Ep 117 | How to Lead Personalization with Ben Malki of Dynamic Yield
This week we dig into the requirements to lead a personalization effort with Ben Malki of Dynamic Yield. Ben’s a big believer in the processes that drive leaders to succeed through personalization versus those who personalize without a plan. Join us to learn what successful companies do.
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Allison Hartsoe: 00:00 This is the Customer Equity Accelerator. If you are a marketing executive who wants to deliver bottom-line impact by identifying and connecting with revenue-generating customers, then this is the show for you. I’m your host, Allison Hartsoe, CEO of Ambition Data. Every other week I bring you the leaders behind the customer-centric revolution who share their expert advice. Are you ready to accelerate? Then let’s go! Welcome everybody. Today’s show is about how to lead personalization, and to help me discuss this topic is Ben Malki. Ben is the director of customer success at dynamic yield, a personalization platform. Ben welcome to the show.
Ben Malki: 00:43 Hi. Thank you so much.
Allison Hartsoe: 00:44 Could you tell us a little bit about your background and how you’re originally landed in this subject area of personalization?
Ben Malki: 00:52 Yeah, absolutely. So I have worked in digital marketing and SAS for about a decade now. And one of the great things about working in SAS is that you get exposed to so many different companies, both large and small, some brand names, some non-brand names, and I’ve seen so many successes and failures in an organizations attempting to stand up new digital practices or improve current ones. And it always seemed to fall back on this simple concept of process and ownership. And that’s essentially how I got into my position as the director of customer success for this personalization software.
Allison Hartsoe: 01:23 Fantastic. So let’s talk a little bit about personalization first. Cause I oftentimes hear about people saying that they already do personalization. Hey, I sent you an email last week, and I used your first name, and maybe I even added a few products you looked at. So tell us a little bit about what does it mean to really personalize or to do personalization today? Are there different levels people think about,
Ben Malki: 01:47 Yeah, I would say there are several different levels. Our view of personalization or my view of personalization essentially is creating content segmented to specific audiences that can also be experiences and really anything that you can do with your digital marketing execution. The first thing for me is making sure your organization is ready to start personalizing. And it has a clear vision in mind for what personalization means to your organization and what you want out of it. And then, of course, having a structured ownership and accountability that with someone who owns a compress plan website, I would say. So in terms of the different levels of what it means to segment, I would say that from a crawl perspective and a crawl walk, run model from a crawl perspective, the first thing is to understand that you have segmented behavior and understanding and really identifying what I like to call one segmentation principle. This can be as simple as new and returning. It could be along gender lines or geo lines that makes the most sense for your business and can really cleanly bucket your audiences and the different distinct groups. And the most important thing is that it doesn’t have to be perfect. Just that so you can get started.
Allison Hartsoe: 02:51 Yeah, that’s a really great concept cause I think a lot of people will go for some convoluted, very rich and deep kind of personalization structure. And then you have people who come on the opposite end. If you’re going to lead through personalization, does it matter if you start on one end or the other?
Ben Malki: 03:07 It really doesn’t. I would say that if you’re starting with the most convoluted, most complicated, most complex different audience segments if it’s the first time that your organization has done something like this that might present some execution pitfalls that you might not be able to act on. So that’s why I prefer particularly when it’s new to the org to have something a little bit more simple, that’s really understandable across the different levels of the organization. Then you could just get started. And then, of course, refine from there.
Allison Hartsoe: 03:35 Tell us a little bit about what kind of execution pitfalls you’ve seen for people at the crawl stage.
Ben Malki: 03:39 Yeah. So at the crawl stage, what’s really important is particularly if you’ve never done this before is for not only your department, but your executives and different departments across the organization to understand the different things that you’re doing. And so if you have something that’s essentially inscrutable, maybe to others in the org who aren’t as familiar with all of the information and all the jargon, the jargon and the concepts that you have, it’s going to be really hard to involve them in the process if they just inherently don’t understand it. And so getting a developer to let’s say, code different experiences or something that they totally don’t get or have copywriters or your creatives try to create for something that they don’t inherently understand, that’s going to be really difficult. And it is also going to be hard to get executives cover or sign off on something. That’s not understandable to them either.
Allison Hartsoe: 04:26 I heard some people use betting. They put up all the variations up on the wall, and they ask people to bet on which one they think will actually be the highest performing outcome. And that gets people involved and gets them engaged in it. What do you think of that strategy?
Ben Malki: 04:40 I love it actually. One of my favorite experiences that dynamic yield has included having a bet with a customer on which variation of something would work or wouldn’t work. I’d like very happy to say that I won that bet. Thank you. But I think anything. I think that’s really cool. It’s fine, everybody. It makes it fun, but also actionable. I think anything that can get people excited for whatever it is that you’re trying to accomplish, I think, is a total win.
Allison Hartsoe: 05:03 Yeah. It’s amazing how many preconceived notions we have, and we’re always coming at it from our own perspective instead of our customer’s perspective. And I imagine that’s a little bit of what you see when people move up to the walk stage.
Ben Malki: 05:13 Yeah, absolutely. At the walk stage, you should have already had something in place, at least for a couple of different iterations, and have communicated at least to the most relevant departments that you work with. I think this is where you can take in, particularly if you started with something really basic. I think this is a great opportunity for this to introduce the idea for some organizations of customer lifetime value.
Allison Hartsoe: 05:37 Oh God, we’d love that.
Allison Hartsoe: 05:37 Yeah, I know. But I think this is particularly, let’s say if you’re a multi-category retailer, this is such a great way to not only to bucket your customers cleanly but also in a way where you can look at moving customers up to active or the most valuable, um, iterations of your customers that you can have that can really generate a lot of success and a lot of incrementality.
Allison Hartsoe: 05:57 What else do you see them doing from a leadership perspective at that middle stage? What changes from the basic?
Ben Malki: 06:03 Yeah, so I think this is where it extends beyond either one solar department going a little bit rogue and then bringing it out to the executives or having one executive cover for this. So I think this is when you start to see it spread throughout the organization, which is really where you see it when you get to that stage, when the whole organization is behind this, that’s when you’re going to have the most success. One of my favorite examples of getting to the stages and awesome clients that we have that sent out a test Roundup that showed all the different things that they tried, what worked, what didn’t work and why, and that generated so much excitement, particularly from elements of the organization departments in the organization that had no idea this was happening. Once they did that, they were able to get resource excitement, test ideas, et cetera. That’s usually what that looks like for us.
Allison Hartsoe: 06:47 Is that a bad thing to get test ideas pouring through,
Ben Malki: 06:51 Sometimes, be careful what you wish for, right. But I think 80 sort of engagement, particularly at the executive level is a positive thing as long as you can funnel that into a process that works for the execution. So you’re not just racing to the next shiny object that you have, your testing roadmap, or your program roadmap that is backed by what’s important to the business and the business outcomes that you’re looking for. So an executive outside of your art that’s outside of your department and is giving you ideas. That’s great. But as long as they understand, you’re not going to just jump from thing to thing, just because I want you to.
Allison Hartsoe: 07:23 Yeah. I like what you said before about spreading through the organization. Cause I think that’s where the customer aspect is so valuable is because it does permeate across the organization and all the different departments. So you can get everyone speaking the same language when you get them all in the green of the customer.
Ben Malki: 07:38 Yeah. For something like this to work, it has to be scalable and consistent. And consistency is really key to that. Scalability, if you will. So once you have the entire organization speaking the same way and looking at the same, for instance, KPI is and understand what’s important to them as a business. And what are the things that might be interesting, but not necessarily primary for them to track or discuss? I think that this is when this goes from pet project to something that really brings an organizational change and incrementality and effectiveness.
Allison Hartsoe: 08:09 Yeah. And I always find that there are certain things that happen inside an organization like maybe change is underfoot in another area like COVID comes through and all of a sudden there’s an opportunity to step in and do more. And if you can align with some other change that’s already happening in a way you can kind of, I think you can ride that wave. What do you think?
Ben Malki: 08:29 Yeah, I would say when you have a really strong process, no matter what it is, you are essentially less thrown to the whims of whatever the, if there are major changes, for instance, like COVID that come into place, the strong process allows you to work consistently. In good times, bad times, crazy times, whatever the case might be. So particularly for something like personalization, if you have a really strong concept of who your customers are, what they need, what they like to, to what they like from you, they want to interact with you, et cetera. What really moves the needle with them? Something even like, COVID, shouldn’t change the way that you operate there if you have the customers in mind first and foremost, their behavior might change, but you can change right with it if that’s what you’ve been focused on before.
Allison Hartsoe: 09:12 Makes sense. Okay. So what about the third stage? So it’s crawl walk and then what happens at run?
Ben Malki: 09:17 Yeah. So at a run, you should have already had organizational agreement and alignment on the different segments that you started to work with. And this is not only, let’s say in the eCommerce department, this is across all digital and the executives also have a very strong idea of what these segments are, what they mean, what they represent and how you’re working towards driving incrementality at each of the sites at each segment level. And this is really at this point, you should be running with your process that is consistent every single time you have consistent KPI reporting cadences, you have consistent reports that get funneled up, and there’s tight alignment across all the different departments that are really working towards the same goal. From here your organization should be really focused at the execution level at the ideation execution level, from the customer perspective, instead of concerning yourself more with what do we need, for instance, if you have high inventory levels that you’re trying to clear out or a major thing or major categories that you’re trying to promote then secondary to what your customers need from you and what you need to do for them.
Allison Hartsoe: 10:23 So, Ben, I imagine that people like you who have a lot of expertise in this area, and you talked to a lot of people start to develop a certain sense of what the maturity might sound like for any given degree. So, for example, when we do our customer-centric maturity, we oftentimes will benchmark someone on the lower stages when we ask them if they trust their data, and if they don’t trust their data, then we know they’re not ready for anything else. So are there certain phrases that you commonly hear that people might listen for internally to help them identify where their own organization is?
Ben Malki: 10:58 Yeah. So trust your data is a great one that I’ve heard quite a few times. And to me, what that means is that there’s not like an accepted source of truth for data, obviously, that’s huge. And the total prerequisite to enact in great process here. The things that I hear that give me a very strong indication as to essentially it’s the personalization maturity or the Testament maturity curve are things like, I know this isn’t necessarily what the numbers say, but my executive wants to do X, Y, or Z for organizations that still prioritize anecdotal opinion over what the data is telling you to do. To me, that is a great indicator of a lot of work that’s needed to be done inside the organization to convince them of putting in a strong process that has stayed alive. Um, other things would be when you hear, for instance, like, Oh, you know, well, that’s the email department, and they’re doing something different, or that’s the paid search department. I’m not sure what they’re doing, to me, that’s indicators of siloed organization. That’s not really working towards the same goal and have different priorities, and different things that they’re concerned about that could also lead to totally different concepts of who, of what their segments are. And some disruption, then let’s say brand voice and general execution. So for this to work, those things are important indicators of how truly empowered and collaborative, and our condition is to make the fly.
Allison Hartsoe: 12:14 Those are great suggestions for things to listen to because I oftentimes find that folks who are trying to get it off the ground are really looking for not only just those sound bites to understand what to do but examples from other companies that kind of say, Oh, they did it over here. Like this, are there particular examples you can share about how companies got through these hurdles and how they came, maybe how they used personalization to a stronger effect?
Ben Malki: 12:41 Yeah. What am I favorite examples? I really love this, um, it’s from an amazing client of ours called Stella and Dot, um, they sell some beautiful jewelry and Stella, and Dant really bought into our organizational best practice theories if you will, around personalization. And then as soon as they start very, very directly correlated with how much they started to personalize, um, you know, first understanding who their segments were and then coming up with a really great data-led plan of how they wanted to execute. You see there, how we measure personalization and their purchase per user, which is really a standard for conversion in many ways, went up 125% over about four quarters. And it was beautiful for me. It was a really amazing story and a beautiful for me as we preach this all the time to see those two lines, um, so correlated so connected. Um, when this case, we have a great brand with a really loyal and passionate customers who essentially had it drove a natural set of audiences that almost sells fragmented in the way and the Stella and Dot team. It was a really, really amazing team over there. They really just, they ran with that. And as soon as they started to tailor messaging and tailor experience to each of those very unique audiences that they have, but you saw that, that conversion skyrockets,
Allison Hartsoe: 13:55 I want to hit on the leadership side here a little bit more. Cause I think there’s something baked into the Stella and Dot example that people may not pick up on. And that’s the idea that these are almost digitally native brands and Stella and Dot hasn’t been around for a hundred years, like maybe an insurance company has, or other legacy companies. Is it easier to do personalization, or I should say, is it easier to lead personalization? If you are from a digitally native brand?
Ben Malki: 14:22 It’s a really great question. And I would say inherently everybody’s favorite answer, which is the dependence, but as a digitally native brand, of course, you’re going to have, but I find in those organizations is that they’re typically a little bit more ready for the data to lead the way. And they’re typically more collaborative just as I think, a result of having to work with smaller, with less resource and work together and wear a lot of different hats, particularly if they were in startup mode and that’s essentially permeates the organization. And typically, they haven’t been around long enough for them to pick up possibly some bad habits along the way if that makes sense, particularly when it comes to very siloed departments that work independently of each other. So what we find in this digitally native organizations is that they’re also more agile they’re faster. And then that, of course, lends itself really well to having a great test and learn program that works across all of their digital executions. On the other hand, when you have, let’s say a legacy, you know, fortune 100 fortune 500 company, basically a big company that’s been around for a while, the obvious benefit there is that they have more resources and more resource allows you to execute more things. But if you can’t create a process that leverages that resource that you have, then essentially to mass to very little.
Allison Hartsoe: 15:36 So it sounds like we’re really saying that in order to lead effectively processes is key.
Ben Malki: 15:40 Process is everything for me, particularly having worked in SAS, outside of personalization, coming from the search world, other than others, I saw that that was true in SEL. I see that’s true in paid search, and I see that’s true in personalization at the end of the day, if your organization hasn’t enacted great process with real accountability and ownership, and that is an essential element of it. Um, having someone who is purpose led and at the end of the day, responsible for success with a clear organizational plan for what you want to accomplish, then, unfortunately, it’s going to turn into shelfware as they say.
Allison Hartsoe: 16:12 Yep. And are there any tricks you’ve found that allows people to get into that process more easily?
Ben Malki: 16:18 Yeah, I would say one of the ways that we’ve seen organizations who may have looked like they were on the wrong track is by really getting the message out there, possibly go and putting some tests live. And then as soon as you start showing the numbers and start showing the data that tends to perks on the ears up and get people excited when they start to see incremental returns from revenue or purchase or conversion, whatever the case might be, whatever. So the most, rather than KPI, as soon as you start communicating that are essentially marketing internally, what you’ve done and what you plan to do, and you could show real numbers behind it. May, I’ve seen many times that this has a lot of power and helping an organization to modernize or change their ways quite a bit.
Allison Hartsoe: 17:02 That sounds like Jerry McGuire scene, show me the money.
Ben Malki: 17:10 That’s precisely what it comes down to. I’ve seen organizations that were really opposed to do this or that they sought out buddy. And they said, Oh, okay. There’s something to it. Eventually, you’re going to make somebody like, you’re going to make somebody look good. So they’ll, they’ll go for it at the end of the day.
Allison Hartsoe: 17:23 That’s a good argument for picking the low hanging fruit, for sure. Cool. Are there any other examples that you want to share with us?
Ben Malki: 17:28 Yeah, there are several others. I think the Stella and Dot, what is the most incredible when you see that 125% purchase per user improvement? You know, there’s some other major brand named retailers who have seen a lot of success with this approach, but a lot of times those are the ones who’ve maybe been around a little bit longer, but another client of ours that we love is a great example of leveraging personalization does get a lot of success. Um, they used a little bit.
Allison Hartsoe: 17:52 Did you say the name of the company? Sorry. I missed it.
Ben Malki: 17:55 Yeah. It was PacSun of the PacSun are a really good example of leveraging some CLV type audiences to see some really great success and some of the great numbers and that another client of ours that we love, of course, is third lab. Um, a really incredible organization. That’s been a lot of great work. And with the personalization concepts that we’ve worked with.
Allison Hartsoe: 18:13 And in both cases, was it the organizational readiness that made it powerful, or was it the way that somebody took ownership and leadership? What was it that helped them take flight?
Ben Malki: 18:24 It was actually essentially one for me to talk it. Third love has one of the best operations that I’ve ever been around in my career—even stretching beyond just my career in digital. They are an incredibly empowered organization that works really fast, and they’re really brilliant, and they just have the right mindset. They’re very data first, and they just execute so well. And they’re all on the same page. They came out of the Gates flying, and I’ve been impressed with them since day one that they’ve come on board. With PacSun it was an organizational change that really was about empowerment and that as soon as they empowered this team to start to add what they saw fit, um, we saw a lot of incredible improvement there and saw a lot of incrementality in return.
Allison Hartsoe: 19:06 Okay. Well, let’s say that I’m convinced, and I really want to do more leadership internally. I really want to get personalization off the ground. What should I do first? How should I think about this?
Ben Malki: 19:18 I would say the first thing is, again, from a process perspective, understanding what you want to get out of this, who’s going to run it. Who’s going to be responsible and who they’re going to work with. So essentially, it’s a, you know, check once you have that, then you’re ready to go. From there to really get your personalization program off the ground. It’s determining what your key segmentation variable is. Now, this is different from determining your actual segments. So it’s really understanding what is going to be the basis of our audiences that serves to bucket our users into cleaner buckets without a lot of crossover. Um, that’s understandable at all the different levels of the organization. And that’s once you have that, then you could start to really determine who those segments are.
Allison Hartsoe: 19:58 Yeah. I think that’s interesting that you said without a lot of crossover, because that concept of not having a lot of crossover, it’s not that you can’t do a test with crossover. It’s just that it’s hard for people to get their heads around the results, especially when you’re trying to make progress. Would I be right in that assessment?
Ben Malki: 20:15 That’s exactly correct. And so if you have a ton of crossover, then you’re really not sure what the outcome is, and you really have no idea what to do from there. One of the most important things is that clarity that comes with, first of all, understanding how these segments were built. So what they were built off of, if you will, and then making sure you’re never going to have perfect. There’s always going to be a little bit of crossover, but keeping that to a minimum allows you that very clear learnings and understandings out of it.
Allison Hartsoe: 20:39 Yeah. That’s exactly why we like CLV, is that key segmentation variable, but I know companies use all kinds of different variables.
Ben Malki: 20:46 There are so many different ways that can go with this. I Love CLV because it’s instantaneously understandable and consumable. And that it also gives you a goal for, let’s say, if you went with a, let’s just say, low, medium, high, in terms of customer intent or customer value. Here, the goal is to get people from that low to that high or that low to that medium and that medium to that high. And so it builds in a whole second level of goals, which I think is really funny.
Allison Hartsoe: 21:09 Definitely. Okay. What would be the next step
Ben Malki: 21:12 So once you have that segmentation variable figured out? And then you start to map out who your customers are, you know, this is where you go to create your segments, right. Um, so under building them into whatever platform you’re using on making sure that there’s your analytics platform has a clear layout for it, so you can track them going forward and then really putting that together and having a really clear idea of where, of who they are, um, from there it’s time to act, right? So understanding, letting the data lead, understanding what, uh, which segment, you know, what the segment seed for, you know, for instance, you might, if you went with low, medium, high, let’s say that your high segment, it’s probably not. It doesn’t, it probably isn’t a huge conversion need there. So let’s say we need to, we could Institute a goal of adding a dollar to their AOV or getting them to add an item to their basket.
Ben Malki: 22:00 Whereas for low, that’s probably going to be more conversion lead. So understanding at the segment level, what the data-led opportunity is, and standardizing starting to create different experiences or messaging or content, whatever the case might be for those segments and really standardizing the process of, um, from ideation to execution, to analysis at the segment level. That makes sense. Yeah. And then lastly, you know, this is, I think one of the most underrated elements of personalization, which is the capture, the learning personalization, isn’t just about deriving from mentality from each segment on every test. It’s also about understanding about learning about your customers by analyzing their behavior on each test and then asking yourself, well, why did we see that once you’re able to capture those learnings and really create an institutionalized understanding of who these customers are? What I love to say is, think about from test one, to test 50, if you, in every single test, you ask yourself why and capture those learnings, think about how much you’re going to know about your customers. You’re going to know almost everything. Now. It’s never going to be a, you can always learn more, of course, but you’re going to know what makes them tick. And so I think that’s a huge value derive that you can drive from a process like this.
Allison Hartsoe: 23:08 Well, not only that, but I think there’s some defensibility there in that somebody comes in, let’s say you do get your testing program up and running. And there’s a lot of effort coming through to stage and push out different tests, having something that says, Oh, we already tested that when it comes back around a year later is really helpful to go back to, or at least this is what we’ve said. We found when you get a new executive in, or you get somebody else who doesn’t, you know, has found another way to attack the same problem, and it’s already been settled, but that does not work. It becomes a really good way for the testing team to say, you know, this is what we believe to be true. If there’s a really interesting twist on that, we can look at how to change that hypothesis. But the hypothesis you’ve presented has already been proven to be wrong. Is there a really valid reason for why we should do this again? Is that what you see too?
Ben Malki: 23:56 Yeah. And I love that you called that out. I think that’s a huge win for any department to be able to, and for any organization to really be able to build on each of those learnings. Cause then, in essence, that’s really what it is. And you can always revisit, but without the historical context or essentially just spinning wheels for no reason, no, there it’s really, again, it all has come back to, it always comes back to process to make sure that you are capturing in one single source of truth that is transparent across the org. So it’s not owned just by, let’s say one person in case that person leaves. And I think it’s incredibly powerful when you can say, Oh, we did that. And this is what happened. And if we were going to do it again, here’s what we would do differently.
Allison Hartsoe: 24:34 Exactly. Well then, if people want to reach you and ask you more questions, how can they get in touch?
Ben Malki: 24:40 Yeah. So my email is the best way to get a hold of me is by email it’s Ben.Malki@dynamicyield.com.
Allison Hartsoe: 24:48 And that’s M A L K I.
Ben Malki: 24:49 That is M A L K I. Yes, of course. I’m available on LinkedIn again, just that at Ben Malki. And we still have a lot more information about best practices in organizational best practices of personalization on our incredible blog, which is dynamicyield.com/blog. And there’s a lot of great information on there, but feel free to reach out to me directly.
Allison Hartsoe: 25:09 Excellent. As always, links to everything we discussed are at ambitiondata.com/podcast. Ben, thank you so much for joining us today and sharing your ideas about process and leadership. I oftentimes feel like the leadership behind the data is one of those unspoken things that people forget about when they plug in a technology and expect everything to just work.
Ben Malki: 25:32 Thank you so much for the opportunity. This was a blast.
Allison Hartsoe: 25:34 Wonderful. I remember when you use your data effectively, you can build customer equity. It is not magic. It’s just a very specific journey that you can follow to get results. See you next time on the customer equity.