really hope I misheard him.
2:46
Alright, everyone really needs to check out http://quantcast.com. Like seriously - that is amazing. Enter your site in the box and it’ll give you some brief information about your demographics. I need to figure out how this works.
2:50
Yea, I heard him right. I guess they gather their information from ISPs. So apparently, they can tell, based on your IP, what 500 sites you’ve gone to in the past. WOW. Remind me to never use the internet again. I really need to look into this in more depth, I’m really surprised that ISPs would release that kind of information.
2:53
The session is wrapping up. Not bad overall, and definitely garnered some really useful information I can use immediately. I doubt that I’ll be able to incorporate personalization to the level that these guys are talking in the short term, but it’s a good thing to keep in mind for a redesign.
Haha, question from the audience: “How did you justify this before you started?” This question has been running through my mind this whole conference.
Answer from Jennifer: depends on your marketing goals and budget (obviously), inform your leaders you can really increase online appointments, etc.
Q: How does personalization affect SEO
A: When search bot goes through, it doesn’t get personalized (again: obviously).
Oooh, another question just came in something about placing cookies. Very good complementary idea. Once you’ve already gathered your demographic/segmentation information you can place it all so the next time they visit you’ll already have all the work done and they can start right where they left off.
[Session's ending - pretty good overall, started a little slow, but definitely picked up. I'd definitley recommend checking out QuantCast - looks promising. Stay tuned for more liveblogs. Hope everyone back home is enjoying our notes, let us know if there's anything you'd like us to ask - or any suggestions you might have.]
Presenters:
Venkatesh Korla
President, Element115
Jennifer Waters
Principal Consultant, iWrite Consulting
November 5th, 2007 at 4:53 pm
You didn’t mis-hear him, Aaron. He’s just confused about what geolocation online is actually about. I think he’s not aware it’s about the ISP node rather than the end user. I cannot stress how common a misconception this is, and how useless the data is when drilled-down from this basic bad assumption.
Will now cease my grumpy session notes; yours are far more helpful and don’t contain any references to Pee Wee Herman or professional wrestling.
November 5th, 2007 at 4:56 pm
Re: IP tracking
Maybe it’s something like Alexa?
November 5th, 2007 at 7:02 pm
Yea, I was talking to Louis Towles about that afterwards. He must’ve been off in either his understanding or description.
I still want to look into his explanation of how ISPs publish or give out specific IP history information.
And here I thought privacy was a concern. Silly me!