What all this means is that sticking out from the crowd is becoming very difficult. But attracting an audience is only part of the problem; a bigger problem is keeping the users you worked so hard to attract. There is little loyalty on the Web. Users switch search engines and online stores all the time, primarily because it's so easy to do so. And that's dangerous: after all, the key to a successful Web site is traffic - in particular, repeat traffic.

So how do you retain users? The answer is to make their experience such a memorable and important one that your site becomes an integral part of their online life - something they can't live without (or at least don't want to). And that's where personalization comes in.

What Is Personalization?
As the word suggests, personalization is a mechanism by which users' online experience can be customized and tailored specifically to their personal needs. It allows you to provide users with an online experience that's uniquely theirs. In this way you can ensure they derive real value from their visit, a value proposition that translates into repeat visits.

Personalization is used in many ways (you've probably used it yourself without paying much attention to it):

The common thread in these examples is that the same site looks and behaves differently based on who's looking at it. That's personalization.

Explicit Personalization
The simplest form of personalization is explicit personalization. This usually involves prompting users for what they want to see or know. Typically, users create a profile of themselves by filling in a questionnaire of some kind that lists all available options. (Users also expect to be able to update those selections subsequently as needed). The profile is stored in a database and can be subsequently used to filter generated pages.

This form of personalization works well for:

Explicit personalization is highly accurate. After all, users state what they want and they get it. It's also easily implemented (you could use simple databases and ColdFusion queries), easily updated and maintained, and is very inexpensive (no special software needed).

It's also terribly unintelligent. Users will see only what they selected and not what they might be interested in (even though they were unaware of it).

Implicit Personalization
Implicit personalization happens without users even being aware of it. They go about their business as usual - meantime, their activities are tracked in the background. Exactly what's tracked, and at what level of granularity, is up to you. You might decide to track only actual purchases or you might also want to track products looked at but not purchased. You determine what information is valuable and what that value is. Once collected, the data is stored in a database and special software can use it to perform analysis and return results.

This form of personalization works well for:

Implicit personalization is inherently inaccurate, although statistically the accuracy improves as the volume of collected data grows. Obviously, if you only have data on a dozen users you have a margin of error far greater than if you had data on hundreds of thousands (or millions) of users. It's also highly intelligent, and presents incredible opportunities that would be impossible without it.

The big downside is cost. You'll need to buy special software to perform the analysis and make suggestions and predictions. There are several vendors with offerings in this space (and no, I am not going to make any recommendations) - none of which are cheap. Nor is writing the code that interacts with it.

Summary
It's a big Web out there...and it keeps getting bigger. To survive and thrive, you need to keep your users happy. Personalization can help foster customer loyalty, which in turn translates into happy users, which in turn translates into repeat users.

Explicit personalization is easy, so start there. Implicit personalization is more complex and expensive but (for the right site) is well worth the investment. And ColdFusion can be used for both. (Spectra users are luckier as Spectra comes with the building blocks for implementing personalization right out of the box.)

The bottom line is: personalization is here, it's hot, and it's changing users' expectations. Don't fight it, give it a try - and let your users take it all very personally.