Website Customization Versus Personalization

If you were a skilled baker in an isolated small town, you might know most customers who drop by your store by name. People are creatures of habit, and there is a chance you'd know a person's order or special request before they utter a word.

This close relationship is more difficult to replicate online, especially when there are hundreds, thousands, and even millions of website visitors you have to deal with. Anything from generating made-to-order products to leveraging AI can add to a very useful and profitable illusion of intimacy. How long you are able to believably maintain the illusion with every single customer, determines the length of their customer lifetime value.

People are drowning in information when browsing online. Anything that can be done to present relevant information to your website visitors which results in increased conversion rates, increased visitor engagement, and improved customer experience is a worthwhile exercise. What is the difference between Website Customization Versus Personalisation?

Website customization: This is when the visitor deliberately chooses between options designed to make the user experience more personal

Website personalization: This is when the visitor is automatically shown personalized pages and content based on anticipated requirements

Web customization is the visitor’s conscious decision to modify the user experience, while web personalization is making predictions and automatically altering the user experience based on history, and demographics.

Currently, most digital marketers use personalized content, rather than a personalized UX which is a shift in thinking that is required to take full advantage of personalization.

Benefits of Website Customisation

Web customization lets users make their own choices regarding what they want to see, or set preferences for how information is organized or displayed. This is one way you can improve the overall user experience because it enables website visitors to stay in control of their interactions.

Customization gives each user the ability to see exactly what they want because they are in control.

Problems are that many users do not know what they need and that most users are not interested in doing the work required to amend the user interface to match their preferences.

Benefits of Website Personalisation

With website personalization, the pages viewed by the visitor are different based on different user characteristics such as the visitor’s demographic, visitor’s device specs (iOS vs Android, mobile vs desktop, large-screen vs. small screen), referrals (from where the user came to the website), previous behavior and more.

Personalization reduces the amount of information and the number of options to help guide visitors through a funnel that is designed just for them and their individual needs.

Key benefits of website personalization:

  • No development resources needed
  • Can be used for product and content recommendations
  • Real-time decision-making using data to make timely and accurate decisions
  • Higher conversion rates with cross-channel consistency
  • Possible to create complete campaigns for virtually any type of site or device to ensure a consistent experience for your customers
  • Ease of use accelerates time to value
  • Quickly deploy and start testing even the most powerful campaigns with easy to use interface

Quickly deploy and start testing even the most powerful campaigns with easy to use interface

  • Who is this person?
  • Which website or paid campaign did they come from?
  • Have they been here before?
  • Have they entered the conversion funnel at all?
  • Have they made a purchase before?
  • What pages have they read?
  • How thoroughly are they reading those pages?

This will enable us to understand:

  • Who is the visitor?
  • Why the visitor is here?
  • Where the visitor is in the buying process?

When these questions are understood, it is possible to create entire user experiences for extremely specific segments. [phrasing not clear]

Ask yourself what you can personalize to:

  • Provide more context to visitors.
  • Provide an experience that is less machine-like.
  • Present your visitors with all the shortcuts to finding what they are looking for.
  • Make it easier for the visitor to complete pre-defined goal actions.
  • Limit the number of irrelevant or secondary data the users encounter.

Web Personalisation UX

Use this process to obtain a good web personalization UX:

  • Be automatically gathering, analyzing, and deploying new data for new and existing users.
  • Understand that intention often matters more than the behavior.
  • Debelop personalization based on individual context and produce adjusted user experience in real-time.
  • Aim for helpful and useful information, not overwhelming.
  • Investigate which part of your funnel are you losing the most visitors.
  • Separate your audience into segments and conduct additional research to comprehend their motivations, intentions, habits, anxieties, etc.
  • Design entire UXs for each segment. Eliminate distractions, simplify navigations, and update creativity and copy.

 
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