Big data for dummies: Gigya’s new Consumer Insights tool makes mass personalization simple

What can big data do for marketers?

How about letting them know each of their 10 million customers’ individual favorite sports teams? Or where they like to go on vacation? Or how they prefer to spend their leisure time? And helping marketers use that data effectively, intelligently, simply, and quickly.

Social login pioneer Gigya released a new tool for marketers today that will not only give them that data — it will also flow into customized email, web, social, phone, and offline marketing campaigns.

With just a few clicks of a mouse.

Above: Sample insights

Image Credit: Gigya

“Marketers are tired of hearing companies preach about ‘big data’ and the vague ways they should be using it,” CEO Patrick Salyer said. “Consumer Insights finally puts massive amounts of modern consumer data — everything from users’ interests, to their Facebook likes, to the articles they’ve commented on — into one dashboard that actually shows marketers what they need to know about their users, complete with integrations with the marketing platforms they already use.”

One use Salyer mentioned to me was by a major online sports retailer. Because that retailer uses Gigya’s Consumer Insights, it knows that Salyer’s favorite team is the San Francisco 49ers. So the store sent him a personalized email including a 49ers jersey with his name on it.

Setting up this kind of campaign, Gigya says, is easy.

“We’re storing modern identity data, in which Facebook passes interests, likes, and behavior data,” Salyer told me this morning. “That includes reviews, comments, shares … and allows us to set up an insights dashboard where marketers can come in and query against any of those things in our database simply by selecting a few checkboxes.”

That shows you, for instance, that visitors to your website who are under the age of 25 and spent over $100 are interested in backpacking, hiking, and trips to the Adirondacks. Or that people who spent over $500 on your site are 45 or older, own Volvo sedans, and vacation in Tahiti. Or whatever the unique characteristics of your specific slice of American consumers are — all of which can help you in merchandising, targeting, or simply personalizing.

Gigya used the tool this past week to find, for instance, that Bronco fans like Finding Nemo and Shrek, while Seahawks fans like Star Wars and Batman: The Dark Knight.

“Insights like these highlight the differences between user bases that marketers need in order to best reach an audience,” the company said.