Published on by Pat Ramsey, Director of Technology
Personalized Digital Experiences can greatly impact your site conversations, increase customer engagement, and lead to more sales. Personalization can also have a positive impact for non-eCommerce sites and promotions. Showing you understand your customer and can provide the content or solution they are looking for is crucial.
Why is Personalization Important?
As the world rapidly evolves from in-person interactions to more digital interactions, business’s websites become the main way to engage with customers. A brand’s website is their new storefront, welcoming more and more users and interactions each day. With more of our behaviors and actions moving online, such as buying food, working, having meetings, scheduling appointments, online learning, shopping and more, standing out and capturing the visitor's attention becomes more important for the brand’s website. A good way for a brand to capture the attention of their audience is by delivering a personalized experience for their visitors.
A site’s efficacy is measured by its ability to convert a visitor into a customer. It is key for a brand to capture the movements and actions of their visitors, this allows for the tracking of key conversions. How many of the visitors to your site completed a key action? Whether they bought something, downloaded something, or signed up for an email list, these are all types of conversions. The higher the conversion rate of the key actions, the more effective your site is in reaching people and convincing them to take action. Multiple eCommerce studies show personalized content leads to higher conversion numbers and more conversions translates to online revenue growth.
In one study, Epsilon Marketing found 80% of consumers were more likely to do business with a site that delivered personalized experiences. Shoppers feel like a site is easier to use and is more relevant to them as an individual. One way to increase that sense of relevance is to deliver personalized recommendations. Barilliance found websites have an average order value of $44 without any recommendations. One personalized product recommendation increased average order value by 369%.
How does Personalization work?
Personalized digital experiences are created when a site is able to learn more about a visitor and deliver content tailored to match a key trait of that visitor. Knowing the audience is crucial; who you think is using your site could be very different than who actually is using your site. Good analytics and the ability to identify segments of your audience can eliminate the guesswork when identifying the audience. Without this information, personalization is ineffective.
The next piece is knowing how people interact with your content. Email campaigns, newsletters, landing pages, contact forms, newsletter subscription forms, file downloads, shopping carts, are all ways people interact with your site. These interactions provide key insights about your audience in order to deliver a personalized experience.
How are visitors interacting with your site?
- Did someone open and read the email newsletter?
- What page on your site did they go to after reading the email newsletter?
- Did someone use your contact form?
- What were the pages visited before the contact form was used?
- What products did someone look at before buying something?
- How many visitors use mobile devices?
- Looking at all the questions above again, what role does internationalization play?
When you have this knowledge you have audience segments, and are ready to create personalized content. For each segment, or combined segments, you can create rules. These rules are used to show or hide content. Your campaign might display one background image for one set of visitors, and another for a different set of visitors. A webinar signup form might display a difference field based on someone being a new vs. returning visitor. Conditionally displaying content is a key part of creating a personalized digital experience.
How do you get started with Personalization?
Once you have determined your audience segments and how they interact with your content, you can then decide what aspect of your site or content should be customized for that audience and why. Is it to drive a promotion, generate a sale, or encourage a sign up? Running a promotion for Hatch Chiles during their limited availability from August to September makes sense for any visitor across the whole southwest region of the United States, but a visitor from the northern region of the US or Canada where there is limited availability, will be left feeling confused, left out, and disconnected from the brand.
Showing you understand your customer and can provide the content or solution they are looking for is the key, and this begins with having the right personalization incorporated into your digital strategy. A personalized digital experience can greatly impact your site conversations, increase customer engagement, and lead to more sales.
Collaboration with the right partner can make this digital transformation easier than doing it on your own. Crowd Favorite is happy to help identify the best path forward to creating a robust “personalization engine”, optimizing your website into a more dynamic and personalized digital experience for your customers.
Digital Transformation is important for every industry and can positively affect the user experience for your customers. If you’d like help with getting started or need a partner to work alongside you through this process, reach out to us. Crowd Favorite has worked with partners in many industries as they’ve modernized their online presence, and improved their user experience.
