Amazon was one of the first, and is probably the best-known company for making their online business personal for the user.
There are times where the Internet can give the feel of walking in a crowd and nobody noticing. One of the keys to breaking that is to add some type of personal touch to your site.
Sucharita Mulpuru, a senior analyst at Forrester Research says "Personalization is very important, as we've seen with Amazon's collaborative filtering--other customers who bought X were also interested in Y."
Other way companies have utilized the internet to become more personal has been cookies, member profiles and wish lists. It's almost impossible to understand the market you serve and what they want if you don't have these things in place.
One I particularly like is loyalty programs. We should always be looking for ways to reward our best customers. To do that though, you have to have tracking in place to measure the customer's activity.
The big key in this area is to surprise your customers by offering them their rewards and not waiting for them to claim them. Many customers forget what they've earned as one of your clients and proactively seeking them out to reward them will make them appreciate you more.
This is the type of personal touches that truly separate you from your competitors.
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