In this meticulously researched guide, we shall uncover everything you need to know about website personalization. In the current era of digital marketing, time after time, personalization has proven itself as the final puzzle piece that builds synergy between a brand and its users.
Think of it this way, your website is the very first touchpoint you have with a visitor. When that happens, it all comes down to how tailored your website looks to inevitably transform your unknown visitor into a returning customer. For this core reason, website personalization is the gateway to enhancing user experience and ensuring every type of customer gets to have seamless interactions with your business.
After all, 74% of customers express frustration when website content lacks personalization. Every customer is unique in the context of their demographics, location, interests, and buying history. By carefully implementing a precise website personalization strategy, you can efficiently cater to all buyer personas associated with your business.
The result? Increased conversions, greater revenue generation, lasting customer loyalty, and brand recognition. That said, let’s delve into an insightful and enlightening guide on website personalization. We’ll walk you through the starter knowledge for understanding website personalization, its benefits, dos and don’ts, best practices, and personalization filters.
Finally, you’ll be given a brief demo of how Relevic is revolutionizing website personalization with its powerful capabilities.
Explaining Website Personalization
So, conceptually, how do you explain website personalization to someone? website personalization is the technique through which you tailor your website according to the preferences of your target audience.
The content is strategically written and segmented to resonate with each customer’s location, demographic, type of device, behavior, and past interactions.
Moreover, website personalization utilizes the browsing history data of users to help you critically analyze an individual’s past interactions with your brand. For example, if you are operating an e-commerce store, by deploying the right practices of website personalization, you can recommend products similar to his or her past purchases.
The end goal of adopting website personalization is to enhance user engagement: to make every visitor feel more affiliated with your brand and prioritize relevant data that leads to a boost in sales. Exclude website personalization from your website, and it’ll fall short of connecting existing and future customers to readily interact with your business.
People often mistakenly use the terms personalization and customization interchangeably. As mentioned, personalization consists of inducing smart touchups to the website based on user data, whereas customization refers to when users themselves make changes on the site. For example, altering the theme, language, and other accessibility options.
Benefits of Website Personalization
As aforementioned, website personalization is the key to facilitating every individual who lands on your website. Selective content activates their behavioral triggers, persuading them to take action. Here are the key advantages of making website personalization a crucial part of your marketing campaigns.
Bounce Rate Minimization
Users automatically become engaged when they land on your personalized website, which creates an individualized experience through dynamic content. This leads to an increase in the time spent by an individual on your website and lowers the bounce rate by an impressive rate.
Bounce rate is defined as the amount of time spent by a visitor on your website before they decide to exit it. A higher bounce rate means your website is failing to keep visitors engaged, whereas a lower bounce rate signals an enriching user experience.
According to Semrush, a bounce rate that’s 40% or lower is considered to be good. Anything higher than the 40% ballpark is concerning.
By integrating appropriate website personalization techniques, you can improve your bounce rate by a substantial amount. Once you implement these strategies, you will experience the following benefits:
- Higher engagement levels among users landing on your website due to dynamic content that varies based on their location, demographics, and history
- A higher click-through-rate (CTR) because each traffic segment sees product recommendations based on their past interactions with your business
- Long-term customer loyalty because a lower bounce rate increases the chance of returning customers
- Amplified revenue generation because the longer a visitor remains engaged, the higher the probability of them making a purchase
Web Page Optimization
website personalization is not all about the front end of your website. It also extends to the backend. For example, the load time of your web page. Studies suggest that having a slow loading time for your website can drastically increase the bounce rate. The majority of visitors choose to abandon the website if it takes more than 3-5 seconds to load.
Improving the performance of your web page to make it load faster enhances the user experience as it allows them to engage with your website without any technical delays.
High-Converting Landing Pages
Another crucial facet of website personalization includes transforming your mediocre landing pages into high-converting ones. These standalone web pages serve a vital part in converting visitors. The role of personalization here stretches to almost every aspect of it. This ranges from crafting captivating copy to creating visually striking design layouts.
A high-converting personalized landing page would have the following features:
- Fascinating promise: your potential prospects want to know about the key features of your service or product; what promise are you giving them so that they may reciprocate and press the CTA button?
- Layout Design: Everything from the typography, color palette of the graphics used, and content positioning contributes to the personalization of your landing page, and if it's perfected, you can easily increase traffic.
- Crystal Clear CTA: Is your call-to-action copy concise, tailored, persuasive, and, more importantly, is it easily visible?
- Traffic Segmentation: The key principle of landing page personalization is making dynamic landing pages whose content changes in terms of how you have segmented your incoming traffic. A high-converting personalized landing page includes segmenting your traffic based on location and demographics to ensure every visitor sees what’s relevant to them
Overall, website personalization helps in audience segmentation to create relevant, engaging, and action-provoking landing pages to maximize conversions.
Customer-Relevant Product Recommendations
Your customers, often at times, need a guiding hand to reinforce their purchasing decisions. Multiple factors add to this:
- The budgeting dilemma: Price-conscious customers are usually hesitant to spend money until or unless they are 100% sure about what they want and why they need it.
- Too many options: If your services or number of products are too versatile, customers become confused when they land on your website; thereby, making their decision-making process a whole lot more difficult.
- Lack of Motive: We all love to window shop even when it comes to online shopping. So, certain visitors who land on your website aren’t driven to purchase in the first place but rather to simply scroll through your product portfolio.
- Trust Factors: New customers have yet to build familiarity with your business.
website personalization is the sole solution that can overcome all these conversion barriers, ensuring your customers stay motivated and confident about the money they invest in your products. website personalization achieves this by making customer-relevant product recommendations. Here’s how:
- Strategic user segmentation: By gathering enough user information about their demographics, location, behavior, and past purchases, you can customize the products you recommend to them when they visit your website.
- Personalized product descriptions: Consequently, the more data you have of your users, the better you can write your product descriptions—concise, bulleted, and tailored engaging content to transform your passing visitor into a customer.
- Product Bundles: Once your customer-relevant product recommendations are rolling out, you can take website personalization one step further by recommending bundles of relevant products for each user segment.
Brand Loyalty Sustainability
Your company’s commitment to keeping your new customers' content should be equivalent to maintaining the satisfaction of your existing customers as well. Ensuring fruitful experiences for your users whenever they navigate through your website would increase their loyalty toward your brand.
The user data collected when conducting website personalization ultimately nurtures customer loyalty. Doing so increases customer life value—bringing an increased number of high-value customers to your brand’s doorstep.
Decision Making Simplification
If you have a large number of monthly visitors landing on your website, it’s rather impossible to create content that seamlessly blends with the preferences of every type of visitor. website personalization can effectively help you map out your brand’s content strategy to dynamically impact every unique user segment's line of interests.
Types of Website Personalization
website personalization can be further subdivided into two different categories: prescriptive website personalization and adaptive website personalization. Both of these categories carry the overarching objective behind the implementation of website personalization—enhancing user experience.
Prescriptive Website Personalization
Prescriptive website personalization is the data-driven and rule-based approach wherein a user’s data is actively collected to personalize accordingly. For example, a business utilizing prescriptive website personalization would monitor a visitor’s on-site behavior, location, time, activity, and referral source to create a fact-checked user profile.
Then, based on the user’s characteristics observed, appropriate website personalization techniques would be deployed to create an engaging, individualized, and tailored web experience. Prescriptive website personalization further branches into implicit and explicit website personalization.
Explicit Website Personalization
Explicit website personalization refers to when a user gives his/her information on their own, such as by filling out a signup form. This information can revolve around their demographics, location, interests, and perhaps even insightful suggestions.
Explicit website personalization is an excellent way to alleviate the burden of diving into intricate analytics by allowing your customers to do the homework for you.
Grant your visitors the option to create user profiles directly connected with your customer relationship management software. From there, you can leverage the information obtained to create dynamic content that resonates with each user segment.
The “rule-based” approach in explicit website personalization refers to the employment of certain rules set by a business that are triggered upon a visitor’s certain behavioral actions. For example, if a user has abandoned the cart for a set amount of time, an automated personalized email will be sent to retarget them.
Implicit Website Personalization
Implicit website personalization, conversely, is a type of prescriptive website personalization that doesn’t depend on users to provide resourceful data. Instead, an implicit website personalization approach adopts external methods to track and filter a user’s activity on your website.
The system passively gathers users’ data to make profiles based on their clicks, frequently browsed items, the type of device (laptop or mobile) they are using, location, and so on.
Implicit website personalization’s strength lies in its ability to work smartly in the background without urging customers to halt their shopping spree and fill out a form. However, there’s always the possibility that the data gathered passively isn’t wholly accurate.
Adaptive website personalization
As the name suggests, adaptive website personalization is a type of website personalization that isn’t static. This approach consistently “adapts” itself to real-time changes to constantly present dynamic content. This leads to a refined and seamless user experience in contrast to static personalization that operates on a set of rules.
Adaptive website personalization records user actions to modify the content and recommended products accordingly. Moreover, alongside clicks, adaptive website personalization takes into account contextual awareness. Everything from the user's location to their device and time of day is considered.
Not to mention, this type of website personalization is constantly learning. It deploys predictive personalization, the ability to predict a user’s interests on the basis of their past interactions with the website. Let’s take Amazon’s example. If you have been searching for kitchen appliances but later shift to clothing items, your product recommendations would adapt accordingly.
Website Personalization: Best Practices
Improving your website with personalization requires the implementation of the best website personalization practices. By following the tested and proven ways of conducting website personalization, you can undoubtedly create an enriching user experience that would benefit every facet of your business: bringing in a greater click-through rate, increasing average order value, boosting sales, and decreasing bounce rate.
That said, let’s uncover website personalization’s best practices together.
1. Familiarizing Yourself With Your Target Audience
It all starts with identifying your target audience. Only by knowing to whom your business is selling can you properly initiate website personalization. Are they children, teenagers, young adults, or the elderly? Dive deeper. Are they business owners, fashion enthusiasts, foodies, or tourists? The list goes on.
It’s also a healthy practice to create buyer personas of your potential prospects to get a generalized idea of to whom your business is providing its services.
Ask yourself the following questions:
- What are you selling?
- Why are you selling?
- Who are you selling to?
- Who is your competition?
Answering the above questions will provide you with a clear understanding of your target audience. Then, you can begin streamlining your website personalization and proceed accordingly, ensuring your target audience receives a seamless website experience.
2. Knowing What Parts to Personalize
website personalization can involve minor tweaks to broad and distinct changes. The objective is to make customers feel more welcome and make their navigational experience on your website fruitful.
Incorporate content personalization. Your website copy should resonate with the people reading it. Tailor it based on user segmentation. Make them feel welcome by using their actual names if they are logged in.
Content personalization also extends to articles and blogs. For example, if a reader has shown interest in buying yoga mats, you can showcase your blog post on “How to Kickstart Your Morning Moutine with Yoga.” You can also feature seasonal content. For instance, when Halloween is nearing, a blog post on Halloween should be featured at the very top of the web page.
Revamp CTAs after collecting sufficient data. Track the click-through rate to see which CTA is performing the best. This can be achieved with A/B testing or multivariate testing. Personalized CTAs urge customers to take action and increase the conversion rate. If your CTA lacks personalization, you risk losing out on potential revenue.
Deploy dynamic hero images that change according to different user profiles. For example, an American customer would see a different image compared to a customer residing in Asia. These hero images could also provide different text, each tailored to capture attention.
Set behavioral triggers for specific customers. For instance, you could greet a first-time visitor with a 10% off coupon popup.
When implementing your website personalization strategies, you may encounter pitfalls that disrupt the process and diminish your brand's value. Understanding and developing an awareness of these mistakes would help you increase the user experience without any unforeseen delays.
3. Avoiding Excessive Personalization
A bombardment of hyper-specific content or recommendations can be overwhelming and very invasive. Establishing a clear distinction between relevance and hyper-specific personalization is crucial.
4. Respecting User Data Privacy
Personalization should not disregard the sensitive data of the user. Not following requirements (for example, GDPR) and not obtaining the applicable consent may breach trust and create litigation cases.
5. Valuing the Significance of Segmenting
If you do not segment your audience down to every essential detail, your message and recommendations will not synergize with everyone. A personalized approach embeds segmentation and enough individual data for relevance enhancement.
6. Tracking Metrics
Personalization is a dynamic strategy that requires periodic evaluation. You should regularly review the statistics to see what’s working and what’s not. Track your website personalization strategy’s performance via an efficient monitoring tool.
Website Personalization: Best Tools
To execute website personalization perfectly, you need to acquire the finest website personalization tools to help you deliver tailored experiences to your users. To elaborate, website personalization tools whose use cases and functionality align with your personalizing objectives. Selecting the ideal tool requires thorough research before committing to it.
Let’s take a quick tour to overview some of the best and brightest website personalization tools out there!
Relevic
When we talk about the future of website personalization, Relevic, alongside its A/B testing capabilities, is making immense strides. Relevic’s unique selling point revolves around its user-friendly drag-and-drop editor. Personalize your website in a few clicks without writing a single piece of code.
Create dynamic content per the interests and preferences of different audience segments. Achieve this with powerful tags such as UTM, visitor, referral, query, and more. Relevic’s free plan gives you full access to their drag-and-drop editor.
Therefore, feel free to play around and experiment with its vast features before investing in a plan that suits your company the most.
Optimonk
Optimonk tackles website personalization by diluting its services down to popups only. If you are interested in creating click-worthy and eye-catching popups for your website, Optimonk should be your ideal stop.
Whether you want popups to display exclusive holiday offers or as an exit intent to prevent cart abandonment, Optimonk has you covered with interactive and visually appealing templates of popups.
Ninetailed
Ninetailed is a composable personalization solution that is based on composability and MACH principles, providing businesses with the tools they need to create bespoke experiences, scale, and optimize continuously.
By merging its technology into Contentful, a content management system, Ninetailed enables businesses to transform unlimited content and customer data into the finest possible personalized experiences.
Dynamic Yield
Dynamic Yield is a platform for creating individualized digital experiences across numerous touchpoints, such as online, mobile, and email. It optimizes customer journeys through A/B testing, machine learning-powered suggestions, and behavioral targeting. Its integration features enable firms to consolidate data from diverse sources and provide consistent customization.
Hubspot
HubSpot's marketing and CRM software include features for tailored content delivery, A/B testing, email marketing, and analytics. It enables organizations to successfully segment their audiences and customize consumer experiences based on behavior and preferences, all within an easy, all-in-one platform intended to expand with growth.
VWO
VWO focuses on conversion optimization via A/B testing, multivariate testing, and behavioral analytics. It provides tools for heatmaps, surveys, and user recordings to help you deeply study customer interactions and improve the user experience. Its purpose is to assist organizations enhance conversion rates by focusing on user behavior insights and test-driven improvements.
Personyze
Personyze is a customization engine that employs machine learning to provide tailored content, product recommendations, and email personalization. It also includes A/B testing, smart segmentation, and interaction with third-party systems to deliver dynamic, personalized experiences across online and mobile platforms.
Collecting Data for Website Personalization
Data collection for website personalization is vital to the credibility of the results you obtain once the process ends. There is more than one way to collect data for website personalization. It’s up to you which or how many approaches you want to tackle.
Here are some of the most effective data collection methods for website personalization:
- Surveys and questionnaires
- Customer relationship management software (CRM)
- Web analytics tool
- Third-party data providers
- Heatmaps
- Customer profiles
- Social media channels
Website Personalization with Relevic
Relevic is your go-to SaaS tool for conducting seamless website personalization without writing a single piece of code. Evolve your website with Relevic’s user-friendly drag-and-drop editor to enhance the user experience and boost conversions. Relevic helps you do it all through its powerful and efficient personalization filters, ensuring your campaigns drive x3 times the revenue.
What Are Personalization Filters?
Personalization filters work to tailor your website personalization strategy. Embedding them in your personalized marketing campaign ensures a stream of individualized, dynamic content reaching the screens of your target audience. With Relevic, you can access numerous highly optimized website personalization filters. Let’s explore their functionality:
- Visitor: Personalizes based on individual user behaviors or profile data.
- UTM: Tailors experiences according to campaign-specific tags or URLs.
- Location: Content is adjusted to align with the visitor's geographic area.
- Query: Customizes based on specific search terms or URL queries.
- Referral: Personalizes content by tracking the source site.
- Template: Applies unique layouts or designs for user segments.
- Retarget: Targets return visitors with tailored offers or updates.
- Cookie: Uses stored data to provide a customized experience.
- Variable: Adjusts content with dynamic, custom data.
- A/B Test: Tests different versions to find the highest-performing content.
- Multivariate: Tests multiple content combinations to refine the user experience.
Website Personalization Case Studies
Let’s take real-life examples of renowned platforms that have integrated best practices of website personalization to enhance the overall web experience for their users.
Best Buy
Best Buy, a reputable platform selling consumer electronics and other related merchandise, implements website personalization to ensure each user receives content and deals that resonate with their preferences. The website immediately presents you with two options: Canada and the United States.
Clicking on the United States directs users to bestbuy.com while clicking on Canada directs them to bestbuy.ca. Best Buy strategically personalizes its content, offers, product recommendations, pricing, and customer support availability by allowing users to specify their geographical region.
For instance, Best Buy offers membership programs in both countries; however, the structure and perks of those memberships might vary. Similarly, there’s price matching. Certain products might be cheaper in Canada’s Best Buy as compared to the United States. This is to separate the differences in taxes, currency exchange rates, and overall market demand.
Best Buy also has a trained personal AI assistant for their chat box to answer customers' frequently asked queries. This ensures visitors receive a quick clarification on the go. They also feature a "Deal of the Day" section in the navigation bar, enabling customers to discover the most attractive deals without the need to sift through a vast array of available items manually.
Finally, Best Buy utilizes personalized hero section images and banners to ensure their content remains relevant and engaging.
Since the holiday season is approaching, Best Buy has already updated its website with a personalized Early Bird gift limited-time sale offer. Making sure their customers do not miss out on enticing deals on their favorite electronics, whether it's mobile phones, laptops, headphones, televisions, or appliances.
FedEx
Next, we’ll explore FedEx, a globally recognized delivery, courier, and shipping company that utilizes website personalization to increase customer satisfaction and streamline its services.
When you land on FedEx’s website, you are immediately greeted with the popup of choosing your location (similar to Best Buy). Here’s what we found out.
FedEx is using dynamic content to its full extent. If you choose a geographical location, the webpage refreshes, and you land on a new home page that has been specifically tailored for that region’s users.
Upon choosing Canada as the region, the hero section of the FedEx website changed accordingly. The image above clearly illustrates these modifications. The hero section displays articles pertinent to FedEx Canada, including information on services, company announcements, webinars, and the newest offerings.
These customized articles give Canadian visitors a thorough summary of significant news and insights, improving their experience by offering content specific to the region. Similarly, we noticed that FedEx goes as far as to personalize its About Us page too. For Canada’s About Us page, FedEx labels itself as FedEx Canada and gives a summary of the company.
Right beneath it is a table of facts. These facts relate to the Express Canada quick facts, Freight Canada quick facts, Ground Canada quick facts, and Logistics Canada quick facts. All the facts that you need to know as a Canadian citizen to familiarize yourself with FedEx operations.
Lastly, FedEx does not only use third-party cookies to gather essential visitor information, but it also asks for consent when it comes to using different types of cookies. This is a fine example of how to embed website personalization ethically. The privacy of your users should be respected at all times. Transparency is key.
Ralph Lauren
Last on the list we have the luxury brand Ralph Lauren. Their global website is personalized down to the minute details. An exemplary website that shows the true potential of website personalization.
For starters, we have location-based personalization. Their global website is personalized to deliver tailored experiences for users residing on every continent. For instance, if we click the Middle East and choose United Arab Emirates, a user can proceed either in English or Arabic.
Once the homepage loads, you’ll find products priced per the currency of the particular region you selected. In this case, Dirhams (AED). This allows Ralph Lauren to adjust shipping charges and other delivery-related matters accordingly. The same goes for seasonal offers and sales.
Then we have their “personalized gifts” category. Ralph Lauren has selectively curated a list of their products for “her” and “him.” This includes adults and kids; thus, personalizing their gifting options demographically.
Ralph Lauren's innovative “customize” feature facilitates its customers to design their polos. This can include anything from the style, fit, color, size, and the type of design they’d want on the front and back.
Their apparel portfolio is designed to complete unique looks. This enables Ralph Lauren to utilize upselling strategically rather than randomly, as most brands do. For example, let’s say their Kent Brushed Wool Topcoat catches your eye.
You click on it, and you’ll notice the “Complete the Look” feature. Anything from a missing accessory, such as an elegant watch or a linen shirt that’s part of the attire, will be recommended to you.
Conclusion
You are now well-equipped with all the website personalization knowledge you need to kickstart your personalized campaign. Don’t just do it with the intent to drive conversions; do it for your new and existing loyal customers who deserve a seamless and engaging website experience—one that is specifically tailored to meet their interests and expectations.
Needless to say, website personalization is the gateway to diminishing your bounce rate, amplifying sales, increasing the customer life cycle, and building a distinguishable brand. In today’s highly competitive business world, learning to meet your target audience on an individual level is the most effective way of achieving your marketing milestones.
Ready to enhance the user experience? Begin your personalization journey with Relevic and watch your marketing goals come to fruition!
