The battle between website personalization and consumer privacy is one web designers fight nearly everyday. As web designers, it is our job to make sure our clients and their consumers get what they want, how they want it, within the realm of possibiity in terms of budget, time line, coding ability and security. Designing within the realm of possibility and keeping online privacy protection in mind is a very fine balance we must constantly maintain.
For many years, ecommerce professionals and Internet Marketers have struggled with the balance between personalization and privacy. To effectively market a website and/or service, they want people to feel important, but they want them to feel safe, too. Until recently, many internet marketers have used tools such as social media, rss feeds, and opt-in newsletters to provide personalized content while providing online privacy protection to their consumers. If they haven't taken that route, they've spent a lot of time and money with manual site updates and watching trends. These two paths lead to decrease in profit margin and do not provide the results needed to justify the effort put forth.
In response to this dilemma, many firms have begun to offer what they call "self optimizing" tools targeting behavioral patterns rather than demographics. These tools make it possible to setup various promotional activites without tracking a visitor's site to site visits so marketers and ecommerce professionals may still reap the benefits of personalized content with respect to visitor privacy and online privacy protection.
These tools make it possible to gather knowledge about shopping trends and important consumer information based on data alone, meaning marketers will have the necessary information to continue with promotions and product ideas without ever taking a look at any transacation information--a very important aspect of online privacy protection.
Research shows companies using this "self-optimizing" software are reporting great increases in sales. The companies in this research panel declined to release thier names or the names of the software they used because of the competiveness in the field. Not releasing this information prevents competitors from finding it and using it against them.
These systems can be implemented for any business in a matter of days or weeks, making them efficient and easy to use. As web designers, we need to stay on top of the current software and programming trends such as this, to ensure our designs are compliant and will work well with these systems. Knowledge of these systems will help us guide clients with their website plans and help us to better be able to suite them. These systems are a great answer to the problems presented with personalized content while online privacy protection is kept in mind.