6 ways to harness the power of website personalization
Personalization – Are you ready to ace the game?
Personalization is the technique to harness digital technology, keeping the end-user at the core and serving up a game-changing experience based on specific customer insights. In the real world, imagine you walk into a mall and instantly get notified with a message on your phone that the product you were researching yesterday is available in the store in front of you, and there is also an offer running. Adding to that, when you walk into the store, the manager greets you by your name and navigates you directly to the product, saving you the hassles to discover the product in a new store layout. Wouldn’t that experience leave you over the moon? This is the power of personalization, but you need to find the “sweet spot,” which could be tricky. Too much personalization would make customers feel intrusive, while too little can make it impersonal. The optimal personalization mix is derived by harnessing these six different ways that we will touch upon here.
Personalization – Why it really matters!
- Your customers expect you to remember and reward them in every step of their buying journey.
- The personal connection leveraging the consumer’ emotion, helps business grow by making the right moves at the right time.
- Presented content should be timely and personal. Innovative personalization tactics keep’s the consumer engaged.
A research by Accenture survey points out to the fact that 91% of the consumers connect with brands that recognize and remember them. Yet another research highlights that 48% of the consumers moved to a competitor’s website because the experience was poorly curated. These data points further signify the relevance of personalization in this digital era.
Target the intended audience
So who are your target users? What age group do they belong to? Get crucial insights on the demography, purchasing power, buying pattern, geography and consumer mindset. This helps you frame your roadmap on what is the right amount of personalization that is required. Historical insights like past purchasing patterns need to be mined as well, and these help you target focused user groups and plan your digital marketing strategies around them.
Let us look at some of the ways we can achieve this.
Rule Based Personalization:
Never are two consumers the same. With this option, you can frame specific criteria based on certain web attributes, database attributes or user behaviour data. Accordingly the images, discounts and promotions would be shown.
Behavioural Personalization:
In this technique, the personalization is driven by what visitors do on your website. You can trace successful patterns of visitor’s journeys and suggest these paths to other users. Also you understand at what stage the visitors are most likely to drop out and stick out some jaw dropping discounts to drive them on their buying journey.
Personalized Product Recommendation:
Many successful businesses, like the apparel brand Rachel and Thinx have mastered the art of personalized product recommendation to carve out a 100% conversion rate. An artificial intelligence styled interaction, collects user inputs and provides tailored recommendations. This helps educate your customers and empower them in making a choice.
Relevant Reviews and Testimonials:
The cosmetic industry offers a plethora of products which differ minutely based on skin and hair characteristics. Sephora and Thinx have introduced smart reviews that include attributes like skin type and eye colour to help filter and read relevant reviews. Also connecting users to chat or having a testimonials feature improves connection and helps provide relevant feedback.
Creating In-store Experience on Digital Storefront:
A recent survey result showed that the conversion rate of an interactive content was twice that of a passive content. Physical bike shops provide an option for the customer to touch and have a test ride. Further it provides a sneak peek to understand the real people who want to associate themselves with the brand and have conversation with these folks. It is key for such brands to provide transformational experiences using immersive and augmented technology to achieve the same experience digitally
Provide Location relevant content
Serving the right content is a key ingredient in the personalization mix, and this needs geolocation services to make the content relevant based on where the customer is located at any given point in time. This reduces the number of clicks, which in turn provides relevant content at a faster rate providing customer delight. The quicker the connection with the content happens, the higher the probability of any meaningful transaction.
The immersive customer experience
It is highly unlikely that your customer uses a single device to access your website. A responsive, lightweight design that is accessible and fits any frame be it a mobile, tablet or a larger screen is crucial to give the user a similar experience across devices. It makes the most sense to consider the mobile context as smartphones will continue to disrupt and likely emerge as the key gatekeeper in providing personalization benefits to your customers.
Engaging both your new visitors as well as the returning ones
It is important to help the user in his journey. You should make a new user feel appreciated for being there; the customer paths should be well defined and help locate content quickly. It is also crucial to identify a returning customer as they give you opportunities to cross-sell or another opportunity in customer retention.
Exposing the Right Content
Your landing page's first content is your crucial element to make the user continue his buying journey. Combinations of images, short videos, discounts and call-to-action should be focused and intuitive. Personalizing these components based on location or historical user pattern helps set the directions for the conversation ahead.
Power of Social Media
Help your customers connect, refer, review and rate your products or services. The ease of log-in using their social media accounts is a win-win setup any day. The tons of data you unearth from the user’s social media accounts can help you plan a more relevant and engaging buying journey.
What Personalization Tools Can a Brand Use?
- Tools with integrated web analytics include Adobe Target and Google Optimize.
- In the Software as a Service (SaaS) Category we have Apttus, Certona, Omniconvert, Pureclarity, Qubit and Yusp.
- Magento is an open source e-commerce solution that has its own personalization extensions.
- For the B2B needs and marketing automation, we have Evergage, BrightInfo, Ion Interactive and Sitespect
- Self-service personalization tools include Proof, Sleeknote and Personyze
- Managed website personalization solution include Yieldify, Fresh Relevance and VWO
- Sitecore also offers online commerce solutions for personalized shopping experiences
- WordPress, Drupal, SharePoint and Aquia are other tools available to help in the personalized digital experience platform journey.
Conclusion
PennyWise has proven expertise in harnessing the power of website personalization along the lines of broader digital transformation tools and processes, thereby allowing your business to understand the customer base better and help in pushing the right content at the right time. Do not hesitate to reach out to us for any of your personalization needs.
References:
1.References for Power of Social Media
https://mention.com/en/blog/personalization-social-media-marketing
https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/why-hyper-personalization-is-key-for-marketers-in-2020/570276
2. References for What Personalization tools can a brand use?
https://www.yieldify.com/blog/website-personalization-tools-5-factors-to-consider/
https://www.smartinsights.com/ecommerce/web-personalisation/web-personalization-software/
https://influencermarketinghub.com/website-personalization-tools/
