I was just pondering a discussion this morning about website CMS tools when this article from EContentMag came through, discussing how great dynamic content sites are. Mike Maziarka, director at Cap Ventures, with whom I spoke on a panel at Seybold last year, is quoted extensively throughout the article.

Dynamic website content, tailored to the visitor, is one of the holy grails of the personalized site experience. Just when you thought you were cool because your site was database driven and could be easily updated by your marketing admin through a great CMS tool - imagine now having that person updating several databases, all feeding the same site, based on user profiling performed at the site, dynamically of course, as the user interacts w/ the site.

Of course this is expensive, but if you can generate leads/sales & ROI from it, then the sales & marketing teams that feed sites will come to justify this type of system in the near future, for those sites that warrant such interactivity.

For most sites, their primary purpose is to provide content to visitors, but the real trick is presenting the most relevant content for any given visitor at any particular moment in time. If a site suffers from "static cling", as they call it, the content is essentially hard coded, rarely changes and can only be altered by a webmaster making manual revisions. Although products like Macromedia Contribute and Atomz Site-Centered Content Management provide ways to make quick site changes without affecting the underlying design or code, these solutions only simplify manual updates, doing nothing to drive content that's based on variable conditions. Vastly more desirable is the ability to have content appear on the site in a dynamic fashion. Often, this means leveraging data learned about the visitor on the fly—like where they navigate, what they read, and how long they spend in a given area—then pulling information and images from a central content repository so that only the most appropriate (or at least somewhat more appropriate) content appears. Ultimately, dynamic content translates into return visits because your content is fresh and meaningful to the visitor each and every time.

[via EContent Magazine]

It's true that one of the goals of a personalized Web site is to quickly provide tailored content based on interests, behavior, and purchase history. For marketers, there is a second, equally important goal -- observing behavior and learning about each prospect's needs and decision criteria. With complete profile data from all touchpoints the Web site or a salesperson can more easily close the sale.

Most CMS products and hosted services are not designed from a marketer's perspective, so they don't have this "look, listen, and learn" approach to growing relationships and making sales.

At Coravue we were marketers long before (okay -- long, long before) we developed our personalized CMS. And, I'm sure other CMS systems also have easy to use point-and-click personalization that doesn't require an IT department. Camworld (which is temporarily down) usually has a good list of CMS products, some of which do personalization.

As for cost, at $40-100 per month, Coravue's personalized CMS isn't expensive. I've seen other hosted CMS services above and below our prices, so the industry has overcome the problem of lengthy and expensive implementations

The real challenge, however, is deciding what to personalize. The first step is to really, really understand how your customers move through the learning/evaluating/deciding process. Once this is clear, it's relatively easy to create personalized content that guides prospects toward making a purchase.