At one point in time strategies like search, paid media, and email marketing worked wonders for digital businesses. All one had to do was build an appealing-looking website, publish innovative content, and engage customers. As the internet landscape became more crowded, increased customer acquisition expenses gave rise to A/B testing, which allowed for a healthy influx of conversions by optimizing the site’s many features to determine the best performing experience and serving it across traffic.
However, now with over 19.4 billion websites on the web, the competition has become ever more intense. You have to do a little extra and in a little more effort if you want to attract and retain customers. Today, organizations must invest in website personalization and resonate with users on an individual level if they want to impact decision-making.
The process of creating tailored experiences for website users is known as website personalization. Website personalization allows businesses to provide visitors with customized experiences suited to their requirements and aspirations, rather than giving a single, generic experience. Companies use data that they have specific consent to acquire to create an individualized web experience for each consumer. Then, utilizing geolocation, site activity, previous purchases, and other factors, they customize the customer’s experience on mobile applications, emails, digital adverts, and websites.
Personalization vs Customization
People often confuse personalization with customization. One easy way to explain the difference between the two is: Personalization is manufactured by the company, whereas customization is controlled by the user. Dashboards, chat rooms, and email filters are all examples of customization a customer can adjust to match their individual needs. On the other hand, personalization is controlled by the company where they curate more relevant and tailor-made experiences for each customer such as specific recommendations and exclusive offers for their customers.
Websites that adapt to a visitor’s previous behavior are more likely to succeed and make more money as these methods help a lot in increasing website traffic, customer retention, and sales. According to a study, 91% of customers prefer to work with companies that provide personalized experiences. Thus, it’s time you start thinking about personalizing your website if you haven’t already. Here is a detailed guide to help you with everything you need to know to personalize your website.
Benefits of personalizing your website
A lot of people still do not believe that personalization is here to stay. Some people still believe that personalization, like many other digital marketing tactics, is just a passing fad that will fade away soon. On the contrary, customers expect personalization to be the standard norm in every business, and rightly so. Customers place a high value on being recognized as an individual and are more likely to purchase from companies that tailor their experiences.
1. Relevant Product Recommendations
Did you know you could irritate a customer into not purchasing your product or service? Nothing irritates a customer more than generalized recommendations that have nothing to do with their personal preferences.
The most significant advantage of website personalization for your customers is a relevant product recommendation. Personalization allows you to make timely and accurate recommendations for your customers based on their data. This will not only keep them from leaving your site, but will also increase website time spent, improve customer loyalty, and result in a higher retention rate.
2. Improved Customer Understanding
One of the key factors in providing a better user experience is understanding your customers. If you are not aware of the people that make up your customer base then there’s very less chance that you’ll be able to cater to them personally, which going forward would lead to customer loss.
Creating buyer personas for your most common customers is a good place to start. And moving forward, you can work with your IT team to begin personalizing your website for those various personas. One benefit of going with developing brand personas, instead of catering to individual customers, is that you’ll have fewer combinations of data to collate. For instance, if you have 20,000 customers, then rather than focusing on every individual’s purchase history or address, you can create personalization based on factors such as their locations(region) or how much money they’ve spent in the last six months.
3. Increased Site Time
Humans already have an attention span of 8 seconds and that too begins to wane if we’re looking at something that does not interest us. Time spent on a page is a website metric that almost every marketer monitors because it is an indicator of engagement. By reflecting your customers’ buying habits and common themes back to them, you increase the likelihood that they will stay on your website longer.
Although the amount of time visitors spend on your website is significant, it is even more beneficial when it actually converts to a CTA or landing page. And this is more likely to happen if your customers see more of what they like on your landing page.
4. Better CTA Conversions
High conversion rates across landing pages and CTAs are the ultimate benefits of website personalization for you and your organization. Call-to-actions are one of the most effective ways to attract people to take action on your website. A well-crafted CTA might persuade website visitors to sign up for a free trial, read a blog article, participate in a survey, or even watch a demo they might not otherwise be interested in.
Companies that create personalized experiences for their customers see a significant increase in revenue, which isn’t accidental. Website personalization is time-consuming, deliberate, and actionable work, with high ROI expectations to match. If you take the time to do it well, you have a good chance of succeeding with this method.
How to personalize your website
One of the most important aspects of implementing personalization is, firstly, gathering relevant data. Knowing your current customer is the first step if you want to provide them with a more personalized experience on your website. We’re going to talk about data tracking tools in a while, before that there are several personalization factors that you can track on your website to create a personalized experience for your customer. The main goal of installing these factors is to compel your audience to stay longer at the website and encourage them to buy your products or services.
Buyer Personas
Creating buyer personas is a simpler way of catering to different clusters of audiences on the basis of factors such as their region or how much money they’ve spent in the last six months. This tactic is used when a company doesn’t want to personalize its website for individual customers, but at the same time, creates buyer personas of multiple individuals that might belong in the same category. This tactic is less time-consuming and delivers the same result.
Another way of looking at buyer personas could be that on the basis of data and research you create semi-fictional categories of your ideal customers and then cater to these categories instead of focusing on individuals. These categories help you understand your audience in a diverse manner and are effective yet simple to apply across product launches, marketing campaigns, and websites.
Geolocation
Geolocation monitoring isn’t always as frightening as it appears at the first glance. There is a huge misconception that people mistake geolocation monitoring as a website tracking every move of their visitors. However, this couldn’t be farther from the truth. Geolocation tracking works by detecting a site visitor’s approximate location using the cell towers and Wi-Fi nodes closest to them. Using this data websites can give more personalized recommendations to users such as the nearest stores in their location, etc.
Device Type
The device that a visitor uses to view your website might reveal a great deal about them. You can make several predictions about the kind of buyer they are on the basis of what kind of device they are using. For instance, there is some data that shows that four out of five Americans make online purchases, and over half of them use their mobile phones to make these purchases. Combining this data with the information about the kind of device your visitors are using can help you make relevant recommendations to them. For example, if your website has a higher percentage of mobile visitors than desktop visitors, it’s a good idea to give them purchase recommendations.
Time Spent on page
We all know that time spent on a page is an important indicator for any website owner. This indicator assists in determining the overall performance of your website. According to a Statista report, users spend five, four, and five minutes on desktop, smartphone, and tablet devices, respectively. The length of time a visitor spends on our website is influenced by factors such as content quality, page design, and load speed. When you combine this information with the device type data from the previous section, you can see which devices have an impact on time spent on the page and why.
Data tracking tools to personalize your website
We’ve got you covered if you’re wondering what tools you’ll need to track this data on your website. Check out these five fantastic tools that can help you personalize your website using client data.
1. HubSpot
The HubSpot Content Management System (CMS) helps you to create and manage a beautiful, personalized website. You can also use forms and chatbots to expand the options you give the clients to personalize their software experience. HubSpot’s software has a drag-and-drop editor that makes it simple to create smart rules and personalized features. You can also utilize the CMS to collect statistics on website visitor behavior, and this information can be used to improve your website and provide a more personalized experience to your visitors.
Moreover, you can also run tests on several web pages to see which ones provide the greatest value to customers. This might assist you in deciding on an intriguing and functional final personalized design. Thus, HubSpot is a great choice if you’re searching for an all-in-one software solution that’s simple to use and scalable.
2. Brilliance
Brilliance is one of the most popular e-commerce platforms that offer tools to personalize online businesses. You can optimize and personalize shopping trips for each visitor using Barilliance. Moreover, they provide relevant recommendations that can aid in reducing shopping cart abandonment. You can provide relevant product recommendations based on the visitor’s preferences, as well as things some other customers have looked at and that the user might like.
Thus, if you have an e-commerce website that you want to personalize for each visitor, Barilliance’s campaign and website features can be of great help.
3. Qubit
Qubit, along with providing brilliant building software, also provides you with the tools to personalize your website. Start, Grow, and Pro are the three categories of offerings. These groups are divided by experience level and focus on the company’s objectives. Qubit Start is for those who only need basic personalization options, such as chatbots or recommendations. Grow is designed to address more particular problems, such as integrating customer data across platforms. Lastly, Pro offers a wide variety of different packages for you to choose from.
Tests, integrations, recommendations, and omnichannel personalization are all standard capabilities in every Qubit category. Thus, go with Qubit if you’re seeking software with tools tailored to your company’s size and expertise level.
4. SiteSpect
SiteSpect is an excellent choice if you are interested in tracking user behavior on your website. It provides tools that help in personalization based on user data such as their previous visits, sessions, and omnichannel behavior. SiteSpect collects this information, which you may evaluate and utilize to tailor web pages to certain audience segments. When using the software to construct segments, you can choose from a variety of characteristics that will improve the impact of your sites, such as the location or the kind of devices your customers are using.
SiteSpect can assist you in developing your website as well as monitoring its efficiency among your visitors. When you analyze campaign performance, you’ll be able to see what’s working and what isn’t, allowing you to better personalize your design for customers.
5. Hyperise
Hyperise was designed specifically for B2B marketers who want to personalize their websites. You can implement hyper-personalization (using data to promote products) to increase conversions with this application, and do not need to have any coding knowledge to do so. Hyperise will help you nurture leads such as form completion and IP lookups. You can also add your company logo, dynamic text, and profile images for your company’s branding. You can also develop a variety of unique CTAs to engage your audience.
Hyperise is an excellent option if you’re searching for a personalization tool that integrates well with HubSpot, Salesforce, Shopify, or Google Sheets.
Conclusion
Recently, Accenture released a survey that indicated that most customers want to associate themselves with companies that know them by name and remember their previous purchases. Amazon is a good example to prove this survey holds some value. When you log in to an Amazon page, the first thing that appears on your page is- deals recommended for you and products resembling your wish list. This shows Amazon has been far ahead in the game and has understood the need for personalization and how it can affect a customer’s behavior towards your brand. No wonder Amazon is one of the biggest names in the world.
