Website Personalization: An Overview

Web personalization, providing the user with better content, is the key to significantly increasing your web traffic, sales conversion, and customer retention rates. Still, not many marketers can leverage it properly. So, if you are not getting the expected ROI, then maybe it’s time to review and revise your strategies. Therefore, we must start from the beginning; this article will explain everything about the topic.

Expert marketers love crafting a strategy to personalize a website. After all, providing exclusive offers, dynamic content, and personalized recommendations can elevate the user experience. But to accomplish that, they need to consider the behavior, interests, and demographics of their audience.

Fulfilling customer requirements before they mention them is the main aim of a website personalization strategy. What if you walk into your favorite diner and find a table ready for you where you will be served your favorite dish? All of these without any booking or prior notice to the restaurant owner. How would you feel?

It turns out you were a regular customer there, and when the owner saw you drive your car into the restaurant’s parking area, he ordered the chef to prepare your order and the waiters to prepare a table for you. The owner was just trying to make your experience unique. That’s what website personalization is all about.

Nowadays, websites are designed to adapt to the user’s previous interests and behaviors. Users now prefer that their favorite brands should provide them with personalized recommendations.

Types of Website Personalization

The website personalization comes in two distinct categories. Let’s have a look at them.

Dynamic content

In the dynamic personalization of a website, changes are made to the native content, such as texts and images. For example, to personalize the customer experience, an extra offer is provided, or a suitable headline is adopted that appeals to the interests of certain segments of visitors.

Dynamic content is one of the least intrusive types of personalized experience you can offer to customers. The visitors only have to browse the website, and they get to interact with the personalized content. And the best thing? Most of them never notice that the content is targeted towards them.

Using headline text, check out how Adidas has manifested the title using visitors’ birthdays.

Overlays

Overlays are used to conceal some of the website’s content. They appear on top of the website’s original content and cover it with more personalized or targeted content. Some of the most common kinds of overlays include the sticky bars and popups.

Since the overlays are programmed to appear automatically on the visitor’s screens, they are more intrusive. However, they get noticed easily and have a better conversion rate than dynamic content.

Here’s an example of how an e-commerce website is popping up recommended products according to visitor’s choices. However, if you wish to yield better outcomes, you must use both website personalization types.

Benefits of website personalization

Personalizing your websites for visitors can be highly beneficial for your business. They include:

More accurate product recommendations

Recommending customers the products of their interests when they are already browsing for related products is a proven strategy.

But you must be careful and make suggestions relevant to their current purchase or preferences. Making contrary recommendations would just cause friction between customers and your brand. Not to mention, all your efforts and resources would go to waste.

Personalized suggestions increase customers’ awareness of complementary products, which might lead to future sales. Rather than providing a generic interaction with the brand, website personalization allows you to provide a unique customer experience to each visitor.

Customized Landing Pages

Although it’s a big win when you bring in your customer, whether through a Google ad, a marketing email, or from organic search ranking, it’s just a start. Clicking on a link routes them to your landing page, giving you an opportunity to drive conversions.

By personalizing your website, you can collect data from the visitors that, in return, will help provide them with an enhanced user experience. With the help of that data, you can create personalized landing pages that list or highlight the services and products your customers are interested in. Such a tactic will help you make a quick sale.

Increased site visit time

You need high-quality content to keep your visitors engaged on the site. If your customers don’t spend much time on your site, all your efforts are in vain. Your website personalization efforts should aim to keep the visitors on site longer using relevant content, ads, popups, and more. They are more likely to make a purchase when they stick around longer.

Targeted CTAs increase conversion

CTAs are very crucial. You could lose sales if you slip up even a little in creating a relevant CTA. Fret not; website personalization allows you to build a targeted CTA that will gently guide the visitors through the sales funnel, leading them toward a sale.

The likelihood of the conversion will increase dramatically when you place a personalized CTA button or link. You can also try out A/B testing to determine which CTA works better with different visitors.

Higher engagement with customers

Keeping your visitors engaged with the site is a very challenging pursuit. Even the slightest things can make your visitor bounce away from your site to your competitor’s. As much as easy it is to connect with the audience online, it is equally challenging to sustain these connections.

Personalizing the websites for visitors would help you keep them on-site longer. The increased level of engagement would also lead to more sales. Web personalization allows you to leverage visitors’ browsing data to curate the marketing experience.

In short, web personalization enables you to cultivate positive customer feelings about your brand.

Elements of the Website That Can Be Personalized

Now, we’re aware of the benefits of website personalization. It’s time to get into the different website elements that can be personalized.

Headline Personalization

A headline is the first thing that catches your visitors’ attention. To use personalization at its full potential, landing pages need to adapt headlines that are relevant to the visitors.

The more personal connection the visitors would feel with the headline, the more likely they are to make the purchase. It would be beneficial to create different headlines to target customer segments based on variables like location and more. Look at an example from Gusto welcoming its returning users.

CTA (Call to Action) Personalization

CTAs are to encourage the visitors to take specific actions like subscribing to the newsletter, downloading some material, signing up for an event, or more. So, they are an ideal element to be personalized. The visitors need to be facilitated with a clear path in their interest.

Based on different customer segments, you can create different targeted CTAs. The classification also occurs at different sales funnel stages and between customers and non-customers. Check out how MVMT uses gender-based personalization.

Hero Image Personalization

Images are visual content. You must personalize it as your text content or message on the website or landing page. It is necessary as it drives more conversions and helps create an emotional connection with the customers.

Image personalization is an art where marketers aim to craft a message that viewers believe is crafted specifically for themselves. You can provide different images for different groups of visitors based on their age, location, gender, and other demographic variables. Look at an example from SumUp personalizing Hero image according to visitors’ industry.

Navigation/Menu Personalization

Customers come to your website looking for something; if they can’t find it easily, they get bored and leave to never return. To cure that, you can personalize the navigation and menu on your website based on customer references.

The navigation menu can provide access to significant aspects of the site. It would act as a roadmap to product discovery. Website personalization can record users’ preferences and optimize or reorder their navigation bar/menu accordingly. Here’s an example from Netflix, which uses navigation personalization for movie suggestions.

How to Personalize the Website

At the initiation of any process, the most commonly given advice is to set clear goals. But that’s not the priority here. In web personalization, you can’t set clear goals, let alone plan your campaign, if you don’t have information about your audience.

The more you know your customers, the more personalized websites you can create and, as a result, more conversions and sales. There is only one way to do it right:

Collect data of your visitors

Data is at the core of any web personalization strategy. You could know a lot about your customers by collecting their data. You can use that data to tag and segment your website’s visitors. Some of the common ways to collect the user data are:

• Web analytics
• Mobile app data
• Online and in-store sales
• Ad interactions
• Form Completion

Create user profiles

Once you have gathered your visitors’ data, the next thing to do is to create a user profile. Also known as a user persona, it helps you understand your ideal or targeted customers and their preferences. This would come in handy while crafting personalized messages and strategies to appeal to them.

Various tools are available in the market that can help you build user profiles that give meaning to your data and turn it into actionable insights.

Remember, your customer is a human with a name, gender, age, geographical location, and more. That’s how your user profile should look as well. The user persona is not about recognizing various customer segments; it’s about forming a strategy that enables you to facilitate a unique experience every time they visit your website.

Every visitor is unique, and you can use their data to create their personas, which would help you identify which segment they belong to. Such user segmentations can help you solve questions like who, where, and how to reach prospects.

Personalization Planning and Implementation

After segmenting your audience, it’s time to determine what personalized content you should offer to every segment.

Your marketing campaigns must be planned around your goals, such as improving the bounce rates of your blog or improving cross-sells and upsells. Then, you must figure out how crafting personalized content for visitors can help you accomplish your goals.

For example, if you aim to improve cross-sells, you can recommend relevant products to the visitors. For an example, look at how Sephora shows tailored product recommendations to their users.

Measurement and Analysis

You must utilize the right metrics to measure the success of your website personalization strategy. This is not just about mapping your marketing campaign’s performance but also about checking whether your ROI channels are working in your favor.

Although the metrics to success depend on the nature of your goals, some of the common metrics you need to measure are:

• Time Spent on Website: You must track how much time a visitor spends on your website across all web pages.
• Visitor Frequency: How many visitors are you getting? Also, how many revisits are there?
• Content Consumed/Pages Visited: What amount of content your visitors are browsing? Which pages are they checking out? How much time are they spending on each page or content?
• Number of actions taken on a site: What actions are visitors taking while browsing through your site? You have to measure the metric for each activity on your website, like reading a blog, clicking certain links, filling out forms, and more. Measuring these metrics could tell you which element drives more conversions on your site.
• Visitor quality: Are your visitors the ones you targeted to bring to your website? If not, how different are they from your targeted audience segment? What brought them to your website?
• Conversion rates: Can your personalized content convert your visitors into your customers? Also, track your conversion rates.
• Revenue attribution: Check how much revenue is generated through website personalization activities.

Real World examples of Website Personalization

Now, we know about the process of website personalization. Let’s look at some major brands across different industries using this process to achieve more traction.

Amazon

No company has performed better than Amazon in website personalization. Their website is always full of personalized recommendations, whether product or content.

Amazon has one of the largest user bases in the world, and the company uses every single piece of information about all its customers to provide a better shopping experience. They even use names and addresses on the homepage to make it more customer-specific.

Netflix

Netflix is a premier streaming option for millions of users around the world. The company has to constantly rework its website personalization capabilities to render elevated and unique experiences.

The more a customer uses their platform, the better Netflix’s algorithm can work to provide a personalized experience. Long-term subscribers can enjoy customized suggestions based on their history, viewing habits, and trends. Netflix is known to highlight content that aligns with the customer’s interests.

Website Personalization Tools

Website personalization tools are the most important part of achieving successful website personalization implementation. In the list, you’ll find some of the most used tools.

Optimizely

Optimizely allows you to deliver personalized messages and experiences to the visitors on the site in real time. This tool comes with the capability to swap sections of the web pages to make them personal for the targeted audience. Major features of Optimizely are:

• Real-time reports
• Visual editor
• Machine learning model

Dynamic Yield

Serving more than 350 enterprise customers, Dynamic Yield is an omnichannel personalization tool. It can help customize user experience across the web, mobile, ads, and emails. Its features are as mentioned below:

• Visual drag-and-drop editor
• Automation
• Client-side and server-side testing

Mutiny

You don’t need an engineering or analytics team to offer a personalized experience to the visitors on your website when you are working with Mutiny. This tool can help you quickly create a pipeline and turn your website into a revenue channel. Mutiny offers the following features:

• Visual editor that provides AI-based suggestions
• Real-time reports
• Offers over 300 attributes for Complex Targeting

Conclusion

If you want to stand out in a highly competitive market, you have to show that your brand is relevant to the customers’ personal interests. It would also prove you have the right products and services to fulfill their needs.

Website personalization isn’t another trend for you to try; it’s a must-have strategy that enables you to connect with your customers, engage with them personally, and increase your ROI significantly.

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