The employment of personalization on digital platforms aims to craft unique user experiences that surpass mere transactions. Our article sheds light on why personalisation is not just a fleeting trend but rather a crucial approach to fortify the brand image sustainably and enhance conversion rates.
Imagine an estate agent showing each customer only a single house or a grocery shop selling the same products to every person. It sounds absurd, doesn't it?
The same principle is being applied more and more to digital platforms, and for good reason. If a company's platform offers the same experience to all users, it results in them not feeling addressed or possibly not coming back.
So, how can you ensure that your customers feel acknowledged and engaged? The answer is simple: by integrating personalization into your platform.
When your platform has a personalization strategy, it enhances engagement, conversion, and customer loyalty. Finding the right strategy isn't easy at the start. However, our digital experts can help you select the right tools and improve your platform to provide a personalized experience for all visitors.
The Significance of Personalization
According to Sitecore, personalization is "a way for brands to contextualize messages, offers, and experiences according to the individual profiles of visitors."
It's important to distinguish between the terms personalization and customization. Personalization doesn't require website visitors to exert effort. Customization means visitors manually modify the user experience, such as filtering search results in an online shop.
By using personalization, a platform strategically controls the content that website visitors see. The digital experience is shaped based on users' interests, reducing unwanted distractions and guiding desired actions.
"87% of consumers state that personally relevant content positively influences their attitude towards a brand (Source: Instapage)."
Consumer-business relationships are not purely transactional. Consumers prefer brands that cater to their individual needs. Therefore, companies should focus on personalization measures and create individual user experiences that build long-lasting customer relationships.
Personalization is Good for Business
Given consumers' preference for brands that cater to their needs, companies should implement context-based marketing and build personal relationships with customers. This boosts conversion rates, strengthens the brand's reputation, fosters customer loyalty, and contributes to business success.
Here are a few things to consider:
Data: the Foundation of Personalization
Individual users have different interests and are in various sales funnel stages. So, how can you cater to all of them? For your platform, collecting, tracking, and responding to data about your users is essential. Those elements are crucial to offering an individual experience where customers feel acknowledged and understood.
When a user interacts with a web platform, the backend technology captures known and inferred attributes, creating a user profile. Offering a personalized experience for each individual is realistically nearly impossible, which is why audience segmentation is an excellent way to achieve the goal.
What are Audience Segments?
Audience segmentation allows digital platforms to display specific content to different user groups. It describes dividing users into groups based on common interests or activities. It simplifies personalization management, as it's easier to track an entire group's attributes than individual persons. Here, too, the platform's ability to track data plays a vital role.
What Could a Personalization Strategy Look Like?
The benefits of personalization are clear, but the journey towards it can be challenging. Where should you even start? Throughout the customer journey, there are several points where personalization can be implemented.
Marketo, a marketing software company, suggests examining every phase of the customer journey and deriving possibilities for implementing personalization in each of them:
- Acquisition (how you capture leads): Personalization here could involve targeted messages and content on landing pages
- Conversion (how leads are turned into customers): Personalization at this point could look like incorporating a reminder of an abandoned shopping cart or tailored retargeting campaigns.
- Growth (how the relationship with new customers is nurtured): Personalization here could involve product recommendations, up-selling, and cross-selling
- Retention (how the new customer is retained and encouraged to return): Personalization here could look like special birthday offers and loyalty benefits.
This is by no means an exhaustive list. There are endless possibilities to integrate personalization into your web platform.
What Experiences Can Be Personalized?
- Homepages
- Web pages
- Advertisements
- Emails
- Mobile Apps
- Online chats
Make Personalization One of Your Key Topics
Personalization is not an add-on or a practical function; it's a cornerstone of modern marketing. By drawing meaningful conclusions from the collected data, your company can address users as if the website were tailor-made for them. This way, you can convert leads into loyal customers and achieve long-term success.
