At Dynamic Yield, we believe that personalization extends beyond simply showcasing product recommendations and content. True personalization should encompass the delivery of unique experiences that consider each individual’s preferences, likes, and dislikes across a range of attributes and dimensions. These experiences should accurately reflect a user’s individuality and make them feel seen and understood.
To make this a reality, we developed a new way to serve personalized content, Affinity Allocation. This new allocation method makes it possible to customize every element of a website, or any other digital channel, to automatically showcase the most relevant content to each individual user, based on their affinity in real-time. This allocation method delivers a truly tailored experience for visitors by ensuring they are only seeing content that will resonate with them.
With more customers expecting heightened levels of individualized content and product recommendations, the need for automated personalization has never been more apparent. Dynamic Yield has developed a solution that empowers you to support this level of personalization at scale: Affinity Allocation enables marketers to effortlessly serve the most relevant content to each user, transforming how users perceive personalization. From the very first page view, Dynamic Yield gathers behavioral insights on every consenting user, known and unknown. With each digital interaction, the user’s affinity profile is updated and refined, creating a deeper understanding of their interests and preferences to create a completely tailored experience across every touchpoint.
The following are some examples of how to leverage Affinity Allocation to deliver a truly unique experience for your customers across the entirety of the digital experience.
Using an item-list campaign with Affinity Allocation guarantees that each user who visits the homepage can quickly discover the categories they have the greatest interest in. The high-level category navigation is streamlined to showcase an unlimited amount of categories that each user has an affinity for, based on their previous engagements with products on the site.
By creating multiple recommendation widgets with a machine learning-based strategy, each filtered by a certain affinity value, companies can target by brand or product category. Each user is shown the items that Dynamic Yield predicts they will be interested in, in the categories or brands they have highest affinity for.
There are a number of ways to serve relevant experiences, including rule-based targeting, multi-armed bandit, and now, Affinity Allocation. All of these targeting methods enable marketers to deliver experiences in unique ways, each applying to distinctive scenarios.
Traditionally, brands have relied on rule-based targeting, which uses IF/THEN logic to tailor the customer journey based on manually programmed targeting rules. Rule-based targeting provides a way to layer in audience conditions, allowing marketers to create personalization initiatives that range from simple to complex. A bulk of the success this method produces stems from the fact that these rules are set by marketers who possess deep industry and brand knowledge. Despite being a powerful solution, relying solely on rule-based targeting for all personalization efforts can become time-consuming and data-heavy, requiring numerous tests with granular measurements of every variation applied to each audience segment to determine a winner.
In cases where it’s unknown what content each user should get and marketers need to optimize quickly, multi-armed bandit, known as Dynamic Allocation in Experience OS, is the top choice. Dynamic Allocation is one of Dynamic Yield’s machine learning optimization algorithms that shifts traffic to variations that are performing well while simultaneously allocating less and less traffic to underperforming variations. By optimizing the classic A/Bn test, brands can easily tackle many different problems to quickly achieve the best outcomes.
The newest addition to the mix, Affinity Allocation, is suitable for instances in which marketers know what content each user should get and need a way to execute seamlessly without spending time building audiences or rule-based targeting. By optimizing here for customer affinity, companies can personalize at scale and achieve precision when delivering tailored experiences as users move through their unique journeys.
All of these approaches offer distinctive advantages, which is why it’s best to use a blend of the three in your personalization strategy rather than relying on only one. Through the combination of automation and rule-based targeting, marketers can rapidly develop personalization efforts while maintaining the ability to control which audiences are served specific experiences.
Affinity Allocation is an essential lever in delivering the personalization modern consumers expect from brands today with speed and agility. By automating part of the process and helping marketers reach the right people in the right way, personalization efforts can be scaled beyond the capacity of traditional targeting and segmentation methods, leading to maximized click-through rate, product discovery, and customer loyalty. Ultimately, Affinity Allocation gives companies the power to eliminate the guessing game by tapping into the enormous potential of unbounded, tailored personalization.
