This is the seventh in Baynote’s ten-part series of cartoons by award-winning cartoonist Tom Fishburne, titled “Intent to Buy”. We’ve received some great feedback from you on our cartoons, so please continue to let us know what you think! To say thanks for your input, we’ll send you a print signed by Tom if you post a comment within one week (U.S. addresses only).

Check out the complete series.

Imagine walking into a store and asking a sales associate for help selecting a sweater, only to be told they couldn’t assist you unless you made a purchase first. Ridiculous, right? Yet, a lot of retailers look only at actual purchases to determine peoples’ interests despite the fact we give all sorts of clues about our interests far beyond the “buy” button. The way we see it, following those clues is just good customer service.

For a company that processes 5.4 terabytes of data every day, you can imagine how important data center operations are to our business. Enter Eric Ericson, our IT operations manager. On a busy Monday afternoon, Eric took a few minutes to tell us a little about himself and his work at Baynote.

Describe your role at Baynote

I am responsible for all of the production and Data Center operations for Baynote. This includes all customer-facing infrastructure pieces, along with overall application performance.

How long have you been here?

I’ve been with Baynote for a little under two and a half years.

What does a typical day at Baynote look like for you?

There is a fair amount of variability in my day, both a mixture of strategic and tactical. My primary responsibility is ensuring that the production environment is healthy, and that the Operations team is not blocked on projects. On the strategic side of the equation, I spend my time driving projects and initiatives to ensure that Baynote environment scales with our traffic growth and continues to have world-class levels of up time.

Tell us how your past experience made you the right fit for Baynote:

Immediately before Baynote, I was the Operations Manager for another Web 2.0 property, where I had a similar set of responsibilities. Additionally, I’ve spent the bulk of my career working in Operational IT for both Internet and Medical organizations.

What attracted you to wanting to tackle the e-commerce personalization opportunity?

The recommendation engine and machine learning components that are core to Baynote’s platform are immensely interesting from a technology standpoint.

In your opinion, what sets Baynote apart from competitors?

The flexibility of our platform. We aren’t silo-ed into one particular space like our competitors. Our platform can be configured to provide a solution for a broad range of challenges.

Personalization is everywhere these days, from shopping to search. What’s a fun use of personalization in technology you’d like to see?

I’d like to see some of the internet personalization technologies driven down to brick and mortar channels.

It’s Saturday. Where can we find you?

If the weather is nice out, I’m usually on my mountain bike.

Given the interest around daily deals, in our recent 2011 Holiday Online Shopping Survey one question we set out to answer was: are daily deals really worth the hype?

The short answer? “Not quite.”

When shoppers were asked to choose which channels were most useful for receiving coupons and promotions, shoppers ranked traditional channels like email, direct mail and search over daily deal sites (shown). Social networks such as Facebook and Twitter ranked even further down shoppers’ lists. In fact, 23 percent reported using a daily deal site to do their holiday shopping, and only one in four shoppers used social media channels to find product promotions and discounts. On the flip side, a whopping 95 percent of shoppers ranked email as a channel most useful for receiving product promotions and discounts.

The bottom line: Coupons and promotions delivered via email, direct mail and search remained most useful for holiday shoppers, despite high expectations for daily deal sites and social networks.

Interested in learning more? Be sure to read our study for additional findings on daily deals and numerous other topics related to the online shopping experience over the recent holiday.

“More than half of adult cell phone owners used their cell phones while they were in a store during the 2011 holiday season to seek help with purchasing decisions.”

This is the quote I have seen repeatedly across the web since the Pew Research Study “The rise of in-store mobile commerce” was released on January 30th. This quote, when taken out of context of the remainder of the report, is misleading. Mobile adoption for in-store experiences is not 50%!

Let’s be clear on what the research says: 52% of people used their mobile devices at least once in store during  a 30 day period. And, they used their devices to perform such tasks as call a friend for advice, look up review, or look up a price. Only 33% used their phone specifically for online information while inside a physical store—either product reviews or pricing information; again, at least once in a 30 day period.

Even with these caveats, these numbers should be questioned:

First of all, this was the holiday season, where shopping is far different than the rest of the year. People are (mostly) shopping for others. The fact that they would call a friend or family member is probably more likely during this time of year to get gift ideas, remember a size, or get input.

Second, if you have visited a mall or a big box store lately and looked for people using mobile phones while shopping, you would know that people don’t. In fact, with the introduction of Amazon Price Checker, it is a bit awkward to have your smartphone out. If you scan something then the sales associates assume you are price checking and may ignore you or give you a dirty look. Besides, using a phone is too hard when you are actually shopping. You want to touch items and having your phone in hand makes that hard.

Bottom line, don’t believe the hype. Mobile has promise, but the belief that everyone is out there using their phones in stores is simply not true. While a phone can be a useful tool in some situations, people are still shopping in stores the old fashioned way and mobile has a long way to go.

This is the sixth in Baynote’s ten-part series of cartoons by award-winning cartoonist Tom Fishburne, titled “Intent to Buy”. We’ve received some great feedback from you on our cartoons, so please continue to let us know what you think! To say thanks for your input, we’ll send you a print signed by Tom if you post a comment within one week (U.S. addresses only).

Make no mistake: selling online is hard work. With statistics reporting that up to 75 percent of all shopping carts are abandoned just before the sale is closed, it’s a miracle that most retailers haven’t been institutionalized. The good news? Personalization may be just what the doctor ordered. By providing a customized experience that identifies and addresses their in-the-moment needs, retailers can help shoppers go the distance, all the way to the checkout button.

The Personalization Roundup is an ongoing blog series featuring the most evocative news, articles and blogs curated by Baynote each month highlighting the rapidly growing topic of web personalization. For this month’s roundup, we’ve combed the web to once again bring you the latest and greatest on the personalization revolution.

January kicked off with a bang as we said ‘goodbye’ to 2011 and ‘hello’ to 2012 and a fresh set of resolutions. Retailers took a hard look at their failures and successes over the last 12 months and began setting new benchmarks for performance across their channels. With a record-breaking holiday shopping season behind us, now is the time for retailers to take action and ensure their online storefronts are up to snuff. Read on to find out how personalization is positioning brands for success and sparking innovation and disruption in the New Year:

Consumer Sentiment with Online Holiday Shopping Experience Improves but Retailers Have Long Road Ahead with Mobile and Social , Baynote—We’re not usually one to toot our own horn, but with outlets like Internet Retailer and TechCrunch covering the news, the results of our 2^nd Annual Holiday Online Shopping Experience Survey made big waves this month. Check out the report and infographic to discover, among other key findings, how 57 percent of shoppers bought products personally recommended to them this holiday season.

For Mobile Commerce: The Year Of Convergence And Context, Forbes—Mobile commerce emerged as the true channel to watch in 2011 with total m-commerce purchases exceeding $10 billion. But what if mobile commerce isn’t what we think it is? Marketing SVP Jeff Caron explains the subtle, but distinct differences between mobile-enabled ecommerce and mobile commerce and explains how personalization can provide a “transformational” mobile shopping experience for the shopper that influences behavior and boosts spending.  

How Will We Read: Textbooks?, Huffington Post—Vineet Madan, VP of McGraw-Hill Education, a leading provider of education tools, believes using technology to individualize online educational programs and textbooks could very well reinvent education as we know it. “Personalization” says Madan, “will help break the performance rut associated with today’s industrial production model of education.”

You Can’t Spell Media Without “Me”, TechCrunch—Social media distributor and WetPaint CEO Ben Elowitz knows that understanding one’s audience is the hallmark of any great communicator. This is why, according to Elowitz, the media industry’s greatest failure has been its unwillingness to open its eyes and ears to its own audiences: until now.  Does personalization have the “greatest potential to transform the media business,” as Elowitz suggests? We certainly believe so.

No More Average 32-Year-Old Woman, but Market Myth Persists, AdAge—Just as man cannot live on bread alone, retailers cannot market by demographic alone. Milan Mahadevan hammers this truth home in AdAge, declaring that “many marketers already have the tools they need to realize the benefits of personalization, but most insist on using the same tired techniques when examining “average” consumer behavior.”

1. Provide a customized search engine that works

According to our survey, retailers have a lot of room to improve when it comes to helping shoppers find the products they are looking for. The number one concern for consumers* was that when searching for a product on a retailer’s search engine they are shown too many different products to choose from. This lack of personalization results in a busy array of content, confused buyers and high bounce rates.

2. Avoid generic landing pages

After clicking on a scarf your customer is interested in purchasing, they’re directed to a landing page of all the accessories you offer. We think this all too common scenario a little backwards and your customers will agree. Over the holidays, 34% of consumers ended up on generic home pages instead of the specific product page they were looking for through search. Make sure to connect the products themselves with the appropriate landing pages, respectively. For more practice advice on how to create landing pages that drive sales, check out our article in Bloomberg BusinessWeek.

3. Personalize the customer experience

Once the customer is on your page, it’s key that you keep them there. How do you keep them from searching yourcompetitor.com? Provide relevant and recommended content to what they are searching for in the first place. 22% of those surveyed found that not only were the search box results poor but it was difficult to find content they liked. By understanding buyer intent, and offering products your buyer may be interested in, you are optimizing the customer experience and increasing the chances that the consumer will find what they are looking for (and possibly a pair of matching socks).

4. Send emails that relate to things the customer might actually want to buy

As our cartoon demonstrates, sometimes emails offer you things you were interested in 10 years ago or that only your old aunt Betty would consider buying at a high discount. This can lead to disinterested readers and high unsubscription rates. On the other hand, if customer emails are personalized enough to provide content that fits the individual’s preferences, your email engagement and conversion rates will increase. And, proven conversion? Well, that’s just an email marketer’s dream.

*The Baynote Annual survey included 1,032 completed surveys and was conducted between cyber Monday and Christmas Eve.

In addition, while only 9 percent purchased a product on a Facebook fan page, 55 percent said getting advice on products from friends was important, indicating retailers are missing an opportunity to exploit the social graph. However, the real opportunity does not live on Facebook, per se. Those retailers that effectively integrate social graph data and features into their own websites to better personalize the shopping experience will win big. See my recent article about this topic in MultiChannel Merchant.

Interested in learning more? Be sure to read our study for additional findings on social and numerous other topics related to the online shopping experience over the recent holiday.

Baynote Annual Shopping Survey in 2011 and 2012:

Survey Stat: 14.4% of consumers (up from 12.6% in last year’s shopping survey) used their mobile phones to purchase over the holidays.

What it Means: Enabling purchasing on phones is a nice to have for many retailers. However, according to our survey, 77.6% of consumers are using their phones as a shopping aid, primarily for research and comparison shopping.With this in mind, we recommend that retailers not just look at mobile as a selling tool but as a research tool. Think of ways you can help shoppers get more information on the products you sell or compare products in an effective, clear and unobtrusive way.

Survey Stat: 23% of those surveyed said that their personalized shopping experiences on a tablet exceeded expectations.

What it means: The higher quality of the consumer experience, the higher value of the channel. While smartphones won the vote for met expectations (64.7%), tablets won the vote for exceeded expectations (23%). More and more retailers have had time to integrate mobile strategies and incorporate personalized experiences, whereas tablets are still in their infancy. Since we know that users are primarily using mobile to comparison shop, and tablet to comparison shop and purchase, the likelihood that the tablet experience exceeded their expectations is increased.

The strategic use of mobile and tablet will open doors for retailers. However, what consumers want is convenience. It isn’t about just being on mobile, social, or tablet but instead providing a positive experience and seamless transition between them all.