Each customer has different needs, interests, behaviors, and problems to solve. And the better you personalize their experience on your website, the more likely it is that you will outperform your competitors. McKinsey & Company research shows that companies that rely on personalized marketing generate 40% more revenue than those that continue to use the “one size fits all” strategy.
How Personalized Customer Journey Pays Back
Following the massive transition to e-commerce, online websites become the primary means of client interaction as well as one of the primary sources of revenue. That is why website personalization is a top priority for 86% of businesses. If this is interesting to you, then keep reading to know how to implement personalization on your website.
Personalizing Your Website — Steps to Take
Personalizing your website requires a comprehensive approach. Otherwise, the results may deviate significantly. The below steps will help you approach website personalization in a more structured and strategic way. The good news is that with customer intelligence services, the journey is easier and faster for you to implement.
1. Set a Clear Goal
Creating a website personalization strategy without a clear goal is similar to running a hamster in a wheel: you spend time and effort but do not achieve the desired result. Furthermore, the lack of a goal makes it difficult to track progress because you don’t know your key performance indicators. So, understand why your website should be personalized. Purposes can vary, for example, it can be:
— Reduce the bounce rate
— Motivate repeated purchases
— Recruit new customers
— Increase the average purchase check
— Decrease the number of abandoned carts
Assume a specific goal does not immediately come to mind. In that case, you can investigate the current issues on your website and determine how personalization can help you solve them.
2. Gather Audience Data
Understanding the behaviors, needs, interests, and other characteristics of your target audience is essential for developing a truly effective personalized strategy. The most common sources of these useful insights are:
— Web analytics — Check the customer journey on your website, including which pages they visit, what products they purchase, how often they abandon their shopping cart, etc.
— Service and sales data — With this data, you can access positive and negative customer reviews, learn about the challenges customers face when interacting with your brand, discover what prevents them from making first or repeat purchases, and so on.
— Email and advertising analytics — After reviewing your most recent campaigns, you can determine who is interested in your product, what triggers work best for different audience segments, and what messages inspire them to take targeted action.
Armed with the information, you can plan your further steps and actions.
3. Collect First-Party Data
For a long time, successful website personalization was primarily achieved through the use of cookies. Amid reports of a cookie-free future, 37% of businesses have already stated that they rely solely on first-party data for personalization strategy. You should join them. Communicate with your customers and allow them to share their data openly and voluntarily via newsletter subscriptions and surveys.
4. Use the Omnichannel Platform
In an ideal scenario, you should use data from all of your interaction channels to develop an effective website personalization strategy. Choose one omnichannel platform to serve as the hub for all of your data. It enables real-time data integration and synchronization. As a result, you will have complete control over your customers’ behavior on the website, social media, email campaigns, and other channels. Understanding the entire picture makes it easier to make sound decisions.
5. Segment Your Customers
Once you’ve collected data on your entire audience, you can split it into two or more segments based on similar interests, needs, and behaviors. The more detailed your segments, the more precise your personalized strategy will be. In the future, you can assign each group a unique tag and display the most relevant content to them.
6. Begin Personalizing
Remember the original purpose of personalization when implementing it on your website. For example, if you want to lower your bounce rate, you could start by customizing the navigation or menu on the homepage. The main rule is to give your campaign time to prove itself and generate initial results before expanding your website personalization strategy.
7. Keep Moving Forward
Running a strategy is a marathon, not a sprint. So, monitor its progress on a regular basis. Even if your initial website personalization ideas do not produce the desired results, they will still provide useful information about your target audience’s behavior and preferences. At the very least, you will understand what does not work.
Final Say!
Website personalization brings customer experience to a whole new level; it leads to building trusting relationships with your customers and boosting your revenue. So use this approach in a strategic way.
