Why personalization of web content?
Sometimes it’s easy to forget the benefits of personalization. For businesses with a significant amount of revenue generated through web traffic, personalization can have a hugely positive effect on several important key performance indicators (KPI)s.
Increase engagement
Your users will love personalized content. This will encourage them to spend more time in your store or with your product/service.
Improve customer experience
Customers expect their online experience to be highly personalized. 74% of customers feel frustrated when website content is not personalized.
Increase conversion
Ultimately personalization has a direct effect on your bottom line. In-house marketers who are personalizing their web experiences and who are able to quantify the improvement see, on average, a 19% uplift in sales.
Increase the effectiveness of remarketing
Personalization of content allows marketers to understand their customers even more. This makes remarketing via other channels more effective as it’s easier to gauge what messaging and products consumers are after.
Step one is to understand your customers
To do great personalization you need data. This can seem like a daunting task; how can you make sure that all of your customer data is available for personalization?
First of all, you need to ensure that you are collecting the right data from the right sources. It’s time to own your first-party data and ensure that you have the relevant insights to deliver web personalization that has an impact.
Ask yourself, is your business collecting the following data:
Web data
Which pages did the customer visit? How many pages do they visit on average? Are they above the average, and how often do they visit? How do they find your site via search, social media, or another source?
Behavioral data
Aside from web activity, there is a whole domain of behavioral information that is a powerful asset when personalizing web content. This can vary depending on the business, but purchase history, basket contents, and the number of individual purchases are but a few examples of important behavioral data.
Along with this, store visits or out of home advertising exposure and other physical interactions that are usually stored in the CRM are valuable when segmenting and delivering personalization.
Marketing data
Which emails did a customer open, and which did they engage with? Did they first visit your site through a paid ad, and what was their copy/theme of the advertisement? Every time you send a campaign or a customer interacts with some kind of marketing activity. This is important data that can be used to personalize at a later date.
Third-party data
You can find third-party data on your customers via other sources, and this can help to add depth to your existing customer profiles. For example, many brands use visits location data to understand if any of their customers visit their stores after visiting a web or mobile experience.
Another example is collecting structured web data that can finesse your customer profiles and help to personalize web content. For example, added company data related to the customer can improve understanding of consumer needs.
Bringing the data together
Customer Data Platforms (CDP) – Bring all of your customer data into a single place
The next step is to make sure that all of this data is structured and in a central place. Connecting data sources can be a difficult task, and ensuring data quality requires powerful tools and a data governance framework.
Tools like a CDP are a great example of an effective central data platform. This can be used to connect the previously mentioned data and ensure that you are storing this in a structured way.
This helps to provide a consistent and unified view of your customers, and all of the data that you have to help understand their problems, habits, and buying history. This is a crucial step in the web personalization journey – without it, it’s difficult to match behaviors to individual users and store actions in a structured way.
Choosing the right segments
Once you have a robust data management solution in place, you can start to think about how to segment your users into groups that you can then personalize content to.
You need to define which segments to use in your web personalization and to do this; you need to be creative and make sure you look at what your data is telling you. Are there any apparent links between customers that can group them into segments?
Once you have defined your segments, make sure you have a system in which changes in behavior can update and move users into new segments.
Example segments
Loyal customers
One effective way to segment users is based on the number of purchases they have made. What’s their average spend per order? Have they ever made a purchase? Loyalty is a powerful market segmentation method that can be used to deliver highly personalized content.
Geography
Where are your users, and what language do they speak? This seems like an obvious thing to say, but it’s surprising how many sites don’t personalize based on geography. This builds better experiences, and identifying consumer location is the first step towards any location-based marketing campaigns.
Engagement
Understand how your customer is engaging with your marketing and use this to personalize their experiences, offers, and products further.
Intent
Another way to personalize your site and convert users better is to look at which stage of the purchase journey the user is at. For e-commerce sites, this could be based on their basket or the number of products that they have viewed within a time span. For B2B, look at previous conversions and understand the pages and channels that assist with this.
Start personalizing
Once you’ve organized your data and defined your segments, it’s time to connect everything to your website and deliver personalized content that will boost your KPIs.
The personalization of products and web experience is an essential part of any e-commerce strategy. Look at changing suggested items, personalizing basket suggestions, or even just combining customer data with the way that your content is displayed to your user.
Combining the same data with your marketing campaigns is another great way to personalize the relationship with your customers. For example, personalizing, which offers are included in email marketing.
You can even use your third-party data to enrich your personalization. For example, property sites can use real-estate data to enrich the listing. This gives them more opportunity for content personalization.
Powerful web content personalization doesn’t just have to be limited to B2C sites. B2B content can be just as easily personalized using the same principles.
Conclusion
- Make sure you are collecting the right data or ingesting data that will help you to segment and deliver segmentation to your customers.
- Use a system that can help you to manage this data and structure in a way that is uniform. Check your data connections and understand what you need to do to keep your data organized
- Build segments based on similar behaviors
- Deliver personalized content to these segments to improve your KPIs
