The Ultimate Guide To Website Personalization

Website Personalization allows you to offer a one-on-one custom made experience to your visitors as soon as they land on your website. You can customize the user experience according to their purchase history, location, or consumer behavior in a way that fulfills several business purposes like better customer satisfaction, more time spent on the website, increased site visits, lesser bounce rates, boosted conversions, and enhanced brand reputation.

Personalization is not a new concept. Although back then, it was more popular in the retail market where the sellers showed products that fit your requirements when you enter their shop. The domain of personalization was missing from the online marketplace. However, as soon as the brands realized the importance of personalization in terms of user experience and revenue generation, they have started exploring this domain.

The better your website personalization, the better the shopping experience you will be offering to your users. Ultimately this will result in increased loyal customer base and retention rates.

In this guide, we will be discussing the importance, benefits, and ways to personalize your website.

Importance Of Website Personalization

In an era where brands are constantly trying to one-up each other, personalization can work wonders. Conveying your audience that you care about their choices and interests while offering them relevant experience and content can make them stay on your site longer. It might even lead the way for them to take the desired action.

Amazon is the perfect example of the importance of website personalization. It has made the shopping experience so smooth, and the recommendations are always on point, keeping all of us hooked to this amazing platform.

Maintaining the right balance between ”you might like this” and ”our eyes are on you” is not simple. You must conduct in-depth research followed by adequate planning, getting the right tools to assist you in the process, and testing out your theory before plunging into any extensive e-commerce personalization.

Benefits Of Website Personalization

Personalization is the main element of enhancing the customer experience. The better you are at addressing the user’s wants and needs, the more are the chances of their conversion and becoming a loyal customer.

Here are the top five benefits of website personalization.

• Optimized landing pages
• More qualified leads
• Improved audience engagement on the website
• Better brand affirmity

How To Personalize Your Website?

The better you know your customers, the more relevant content you can offer to your visitors, and the more conversions and sales you can drive. Here are the steps to personalize your website in the right way.

1.  Collect your visitor’s data

The key to offering a great customer experience is collecting the right data and utilizing it effectively to fine-tune your marketing strategies. Before you start developing a strategy for your website personalization, considering what kind of visitor data, you need to understand your potential customers is vital. You can gather customer data by:

• Asking the audience directly

This is one of the best ways to collect the visitor’s data. To do this, you can ask them to fill a form and fetch details when they either purchase something for the first time from your site, subscribes or registers on your platform. This will help you gather the basic information about them, such as name, email, location, or phone number.

• Map out the customer journey

Following your visitor’s journey on your platform can help you gain insights on their interests, choices, and behavior. Besides page views, you can also track their time spent on individual pages, how well they are engaging with your content, and where they are bouncing off. Each information you collect will improvise your website personalization.

• Cookies and web beacons

Cookies and web beacons are other great options to fetch reliable and authentic user data. You can track your visitor’s browsing history even after they have left your site. You can see where they are going after your website, what they are looking for, and which platforms they are visiting.

• Company records

You can also utilize your own company’s records to examine and organize user data. You can dig into sales records, transaction history, interaction with the sales representative or support team.

• Tracking email activity

This is another way to see whether the customers are opening the emails you send them or not and to know which device they are using.

• Acquiring data from external sources

You can also purchase data from third-party sources. The sole purpose of these sources is to collect and analyze data responsibly and sell them to companies like you. This helps businesses to see what things their target audience is looking for and whether or not they are interested in your product.

2. Profiling visitors

Once you have gathered enough visitor data from relevant sources, it’s time to make customer profiles. Doing so will help you find ways to reach your target customers correctly. It also helps you in understanding what visitors are looking for on your site, which will help you in creating personalized messaging strategies to please them.

The customer profile is more like a virtual human with a name, age, description, preferences, or sometimes physical features too. This customer profiling will help you to offer them a more personalized experience every time they visit your website.

All the customer segments are unique in terms of the products they are interested in. This information can be utilized to target these segments individually and develop website personalization strategies.

3. Establish your goals

Now it’s time to set your goals for both your website and customer segments. Goals can differ across audience demographics, locations, and industries. Some common goals are:

• Boosting conversions
• Reducing bounce rates
• Facilitating product or service discoveries
• Increasing customer retention rates
• Driving repeat purchases

During this process a lot of questions will pop up in your mind. Ensure that you figure out answers to each of them. Some questions might be what are the best ways of engaging with your visitors or what complications are you trying to fix with this? Once you are clear on all this, you can easily establish your goals.

4. Prepare a strategy

This is the stage where you begin your website personalization journey by developing a failsafe strategy to offer the best shopping experience to your visitors.

Typically you should keep these five pages on top priority-

• Homepage – This is the most important part of your website, and personalizing this can appeal to your visitors. You can personalize it by showing different banners to different customer personas which will help them in connecting with your brand more. You can personalize the product recommendations, navigation tab, and content on the homepage.
• Product page – This is another crucial page. You can attract customers by showing them similar products that they have either purchased or searched for before. You can also display the products that are frequently bought together. For example, a phone and it’s back cover or gorilla glass. This way you are not only showing products that they might be interested in but also the related products that they should check out.
• Search results – Mostly when a visitor searches for a product using the search button available on the site, many relevant searches are shown. By personalizing this section, you can drive a lot of conversions. You can display relevant products based on their onsite activity and profile.

You can also personalize other pages like shopping cart pages and no search results pages by recommending some relevant products to the one the user searched for.

5. Planning and implementing your website personalization strategy

There are four steps to do so-

• Identify campaigns – Start writing down your goals and things you want to personalize and improve. Now brainstorm all the ways of fixing these problems.
• Prioritize campaigns – Once you have planned and drafted your campaigns, it’s time to prioritize them. Compare each campaign against their expected difficulty level. Prioritize the one’s which are easy to execute and promise high results at the same time.
• Utilize the right algorithms to fine-tune your campaigns – Algorithms will help you in diving deep into the ocean of website personalization. They will help you in providing a more individualized experience which will help you in grabbing your audience’s attention and achieving your goals.
• Test – Like every other strategy, testing out your website personalization strategy is also essential. Testing it regularly will help you in finding the areas which needs improvement in your website and make amends quickly.

6. Evaluate success

Last but not the least, assessing the success of your website personalization is crucial. This will help you track the results and see which strategy is working out for you.

This was all about website personalization, it’s importance, benefits, and ways to implement it. Let us know how it works out for your site in the comments below.