What is Website Personalization?
Website Personalization is an essential contemporary marketing tool. It's the process of creating a customized experience for a variety of website visitors. Personalization as a service aims to tailor the user experience to fit the specific requirements of individuals.
Some examples of web content personalization include:
- Online stores create targeted offers for customers based on their past behavior – differentiating between eager shoppers and casual website visitors.
- Travel websites offer promotions based on weather, the season, or flight availability.
- News outlets and other media publications show specific news pieces to viewers based on their geolocation.
Why Is Website Personalization Important?
We have all come to expect personalized service from store or restaurant staff. We want them to remember our names as well as our favorite foods and beverages. On their part, every positive interaction greatly increases the chance of a sale or additional sales.
Today, people impose the same requirements on digital spaces. Interactions on a news feed or a social network, and even shopping recommendations strive for hyper-personalization. If you want to stay competitive, you need to go further than simply addressing users by their name. Enterprises, conglomerates, and small businesses alike use website personalization tools such as cookies that keep track of users' online behavior and user segmentation.
However, in the case of some traditional industries, translating personalization to the digital world is not so easy. Some of the challenges include:
- The fact that some companies store various data online but find it difficult to use because it is split between a number of systems. This is where device personalization services come in handy, appeasing users across mobile and desktop tech.
- Companies' data is often stored on a website content management system (CMS) and kept under the control of IT developers who cannot react to cyber threats quickly enough.
- It is not possible to target website visitor data in real-time.
- Let's say that your business can display laser-targeted personalized content to valuable audiences. You are still likely to have issues with tracing the impact such content has made over time.
How Do I Personalize My Website?
Advances in technology now mean that the challenges above can be addressed, but to be effective, website personalization requires that the following strategies work in tandem:
- By targeting visitors in real-time based on the actions they take on your website as well as what we know about their past behavior and stated preferences.
- By understanding your visitors, we can design compelling on-site experiences tailored to specific audiences' interests.
- By constantly measuring the return on your web personalization investment as not every personalized experience will work as you planned.
If you want to deliver targeted messages to an audience without impacting on-site usability or performance, you must classify your visitors into different segments, by identifying their unique needs.
Using Analytics To Keep Track of Marketing Personalization
You also need to gain insight into their online behavior by using session recordings, heatmaps, and analytics to diagnose problem areas. These might include difficulties in your visitors’ experiences across devices, browsers, and platforms.
Analytics will help you make decisions based on facts and figures rather than opinions. Some parameters you need to consider include:
- Real-time data tracking
- Bounce rates
- Incoming website traffic sources
- Engagement frequency
- Demographics
- On-site behavior
Studying your target audience's behavior and uncovering blockages in your customer journey helps you eliminate unwanted features and focus on the features that convert better. Personalization in marketing, when done right, will reduce your website bounce rates, i.e. the number of people who leave the website seconds upon landing on your page.
Data such as on-site behavior and engagement frequency will help you differentiate between enthusiastic, repeat customers and cold leads. With a little help from some personalization gifts rewarding loyalty and commitment, your repeat customer pool will grow at a breakneck speed.
Finally, including social proof such as reviews and testimonials on your landing page, home page or products/services pages is also a good idea when building your online authority.
Zoom Engage Website Personalization
Zoom Engage (ZE) Can provide your website visitors with a personalized experience sure to make them feel seen and wanted. Zoom Engage will:
- Create personalized campaigns for every site visitor regardless of whether they are past visitors or new to the website.
- Adapt your web content automatically to engage buyers without any code changes.
- Cater to the specific needs of individual website visitors.
- Create meaningful experiences based on behavioral, and geographic data.
In accordance with the very definition of personalization, ZE identifies and categorizes anonymous visitors to individualize their first-time experience on your website. ZE uses people's geolocation data, behavioral data, and industry/vertical data to activate ad personalization and other useful conversion tools.
All this is done while preserving your visitors' privacy and in line with GDPR regulations.