Engage Your Customers with Website Personalization
Among many themes, the marketing world seems to be focused on personalization. If you’ve already hit the ground running with website personalization, you can sit back comfortably while your consumers enjoy an experience tailored to them. If you’ve been somewhat avoiding it, there’s no need to panic. We’re going to tell you everything you need to know about website personalization so you can start implementation.
What is Website Personalization?
In the early days of the internet, we would build one website. Every page would be the same for each visitor, and we would therefore cater the content to a broad spectrum of people. Now, advancements in the field have enabled brands to customize the experience for each visitor. As long as you have the data, each visitor gets a unique experience based on their needs.
Why? It can help increase retention and boost conversion. Suddenly, your visitors feel special because they’re seeing content relevant to them. When content resonates with your audience, they’re more likely to stick around.
As an example, eCommerce services can assess the browsing behavior of consumers and use this information to suggest the right products. Alternatively, travel websites can look at the weather in their visitor’s location and use that information to provide special offers and deals. Even news channels can provide location-specific news to visitors on their platform.
Why Invest in Website Personalization?
You already have a website, so why should you spend time and money personalizing?
Boost Conversion
Firstly, we know that you’re already spending money trying to increase the number of leads you get into the business. Whether through Facebook ads or traditional SEO, it’s all well and good generating leads, but why send them to a generic website? Instead, you can ensure that each visitor from these channels gets a unique experience. No matter where your leads come from, and no matter how many leads form, the success of your whole marketing strategy will still depend on the strength of your website. Why let everything crumble at this stage when you can personalize?
Increase Retention
As we’ve seen, website personalization allows brands to suggest and recommend products and content based on the individual themselves. By doing this, the visitor is more likely to spend time perusing. Rather than clicking onto your website and seeing nothing of relevance, they should see at least one thing that catches their eye. We aren’t saying that every click will now stay for a full afternoon, but there’s more chance of them getting value from you.
If you think about your own browsing habits, what is it that makes you engage with a website? If you’re like most, it comes down to two things:
- Relationship
- Familiarity
When you personalize the experience for visitors, they don’t feel like just another number. They feel a part of the family because you’re making the effort to provide content and products that resonate.
Nurture Relationships
Did you know that personalization extends to all different areas of your website? We’ve spoken mainly about the homepage and what the visitor will find when clicking onto your website, but it also extends to:
- Catalogs
- Product pages
- Recommendations
- Cart page
- Site navigation
The more you personalize, the more you nurture the relationship and engage the prospective customer. With relevant content and targeted offers, all that’s separating you from a sale is a nicely placed call to action. Eventually, your website actually becomes a cross-channel tool to speed customers through their journey.
Better Notifications
Finally, people often think that website personalization ends as soon as the customer leaves the online store. That couldn’t be further from the truth. As long as you’re still connected with the customer, the personalization should continue. For example, perhaps you could send a coupon code through an email to draw them back to you? With a tailored offer, they may finally make the purchase they’ve been considering.
Challenges of Website Personalization
Before we go into how you can get started with website personalization, we first want to discuss a couple challenges that personalization brings. Don’t get us wrong, we know it can be difficult. Especially for brands who have established themselves away from the internet, getting customers online in the first place is a challenge in itself.
Challenge #1
The first challenge comes in knowing who to target with personalization. You might know the most valuable audience, but having a way to target individual messages to this audience is another thing entirely. While developers control content through a content management system, visitor data might not be readily available for real-time targeting. Sometimes, bringing everything under one roof is a tricky first step.
Challenge #2
Secondly, another problem comes with the data. These days, every company has a wealth of data, yet the majority can’t or don’t know how to use it since it’s normally spread between a number of different systems.
Challenge #3
Thirdly, how do you measure the success of personalization? In the past, we’ve spoken to several companies who made all the changes we’re going to suggest without really understanding the impact they had. With personalized content and the targeting of valuable audiences in this way, there’s no direct way to measure the effectiveness of the strategy.
Adopting Website Personalization
Now that we understand how it all works, let’s look at implementing the idea. Firstly, you need to answer two questions before doing anything else.
- Who will receive your personalized efforts?
- What do you want to show them?
This first question is all about identifying your audience and deciding for whom the messages should be personalized. There are three ways to do this; the first is to consider demographic attributes. In other words, consider the average visitor to your website, their location, their job, their age and gender, etc.
Secondly, you could base your audience on behavioral attributes. This way, you think about what the visitor was doing before finding your site and what they do once on the website.
As the third option, you could choose to base your audience on context, which includes the device of the user, their browser, and whether they’re logged in or not.
Once you have an audience, it’s time to address the second question. We have the ‘who’, now we need to worry about the ‘what’. Again, there are a couple of different considerations. One of the best tips we can provide is to print out a picture of your homepage onto a large sheet of paper. Then, come together with your marketing team and decide on a few areas that could be personalized for your chosen audience.
With the huge sheet of paper in the middle of the table, everybody can offer their thoughts. Eventually, you should come up with a few locations where you will need to personalize.
From here, it’s a matter of creating value for your visitors. What will you show your audience? In order to increase retention and boost your conversion rate, you need to create value and ensure that the audience gets what they need from you.
At this point, you’ve now answered the two major questions and it’s time to make the necessary changes to your website. Whether you do this yourself or outsource the technical aspects to a specialized service is up to you.
Top Tips for Success
To finish, here are some tips:
- Be Unique — You have a unique website, you have a unique service, so don’t feel the need to copy others. Sure, take a look at how the competition does it. But, introduce your own ideas and generate that value for your audience.
- Analyze and Improve — As with anything in business, it doesn’t make sense to completely change something and then ignore it. Although we’ve said that gauging success levels is difficult, you can still consider your website personalization budget and assess whether or not there has been a noticeable upturn in engagement and conversions. As long as you don’t make other huge changes at the same time, you can be confident that any improvements are a direct result of your website personalization.
- Talk to Your Audience — Sometimes, obtaining the magical data doesn’t need to be impossible. If you need to know what your audience requires from your service, there’s no easier way than to ask them. Whether you do this through social media polls or by asking people who buy from you is up to you.
We hope you feel more informed about website personalization, and go through our steps to decide if it’s something you want to adopt in the near future. It may just prove the key to keeping your customers engaged!
