What is Personalization
Learn all about creating engaging website experiences for your audience.
Website Personalization - The Ultimate Guide
Wouldn’t it be great if all your website visitors magically became your customers? With website personalization, this can be more than just a dream. In this guide, we’ve provided comprehensive information along with actionable insights on adopting website personalization to your marketing efforts.
What is personalization?
Personalization is the act of tailoring a specific product or a service based on your audience preferences. On a website, personalization includes tweaking navigation, images or content depending on visitor intentions, where they are at your company’s buyer journey, geography, demographics, etc. It provides meaningful experiences for your customers and boosts your business growth.
Back in 2014, Coca-cola kicked off personalization with its ‘Share a Coke campaign’, where they forewent their traditional logo on their bottles and printed with the phrase ‘Share a Coke with’ followed by a person's name. This was a huge hit that resulted in 12 million media impressions and boosted consumption by 7% in young adults.
Why do you need personalization?
Personalizing visitors’ experience on your website has become more of a necessity than an option. In a recent survey conducted by Marketo, 78% of respondents said that they are likely to engage with brand offers, only if it has been personalized based on their previous interactions.
In an era where companies are vying fiercely for visitors’ attention, personalization can make your visitors’ stay on your site and help them engage with you better by providing relevant content/experiences.
Personalization is mainly used to:
Improve customer experience
Drive revenue
Reduce churn
Create personalized experiences for your website visitors
How Personalization works
In personalization, you segment your audience into different groups based on certain factors, so that you can provide relevant experiences for them to convert.
Segmentation plays a crucial role for your personalization efforts to work. The better segmented your audience is, the more targeted your messages can be.
Instead of treating segmentation and personalization as separate entities, marketers should leverage segmentation for better personalization.
Here are a few examples of targeting rules that are often used in personalization.
Location
Behavioral
Demographics
Personalization - Customization
Personalization and customization are always used interchangeably. Though they are used together to improve your customers’ experience, there’s a subtle difference between them:
Customization: When your customer chooses from the given options on your website, to suit his/her preferences, it is known as customization.
Personalization: Personalization is when you provide personalized experiences to your visitors/customers by predicting their needs or wants depending on factors like age, demography, past behavior, etc.
For eg., if you are a media website, customization is when a visitor lands on your page and chooses what stories he/she wants to read. Personalization, on the other hand, is when you provide recommendations based on their reading history.
Start personalizing your website right away
Personalization and A/B testing
While A/B testing and personalization serve different purposes, they perform the best when used together. A/B testing can help you compare two web page versions while selecting the one that performs the best. Personalization when done right can bring in higher conversions by providing different versions of your site to different visitors based on their interests.
| AB Testing | Personalization |
|---|---|
| Centered on experiments: The focus of A/B testing is to identify the variation(or the control) that results in higher conversions, for a given audience. | Centered on experiences: Though the ultimate aim is to increase conversions, the focus of personalization is on providing better experiences for customers/visitors. |
| Definite endpoint: A/B testing stops when you identify the better-converting page. | Continuous process: Personalization is an ongoing activity that is often tweaked and experimented with, to provide relevant experiences for your visitors/customers |
| Bucketing: In A/B testing, visitors are bucketed into variations, and will be shown a particular variation irrespective of any changes. | Retargeting: In personalization, the type of page that is shown to visitors may depend on the factor that you personalize with. For eg., if you want to personalize your website based on the location of the visitor, he/she will be shown different variations based on where he resides |
To provide the best experience to your website visitors, it is best to continuously test which ones are more preferred and likely to yield increased conversions. A combination of personalization and A/B testing can come in handy in this case.
To combine A/B testing and personalization, create segments of your audience based on the data you have. This may be the location, demographics, campaigns, new Vs. returning users, etc. Once you have segmented your audience, you can set up probable personalizations and A/B test within that segment, to identify better converting experiences. In this way, your personalization is more targeted and better equipped to bring in higher conversions.
Personalization examples
Though personalization is being adopted only in recent times, businesses have been doing it way back. If you are a business with your target group spread across multiple geographic locations, you may have different language websites to serve your audience. This is a classic example of personalization in action.
Personalization is also much more than addressing your customers by their first name when you send them emails. Here are a few examples where personalization is actively used by marketers, to provide better experiences for their audience while subtly driving them to convert.
Product Recommendations
Product recommendations are backed by machine learning algorithms and AI-based platforms. Though widely used in retail industry, product recommendations are also popular in the media industry like Netflix, Spotify, etc., where their recommender engines/algorithms provide close to perfect matches based on the audience’s previous interaction with them. These automated systems collect real-time data with respect to the user’s context and provide recommendations dynamically. They follow three kinds of approaches namely:
Collaborative filtering
Also known as social filtering, collaborative filtering makes recommendations by using other people’s information.
Here, the engines provide recommendations by gathering and analyzing large amounts of information from the audience related to their preferences, browsing behavior, intents, etc. and matches them to similar ones.
The matching happens either user-user or product-product.
For example, if a user in the age group of 25-30 residing in the UK, purchases a jacket, a similar user in the same age group and the geographical region will be recommended the same jacket, when she browses the clothing section.
Content Filtering
Here recommendations are not dependent on other people’s choices. In content filtering, the algorithm matches items with individual preferences. It recommends products based on what the user has bought/viewed in the past.
For E.g., if you have purchased shirts from an online store compared to bags, the website displays shirts more when you visit it.
A disadvantage with this approach is that the system may not be able to provide accurate recommendations for different product/content types. For example, with this approach, it will not be possible for the system to provide recommendations for shoes based on your purchase of watches on the website.
Hybrid Approach
Sometimes when collaborative and content filtering approaches are used individually, it may not be adequate to provide accurate matches.
That’s where a hybrid approach comes in handy.
This involves a mix of both collaborative and content filtering approaches, giving importance to both individual and collective audience preferences.
Technically, this approach provides the most accurate recommendations. E-commerce giant Amazon, follows a hybrid approach to upsell and cross-sell its products and increase the average order value.
Social Proof Notifications
Social proof notifications are a recent trend in e-commerce websites today. With social proof notifications, you send timely, relevant notifications to your buyers in real-time.
These help you:
Improve your conversion rates by displaying what other customers have bought recently.
Show real-time notifications in customers’ preferred language
Engage your site visitors with ads on sites.
Build trust among your website visitors
For eg, when you visit an e-commerce site, it displays notifications that say that a customer has purchased a product. Brands are leveraging this technology to increase trust in them and eliciting higher conversions from this tactic.
Triggered emails
While it may not be apt talking about emails while discussing website personalization, somehow they are related. Emails reach your audience’s inboxes directly, and can be highly personalized to foster better communication.
Triggered emails are sent in response to an action taken by your users. This type of emails perform the best and deliver higher conversions, as it is targeted better. This is leveraged both by e-commerce and Saas companies.
Some examples of triggered emails include cart abandonment emails, reactivation emails, remarketing emails, welcome emails, transactional emails, etc.
Retargeted Ads
It may be uncommon to classify retargeted ads under personalization. But if you think about it, retargeted ads are personalized to every customer, and is known to convert better.
Personalized retargeted ads are more relevant, improve engagement, and drive customers to purchasing. It is very relevant in the ecommerce business.
Retargeting helps you bring back the traffic that has bounced from your site. It gives you yet another opportunity to make a customer convert, be it making a purchase or fill a form. Your retargeted ads are expensive and can hike up your acquisition costs. Businesses are now turning to personalized retargeted ads to cut costs and boost their conversions.
Craft personalized journeys for your website visitors
Getting started with personalization
Attempting to do personalization for your website, can be quite ambiguous. It is advisable to follow a structured methodology, to avoid confusions and getting sidetracked by other distractions.
The below five-step process can help you get started with personalization
Setting Goals
Data collection
Analyzing data
Step-by-step implementation
A/B testing
Measuring the ROI of Personalization
A/B testing your personalized pages is a good indicator of the success or failure of your personalization efforts. However to determine its ROI, having a standard set of metrics can help. The metrics that you measure will depend on the type of goals that you have set before starting with personalization. These goals are not limited to just your personalization efforts but can be used for your overall CRO experiments as well.
Business goals can be broadly split into:
Engagement-based goals
Conversion-based goals
Revenue-based goals
Engagement-based goals
Sometimes, visitors engaging with your site can be your primary goal. For example, if you have a new landing page published, visitors scrolling to the end of the page may be the engagement that you need.
If you aim to increase engagement on your web pages, the following metrics can measure the effectiveness of your personalization experiments:
Time on Page
Bounce Rate
Visitor Frequency
New Vs. Returning Visitors
Pages visited
Conversion-based goals
Most of the personalization efforts across organizations are centered on conversion goals. Conversion based goals are action-oriented and often require some action to be taken by your website visitors. Some metrics to measure these goals would be:
Form Submits Forms are the widely used lead generation tool. Measuring the number of form submits on your site after you’ve adopted personalization, can identify whether your efforts are working or not.
Clicks on link/elements Measuring clicks on links or elements like ‘Sign Up’ buttons, ‘Add to Cart’ buttons can be a good indicator of the success of your personalization experiment.
Revenue-based goals
If your goal is to increase revenue from your website, the following metrics can help. These metrics give you the exact revenue you’ve made from your site, through your personalization efforts.
Site Purchases When your personalization goals are directed at increasing revenue from your website, tracking site purchases is the right metric to understand if your experiments are working.
Contacting Sales In a service-based business, the revenue is from visitors/prospects reaching your sales team. In such a case, measuring this number would help you understand the effectiveness of your personalization efforts.
Achieve your revenue goals with website personalization
Choosing the right personalization software
The right personalization tool can deliver better experiences to your audience while making your work easier. We’ve listed the important things you need to look out for, while choosing a personalization software for your business.
Segmenting and targeting
Layout personalization
User-friendly
Personalization best practices
Now that you’re ready to start personalizing your website for your visitors, here are a few pointers that you need to keep in mind:
Collecting the right data
Tailoring messaging across different media
Constant testing
Avoiding hyper-personalization
New ideas for overall experiments
Security and user privacy
Personalization with Freshmarketer
Personalization in Freshmarketer is a no-brainer. You can create hassle-free personalized campaigns, with no steep learning curve involved. Freshmarketer lets you create personalized experience either via the easy-to-use visual editor or enabling redirection.
Simply, set a goal for your experiment. Freshmarketer has extensive goal setting options based on conversion, engagement or revenue. Once you have goals in place, you target your audience based on your data.
For. e.g., you may want to target visitors who reach your site through their mobile devices.
With Freshmarketer, you can also launch your personalized experiences once an event is accomplished, from your visitors’ end, via activation mode. This will help you create relevant and accurate experiences for your visitors, provided that your data inferences are correct. To create your first personalization experiment with Freshmarketer, click here.
