It’s difficult to overlook the advantages of personalization. For organizations with a lot of income from digital marketing, personalization can have an immensely positive outcome on important marketing KPIs. But what are the real benefits of personalization, and how to use data on this process? 

Why personalization of web and email content? 

Improving customer commitment 

Your clients will love customized content. This will urge them to invest more in your store, brand, or your products. 

Improve the experience 

A considerable amount of customers believe that the online experience should be highly customized. 74% of people feel disappointed when site content isn’t personalized. 

Close more sales 

Personalization directly affects your key business metrics. For example, personalization can show around a 19% increase in closed deals. Source: Instapage 

Improve the impact of remarketing 

Personalization allows advertisers to understand their clients with improved accuracy. This makes remarketing through multiple channels more successful as it’s simpler to measure what is impacting demand for the items customers are after. 

How to implement a personalization strategy for your business.

Understand your customers

To do personalization well, you need data. Sourcing data and using it can be an overwhelming prospect for many businesses. You’ll need to verify the accuracy of your data to be able to generate the best results.

Firstly, you have to guarantee that you are gathering the correct information from the accurate sources. It’s an ideal opportunity to control your first-party data and ensure that you have the right elements of knowledge that can contribute to powerful personalization.

Ask yourself, if  your business is gathering the accompanying information: 

Web information 

Which pages do your customers visit? What pages do they visit? Is it accurate to say that they are engaged and how regularly do they visit? How would they discover your site through search, social, or another source? 

Behavioral information 

Besides web data, there is an entire area of behavioral data that is a fantastic resource when customizing web content. This can change depending upon the business. However, purchase history,  basket history, and the number of individual purchases are nevertheless a couple of examples of crucial behavioral information powerful in web personalization.

Campaign data

Which messages did a customer open, and which did they click? Did they first visit your site through a paid promotion, and what was the message in this ad that converted? Each time you send a campaign or a client connects, this is valuable data. This data can be utilized to customize and personalize your site in the future.

Unifying the data

The subsequent stage of web personalization is to ensure that the entirety of this information is organized and in a single location. Integrating data sources can be a troublesome assignment, and guaranteeing data quality requires useful assets and an information administration structure. 

There are several tools to help you centralize your data. This can be utilized to work with real-time data and guarantees that your data is being processed with the correct data governance procedures.

This helps to build a positive and thorough perspective on your customer’s behavior. These tools are a great step forward in the web personalization space – without it, it’s hard to coordinate practices to singular customers and store behavioral data in an organized manner. 

Identifying the right segments

When you have a comprehensive dataset in a secure setup, you can begin to consider how to segment your clients into groups that you would then customize content to. 

You have to determine which segments to use in your web personalization strategy. This requires some hypothesizing and the ability to spot connections that will group customers into segments that aren’t too specific and offer enough to create a genuinely personal web experience.

When you have chosen your segments, ensure you have a solution that can update and map data once new data is available, to keep your segments updated. 

Here are some examples of ways of segmenting your customers.

Loyalty

One successful approach to section clients depends on the number of purchases they have made in the past. What’s their average spend per order? Have they, at any point, made a purchase? Loyalty is a fantastic retail or e-commerce segmentation strategy that can be utilized to deliver incredibly customized content. 

Location 

Where are your clients, and what language do they speak? This appears to be an obvious suggestion. However, it’s incredible how many businesses don’t customize emails or web content based on consumer location. This enables better engagement, and recognizing the purchaser’s area is the initial step towards any location-based marketing campaign. 

Purchase stage 

Another approach to customize your site and convert clients better is to see which phase of the buyer journey the client is at. For online business locales, this could be based on their basket or the number of items that they have viewed in a specific time period. For B2B content marketing, take a look at past interactions and comprehend the pages and channels that help with this. 

Start personalizing 

When you’ve cleaned out your data and built your segments, it’s ideal to integrate everything to your site and start delivering customized content that will help improve your KPIs. 

The personalization of email and web is a fundamental piece of any digital business. Take a look at changing suggested items, customizing newsletter giveaways, or even merely linking client data with how your content is shown to your client. This can be done via a content marketing platform or other similar content delivery system. 

Using this customer data with your advertising campaigns is another method to personalize the relationship with your clients. For instance, customizing which offers are useful for email newsletters. 

Good content personalization doesn’t need to be restricted to B2C business. B2B content can be simply customized utilizing similar methods. 

To summarize:

• Ensure you are gathering the right data or ingesting information that will help you to segment and deliver the right content to your customers.
• Utilize a framework that can assist you with storing and updating this information. Check your data sources regularly and understand what you have to do to keep your information up to date. 
• Construct segments based on behavioral data that can be extracted from your insights.
• Convey customized content via email, web, and other channels to improve your KPIs and boost engagement!

Author: James Ewen