Personalize This!

Transcript

Taking it personal? Personalize this! You're listening to Higher Ed Hot Takes, and I'm Joel Goodman.

When I took my second higher ed web job in 2010, I remember my boss immediately talking about personalization, though I don't remember him using those words.

He was reading a book about the power of Amazon showing you what you should buy next, and Netflix's ability to tailor content to you based on what you had watched previously.

The desire to personalize has only grown in our sector, but there's still a lot of uncertainty around what personalization should look like. We started with mail merge features in our emails, we moved on to accepted student videos or landing pages customized to the person's name, custom mailers and digital view books that require a lot of work from the student to whittle down all of the information.

It's kind of exhausting to be honest, and apart from email, --quick plug for my friends' book, Mailed It! --nothing has really moved the needle. Most institutions don't even have the proper infrastructure in place to attribute traffic to records in their CRM, but when they do, watch out.

Ask a higher ed marketer what personalization should look like, and you'll get a wide range of responses from, I have no idea, to letting people save settings on the homepage. I'm sorry to tell you this, but customizable homepages are a waste of time, effort, and money. No one comes back to your homepage.

And why would you want them to?

And I think this is part of the issue with higher ed, we have to be beaten over the head with something. There's no sense of nuance.

If the fancy tech isn't obvious enough, think you know, drone videos, chatbots, those customizable homepages again, it must not be working. But when you think about how personalization is supposed to work, it's not flashing up a big graphic with someone's name on it and the list of all their attributes.

You don't do that, right? Don't, that's creepy.

The only way personalization works is through trying to be invisible. That's my take on AI tools too. All of this stuff is supposed to be invisible. It should feel like magic or feel like nothing.

Personalization that works, guides your visitors to take action in the most natural ways possible. But higher ed wants to be in their faces because we spent the money on it. We're gonna show how cool and forward thinking and cutting edge we are. How will they know we're personalizing things for them if we don't yell it in their faces?

And of course, we don't know if it's working otherwise. Nuance doesn't get the president's attention.

Be honest. That's why you buy AI chatbots and these supposed AI CRO products. They're fancy and new. They make you look like you're keeping up with tech. The problem is that your audience doesn't care.

They don't. You're lucky if they even make it to your website. Your goal then should be to make it as easy as possible for them to take an action. Don't distract them with popups and chat bots and forms popping up everywhere. You're meant to curate a frictionless experience, but all these tools do besides sucking your budget dry is add more friction.

Is Teams suddenly a joy to use now that Microsoft is shoehorned CoPilot into every corner? Have your personal interactions with customer support chatbots gotten any better in the past year? Have you unsubscribed to more or fewer emails in the past six months?

We have no chill because we don't understand the underlying tenants of personalization marketing, too few of us really understand the basics of conversion rate optimization and even fewer understand the so-called AI tech that's underneath most of the tools we use. Look, a university website, today at least, is not a consumer product, and the tools you use are infrastructural even though they want you to believe otherwise.

This is an old problem. There are so many universities that still have unbranded intranets and student portals. If the modern marketing software, you're being hard-sold today isn't meant for public consumption, those old enterprise software applications definitely aren't.

Here's the nuance, and it's gonna sound obvious.

Your audience doesn't know your job.

They don't know anything about the products being pitched to you on their personal college search journey. They aren't wondering if you're using Slate or HubSpot or Element451 or any other CRM. They don't even use that search product you're spending five figures on.

These are high school students, single parents, people looking to switch from a day job doing sales to a career running a business. They're not higher ed professionals.

Stop letting the tool get in the way of the outcome because results are way more valuable than impressions. Results are more valuable than engagement.

Results are everything.

And what gets results is invisibility. When you can anticipate a need or a question or an action and seamlessly resolve it, that is when you win. Not by bragging about how hip you are with the newest, shiny thing that they don't care about. Instead of buying software and SaaS tools that have cool demos, ask if that cool demo is what your audience wants.

If you're unable to understand a website visitor based on your CRM data and the additional signals they generate by using your web platforms, you're doing it wrong.

If you think that the best path is tricking a visitor into giving you their information with a gamified interface, just so you can create tailored content summaries for them, you are setting yourself up for failure.

I am gonna suggest that focusing your time and your money on fixing your user experience, not covering it up with a snake oil solution, will save you tons of cash and generate huge returns.

I know this because I do it every day in higher ed and I do it without kickbacks from companies trying to make as much money as they can off of this industry before it fails. I know I'm a bad capitalist, but there's a huge technical knowledge gap in our industry and companies that sell AI powered tools have only increased that through obfuscation.

They claim to be transparent and benevolent while pocketing your cash for smoke and mirrors. The past three years have generated so much slop. It's harder than ever to pick out the good from the bad, the truth from the fibs, and the outcomes from the promises. Stay vigilant, be a critic, not a skeptic.

I'm not sure American higher education has ever been in a more critical position, and in the UK the circumstances are different, but also precarious. Canada and Australia are also seeing hard financial times. I'm not convinced it's going to get much easier, so make every dollar, pound, or Euro count.

Thanks for listening. Find me, Joel Goodman, on LinkedIn or Bluesky.